I was the inaugural technical hire for Wreno, initially brought on as a technical lead. However, it quickly became evident that my skills exceeded the role, leading to my appointment as the Director of Engineering.

Upon joining, I found the company lacked a solid technical infrastructure. While they had a website hosted on AWS by a contractor, there was little else in terms of established tech. They relied on various third-party tools cobbled together for an end-to-end solution, but scaling issues were eroding their margins.

My immediate focus was collaborating with the founders and a designer to iterate on the product’s vision. This involved determining feasible MVP features, anticipating future requests, and ensuring a launch within six months to address scaling challenges. The first month was primarily spent on strategizing the tech stack, designing the database, and creating a detailed estimate and scope of work.

Once we had clear requirements and a timeline, it was time to hire. I brought on board five frontend Web-React engineers, one backend engineer, and three React Native engineers. This process was time-consuming, but each addition significantly boosted our velocity. Given my experience in scaling teams, this wasn’t the most challenging aspect. I knew how to focus the engineers to avoid redundant work.

As planned, after six months, we successfully completed the MVP’s development, including testing and bug fixing. This was a monumental achievement. However, we now faced the task of migrating all users from the existing app to our in-house solution. This entailed extensive internal trials with power users, testing email campaigns, providing guides, and offering support to address any migration gaps.

In another two months, all app users were seamlessly transitioned, and we had also introduced several new features, expanding the app’s capabilities.

I take immense pride in this project, as it’s the largest product I’ve managed from a technical standpoint, from inception to completion. We’ve since brought on additional technical leads who have contributed to the product’s growth, all building upon my initial plans.