Hey 👋. I’m Matt.

I love building products developers love. I thrive as organizations scale by creating systems that keep priorities clear, defining value with metrics that matter, and coaching teams to grow with challenges. My leadership empowers through accountability, builds trust through transparency, and inspires everyone to be a catalyst for change.

Teams I’ve managed:

• Product management teams unifying all of engineering through the Target Application Platform (TAP)
• The product management team for Production Engineering at Target, including DevEx, SRE, and incident response
• The product, program, and content teams behind Red Hat’s digital communities, including Opensource.com
• Community and marketing teams at Sensu, from seed to series A
• Leading the vision for product and DevRel in part of Intel managing open source projects, including Snap
• Leading the vision for EMC’s first international community advocacy and gamification programs

Communities I’m a part of:

I work hard to connect and contribute to a broad range of communities of practice. Grouping in order of recency, that includes:

• Systems of Thought inspired by Team Topologies, Wardley Maps, and John Cutler
• Product Management through podcasts like Melissa Perri’s and Product School
• Kubernetes, Open Source (the OSI, GitHub, and CNCF), and Developer Relations
• Python programming language and Go programming language
• DevOps through the monitoring, observability, and distributed system sub-tribes
• Virtualization (especially VMware), Infosec, and Storage (especially EMC and NetApp)

Communities I’ve helped build:

• Enable Architect as the founding editorial lead.
• Opensource.com as a Technical Editor and designer of the Correspondent program.
• CHAOSScast podcast to highlight the value of open source and common metrics.
• DevRel Collective as a maintainer, designer of the rebrand, and creator of the website (v1).
• The Geek Whisperers podcast as a co-creator and co-host for 5 years.
• Commitmas: learning GitHub socially to collaborative learn Git and GitHub with the vBrownBag community.
• The Sensu Community leading community initiatives from maintainer practices to user summits.
• Snap: the open telemetry framework (EOL 2018) building brand, documentation, maintainer and contributor strategy.
• The EMC Elect (EOL 2017) as program lead, designing the business plan, brand, and community engagement.
• The Basho Community (EOL 2017) as the community leader and a maintainer.

Projects I’ve contributed to:

I often open small PRs as I work through new problem or as a way of saying thank you to a project. That’s led to contributions to Obsidian, its community publishing plugin Enveloppe, Kubernetes, the CHAOSS community, iPython, Chezmoi, this Notion wrapper for Linux, Slack API Tutorial, Go GitHub library, Slack Go library, Leeroy from Docker, Awesome Maintainers, The Lita project, Homebrew, CHAOSS project, the CNCF Landscape, and many more. I also consulted for Exercism and continue to recommend joining their community because I ❤️ them.

Articles

Some of my more popular articles are off domain, like The right and wrong way to set Python 3 as default on a Mac. Others include:

DONT CONFUSE YOUR SKILLS WITH YOUR JOB TITLE

Don’t Confuse Your Skills with Your Job Title “The map of reality is not reality.

WORK AS A GAME – BOTH FINITE AND INFINITE

Work as a Game: Play as Both Finite and Infinite “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

MAKE OBSIDIAN A DIGITAL GARDEN

Growing Ideas Like Mycelia In 2010 I was told “if you ever have to explain something more than once, write a blog post.

MAKE OBSIDIAN INLINE DATAVIEW PROPERTIES PRETTIER WITH THIS CSS

I’ve found it far more useful to use Obsidian properties when I see them.

MY PATH TO PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (PKM)

My summary of a lifetime of effort… My Why I’ve learned two corollaries about my memory:

TAKEAWAYS FROM READING TRANSFORMED BY MARTY CAGAN

I recently finished “Transformed” by Marty Cagan and team, and it’s helping me connect some crucial dots about how modern product organizations actually work.

MY PRODUCT MANAGEMENT LEARNING PATH

I’ve been thinking a lot about my learning path as a product leader.

MY PATH TO PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (PKM)

My summary of a lifetime of effort… My Why I’ve learned two corollaries about my memory:

TIPS FOR YOUR FIRST 30 DAYS OF REMOTE WORK

I have spent over 10 years working primarily remote, and they have taught me practices I will implement from day one of a new job.

SO YOU LOST YOUR JOB: NOW WHAT?

Some of the most talented, thoughtful, and effective people I have ever worked with were recently laid off.