Dusting this off

In August 2015 I ended a post on this site with a promise. “I will start posting more here. No idea what that looks like yet but this girl has got to let it out somewhere.”

I posted one more time a full year later. That was ten years ago. Ha. Where does time go?

Well now, this is me dusting the cobwebs off.

I’ve re-launched this site as my personal blog. I’m writing mostly for people running software professional services firms and engineering teams. Somewhere past the point where it all fits in one person’s head, which is possible with a small team, and still working out who carries the rest. Maybe that’s a great bookkeeper and a fractional CFO a few hours a month. Maybe it’s a leadership team you’ve hired and are still learning to hand things to.

Other topics will probably come up along the way, but that’s who this is for right now.

What happened in these last 10 years

Quite a lot, actually.

I started doing contract work in 2012, alongside the birth of my youngest. I wanted to be home with her longer than maternity leave allowed. As luck would have it, friends offered an opportunity to work as a contractor as much or as little as I wanted. That turned into two years of working 1099.

Somewhere in 2013 I wanted more. More money and maybe benefits like health insurance, PTO, retirement savings. I did the math, and I would have had to double my rate to represent what I’d wanted. I doubted they would go for that and decided not to even ask. I was doing nearly everything a firm does except finding the customers… or so I thought. I laugh now. You don’t know that until you have the business. You think, I’ll charge 2x and work 50% less. WRONG. We’ll get to all of that.

With that background, I founded Idestini in 2014. For almost eight years it did what a business filling a gap does. It grew from just me to a team of six employees, with interesting projects, good revenue, and a net margin that ran 14 to 17%.

Then the pandemic hit and a lot of our clients halted projects. We struggled, but because I was a planner and because of PPP, we stayed afloat. One client, a software company in financial services, was booming and kept sending us more work. I finally started saying no, because I was getting over-leveraged on one relationship.

That turned into a conversation about me and the crew joining them full time. After years of running things solo, which is lonely business, a real leadership team to work alongside every day sounded great. It also took care of my people during a hard time. So we were acquihired. I wound the company down and moved us over in October 2021.

I spent almost five years there. I ran custom software, then all of engineering, and this year I moved into business development. On September 1st my position was eliminated in a reduction in force, along with a few others.

Five years is a long time at a company that size. It changed ownership. It bought a platform. The leadership team grew and shifted, and the direction got reset more than once. Some of those years were hard.

Through all of it I tried to do two things. Keep the best working relationship I could with the team, and make the call that was right for the company, even when that meant my own role changed.

They told me they kept my role as long as they could, and that it wasn’t about my work. I believe them. We just couldn’t sell our way out of the math.

Reductions are often a cost decision and sometimes a decision about where the company is headed and whether every role fits that direction, and those are fair calls for a business to make.

The journey was worth it, even if I would have wanted a different ending. I believed in the work and I’m glad I did it.

Part of that is the industry. It was only the second time I’d niched down. The first was five years at Southwest Power Pool early in my career, which shaped me as a developer who wanted to move fast but had to play in a regulated environment. Going deep on software for community banks, credit unions and fintech companies was a lot of fun. I also got to lean in harder in an executive role, as part of a bigger team, where I felt I had a lot to contribute.

And, well… here we are. That was four weeks ago. I needed a minute. Now I’m navigating what to do next.

What I’ve been carrying around

I’ve held leadership roles in software professional services and engineering for over 15 years, including leading small dev teams within a bigger agency, building my own software professional services small firm and then running engineering at a mid-sized niche firm. That leaves me with a pile of lessons and a few strong opinions. How to price a fixed-price project without losing your shirt. When to hire, when you’re about to hire a quarter too early, and how to staff in between. How to keep expenses from getting ahead of you. When to pay down tech debt and when to live with it. How engagements should run, and how they should end, which almost nobody plans for.

And there were tools I kept recreating along the way. The spreadsheets, checklists, and templates I kept reaching for, year after year, because they worked.

That’s what I want to put here. The things I learned, the tools I relied on, and what I’m trying out next with how it’s going.

What AI changes

A lot of it was built for a world that’s changing fast.

AI tools are already changing how software gets built, how it gets estimated, what a client thinks they should be paying for, and what a company expects from its engineering team. If a developer with good tools can do in a day what used to take a week, what happens to a firm that sells weeks? Or to an engineering team that plans and staffs in them? How do you value price custom software? How do you size a team, or grow a junior developer, when the tools keep moving?

There’s a lot to figure out, and I don’t have the definitive answers. I was navigating estimating, pricing and staffing custom work daily for the last 15 years. It’s a constant journey of experiments.

What I’m pretty sure of is that the software professional services firm is still a necessity, and so is a good engineering team. But both have to change, and they have to play smart about how. Not chase every shiny thing. Not pretend nothing is happening, either.

So part of this is me going back through what I know and checking it. Which of it still holds up. Which of it needs rework. Which of it goes in the trash.

What to expect

I will post here when there’s something worth sharing, not on a schedule. I won’t make a weekly promise that leads to me creating filler content… and honestly, that kind of cadence pressure will send me hiding in my shell quiet for ten more years.

My goal is for most every piece to have something concrete in it. A strategy, a formula, a decision, what something cost, or a tool I actually use.

Figuring it out in public

I’m figuring out, in public, how AI changes software professional services and engineering teams. Some of what I write about it is going to turn out wrong.

If you’re running a firm or an engineering team and working through the same questions, I’d love to connect and learn from you what you’re seeing too. LinkedIn is the best place to find me.

I’m also open to short engagements while I figure out what’s next. If you have a short-term need for help, now is a good time to reach out.

Anyway, I’m back. It only took ten years.