About Me

I have held positions in Tech Support, Operations, Development and Leadership. Most recently I've been a Director of Software Engineering for SPS Commerce. I enjoy volunteering as a soccer coach and referee as well as facilitating hack-a-thons for middle and high school students.

I live in Minneapolis with my wife, two daughters, and enough LEGO bricks to swim in.

Professional History

I began working in technology after being exposed to a computer in fifth grade. There I rapidly discovered that I had a penchant for it, taking and then teaching a programming class as a middle schooler. Shortly after high school, I developed a warehouse record box retention system while working for Cargill Companies.

While in my senior year at the University of Minnesota, I was offered a job as a LEGO model builder. I spent 18 months in that position building a variety of large scale LEGO models that were shipped all over the world for display. After discovering that being a LEGO model builder was an amazing job, but there wasn't much of a future in it, I moved back home to Minnesota.

Back in Minneapolis, I got a job working second shift at Zeos International on their technical support group. While buying a single piece of memory to repair a friend's computer, I was offered another job at a small PC manufacturing firm. It was in this position that I discovered that I am tremendously excited about work where there would always be a strong opinion about performance. You might be a brilliant success or a miserable failure, but everyone would at least have an opinion. It is these sorts of opportunities that have attracted me since.

Continuing to teach myself anything I could, I learned networking and development technologies and put those to work at Graphics Technologies, a small hardware distributor. I built a new sales system to allow quotes and orders to be placed more accurately and processed more swiftly than the manual process that had existed before. I built my first corporate website and my corporate email server in 1997.

In 2000, I took a position at ThermoKing, a division of Ingersoll Rand. I made a quick impression by insisting on new software engineering practices, building the first corporate Intranet, and securing and stabilizing the dealer web portal. After six months, I was asked to take over a project to develop a corporate intranet for all of Ingersoll Rand. From there, I led technology teams that handled web applications, email applications and dealer technologies. My work culuminated with the creation of a new global CMS system to allow all of Ingersoll Rand's business units to publish website properties properly connected to Ingersoll Rand's brand anywhere in the world. I was given an Ingersoll Rand president's award as a result of my efforts.

In 2008, I took an opportunity to develop a brand new knowledge management product for the Investigative arm of Kroll Ontrack. In this role, we built that product, as well as an identity protection product for Kroll Fraud Solutions and two legal service applications. I led the change in the Legal Services group to move the product from a client based system on a local data center to a web deployed application that could leverage the emerging cloud technologies.

When an opportunity arose at MoneyGram to develop a new agent experience, I took it. I worked at MoneyGram to develop a new web deployed application for MoneyGram agents that could be deployed over the web and be updated remotely as required anywhere in the world. Previous attempts to replace the legacy application had failed. Taking care to identify what the agents required in a successor program, we were able to fashion a new product that could finally replace the existing application.

I joined SPS Commerce in 2015 with a mission to repair relationships with the customer success organization, evaluate the existing adapter product, and manage development partners who were also building adapters. I took a product which had lost the confidence of both SPS and NetSuite sales organizations and developed it into a core piece of technology that would serve as the basis for a variety of new adapter markets. Inbound calls for assistance on the product dropped by 60% and the new performance characteristics allowed SPS Commerce to land deals that would not have been to secure possible a few months prior. We implemented some changes to the internal applications used at SPS Commerce that resulted in much better communication with its users and a dramatic reduction in attrition in the staff who used those tools.