1. What sparked your interest in technology, and how has your career evolved?
I have always been interested in technology, using it, developing it, pushing its limits or finding other ways to use it in a different domain. My driver has always been to have fun.
2. What's one thing that makes your current product work especially meaningful?
My product work has meaning as it has an impact. In some areas I am working on workforce services enabling all employees in the company to better perform their jobs. In other areas it is working in billing and payments, helping our customers be precise in how and when they pay us for the products that match their needs. Overall, this is working with our analytics teams allowing us to be informed and get ahead of our data insights. This completes the feedback loop allowing us and our systems to know when and what impacts our changes had.
3. How does the product model encourage experimentation and learning?
For me the product model is about ownership of your product and also your career. You have the freedom in your product to steer the direction of the product and adopt and drop technologies so you can better service the business needs of the product customers.
We all need to be proactive in making the most of technology advancements, adopting best practices, and, most importantly, translating successful capabilities or technologies from one domain to another. If you see something working well in one area and it could benefit yours, go for it. It is often the lowest-risk, highest-value move you can make.
4. What's been the biggest cultural shift you've experienced at Allstate?
At Allstate, one of the most significant cultural shifts is the change in responsibility. Teams are now accountable not only for delivering their products but also for their ongoing evolution. While this sounds straightforward, it can be challenging in practice. I've worked with teams during this transition, where they were used to presenting polished, final outputs. Now, we ask them to share and demo work in progress. Initially, this can feel daunting, but after going through the process a few times, teams begin to see the value. Early feedback along the way proves far more productive than receiving input at the end and having to make major changes.
5. What's one innovation you hope to see become mainstream soon?
For me I would love to see an adoption of GitOps to allow more precise control of our routes to production. I would like to see that coupled with improvements in the team's use of CI/CD and target moving from code to production (safely) in 90mins and making ops changes in 90secs. When teams get to that speed it creates a positive feedback loop where you can instantly see the results of your work in a very short timescale. To begin with this feels very aggressive but the parallel part to that objective is that the teams need to build up comprehensive automated tooling to allow them to safely move forward changes at that speed.
