Work

I've spent seven years at TrainingPeaks (acquired by Garmin). The last three-plus I've led a Growth team I was promoted from senior engineer to start. I own the path from trial to paid on a freemium athlete product and a paid coach product with per-seat billing. I lead six engineers across backend, web, iOS and Android.

Three stories below. The short version of everything else is at the bottom.

1. Zero replies, one comped account

The problem. Our PM reached out to hundreds of existing users for interviews. Zero replied.

What I did. I called a user I knew personally, comped his account for a year, and got him on a 45-minute video call with my whole team. He walked us through signup, onboarding, and the moments we suspected drove activation. I ran one more interview on my own.

What happened. Those two conversations set most of our roadmap for the next year and a half. Working through the activation friction they surfaced, we cut time-to-first-value from 4 days to 2 and lifted paid conversion 8%.

2. Building the experimentation practice

The problem. TrainingPeaks had no experimentation framework, no clean event data, and no growth team. We were running about one test every two months.

What I did. I evaluated experimentation platforms and chose Eppo for the company, then built the practice on Eppo, Segment and Snowflake. Before that, as a senior engineer, I'd built the event taxonomy everything runs on, cutting 800 unique event names to 14.

What happened. 40+ tests in year one, about four a month. Setup went from two weeks to two days. We wrote the standards and documentation and handed them to other teams, so they could run their own tests without going through my engineers.

The test we didn't ship. One test was trending positive and everybody wanted it out the door. It was underpowered. With our data team lead, I stopped it, and we used it to reset how stakeholders read interim results. Tie goes to the control.

And the failures. About 60% of our experiments lost. Social proof messaging moved nothing. A pricing anchor cost us 3% conversion. Gamified onboarding dropped activation 5%. Each one changed the roadmap.

3. Stripe checkout on iOS, after the Apple ruling

The problem. After the court ruling on App Store payments, we could offer US iOS users a web checkout. Nobody knew exactly what Apple's terms allowed.

What I did. I did the legal research on what was allowed, then built and rolled out a Stripe checkout alongside App Store billing.

What happened. Revenue from those users rose 10.5% while subscriptions dipped slightly. That's a real tradeoff, and it's the kind I like making on purpose instead of by accident.

Also at TrainingPeaks

  • Shipped the next version of our paywall teasers: blurred premium components built from each user's real data. Paywall visits up 45%, conversion up 4.8%.

  • Tested a 40% price cut in Brazil against the US, Germany and other Latin American markets. Price wasn't the constraint at any level we tested, so the work moved to payment methods and positioning.

  • Leading the rollout of relevance ranking for our training plan marketplace, replacing a best-seller sort some coaches had learned to game.

  • Argued against building on an LLM where a simpler, responsive tool got about 80% of the benefit at a fraction of the cost.

The team

I inherited three engineers and hired three more. Half the team was promoted within 18 months, one senior is on track for Staff, and no full-time engineer has left. I set aside weekly time for engineers to teach each other agentic coding, which made us the fastest team in the org to adopt it.

Timeline

  • TrainingPeaks (acquired by Garmin), Team Leader, Growth Engineering. Jul 2023 to present.

  • TrainingPeaks, Sr. Software Engineer, Commerce. Jul 2019 to Jul 2023. Tech lead on the Zuora to Stripe billing migration and the event taxonomy (800 event names to 14).

  • MapLarge, Sr. Software Engineer. 2017 to 2019. Managed a remote team across time zones rebuilding our component suite.

  • HomeAway (Expedia), Sr. Software Engineer. 2016 to 2017. Built a feature-flag framework that cut about a week off each release.

  • IHS Markit, Software Engineer, Front-end. 2013 to 2016. Tech lead on high-traffic financial sites.

  • BYU, B.S. Computer Science, 2013.

Want the full resume? Get in touch.