Goodbye Telligent

Today’s my last day at Telligent.

I’m moving on to a very exciting position that hits a lot of my core passions, but I’ll leave that for a separate post come Monday. (And it will, shockingly, be made from a Mac… )

Telligent’s been a great place to hang my hat for the last 2.5 years, and management there was tremendously supportive in giving me free rein to build a QA team from scratch and run that team as I saw fit. While there were a number of things I wasn’t able to accomplish during my tenure at Telligent, I take great pride in having worked with a great group of testers who really transformed how Telligent ships software. We, as a great team, built something wonderful from scratch and that’s a tremendous accomplishment!

I’m also glad I’ve been able to gain experience working for a product company. I’d had years of experience working for consulting and contracting companies, but the environment of a product company is completely different. My experience here did nothing but cement up my firm beliefs in Lean: you simply can’t afford to build things only a few customers will ever care about. The pain and politics around trying to remove features you’ve released to the public isn’t something folks outside the product world will ever understand. Dodge all that pain and politics in the first place – avoid complexity, avoid building things the vast majority of your users won’t use frequently.

Many thanks to the folks at Telligent who put up with my oddball views coupled with a loud, often curmudgeonly personality. Most importantly, a load of emphatic thanks to the seven folks, onshore and off, who were on my QA team – you folks are some of the best people I’ve ever worked with and we did amazing things together!