Hi,

I’m Kellan. I made my first website in 1994. This is the lightly updated version.

I think a lot about software and leading engineering teams, complex systems, and engineering capacity for social change. Lately I’m thinking more climate change and healthcare.

I’m also coaching a handful of organizations who want more effective and higher impact engineering organizations.

Any of those topics interest you? Get in touch.

Recent notes on engineering leadership:

• Briefly: Anonymous Questions (Jun 5)
• Push and Pull (Sep 1)
• Catch me on First Round's In Depth Podcast (Aug 23)
• Briefly: The Value of Meetings, and Some Alternatives (Jul 20)
• Software and its Discontents: Parts 1,2,3 (Jan 29)
• How to plan? (Oct 8)
• Building Layoffs on a Healthy Foundation (Sep 1)
• Interview Question: Why do leaders keep disempowering their teams? (May 14)
• Briefly: 4 Reasons Writing About Software is Hard (Mar 20)
• Quick note: Dropbox (Nov 4)
• Briefly: Friday wins and a case study in ritual design (May 24)
• The 5 Whys of Organizational Design. (May 1)
• Questions for a new technology. (Feb 5)
• On Sizing Your Engineering Organizations (Jan 21)
• FAQs from Coaching Technical Leadership (Nov 12)
• Advice For a New Manager (Jun 8)
• Towards an understanding of technical debt (Jan 10)
• Optimizing for Learning (Nov 8)
• Five years, building a culture, and handing it off. (Aug 31)
• Surviving being senior (tech) management (Jul 16)

More notes on engineering leadership

A bit more about me:

Some people like talks I’ve given. Here is one on building learning cultures, and another on supporting women in engineering.

I’ve been blogging at Laughing Meme since 2002, though not much these days.

I’ve been pretty active on Twitter as @kellan for a while now (#47). Yes, I love it and hate it as much as you do.

I’m on LinkedIn: Kellan Elliott-McCrea, but the abridged version is:

Currently

• Coaching executive leadership in technology startups for high impact. Building a technology leadership ecosystem centered on New York.

• Thinking about what comes next.

Previously

• VPE of Dropbox. Transforming the iconic startup into a product development powerhouse.

• SVP of Blink Health. Working to fix the affordability and accessibility of prescription medication in the US by overhauling the supply chain. Lead engineering, product and design.

• CTO of Etsy. Built and led Etsy’s famously generative and human centered engineering organization through IPO.

• Architect of Flickr (Yahoo). Social media doesn’t have to be an exploitative hell hole.

My GitHub isn’t very interesting, but if you’re a web developer of a certain age, you can walk down memory lane with MagpieRSS. If that doesn’t produce enough (deeply ambivalent) nostalgia, you could always revisit the Oauth spec I helped author.