About Me

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The hardest technology problems I've been handed were almost never technical. They were lane confusion, unclear decision rights, or a trusted metric pointing the whole company in the wrong direction.

Twenty years in, I've stopped believing that better technology fixes a company. Better decisions do, made by people who understand why they're making them.

Nathan Broslawsky

Now

I'm the Chief Product & Technology Officer at ClearOne Advantage, a private equity-backed consumer finance company, where I own Product, Engineering, Data Science & Analytics, Brand & Creative, and IT. 60 people in technology, 800 in the company, and a core platform we're replacing while it carries every dollar of revenue.

AI made execution cheap. But it didn't make deciding what to build any easier, and that's where the effort and judgment go now.

The part of the job I care most about is the people system underneath everything else. Across three companies I've built career ladders and calibration processes, rebuilt performance management, and pushed quarterly development conversations from my directs down to every person in the organization. Most people don't stall because they lack ambition; they stall because nobody built the structure that tells them what good looks like.

A strategy only works if it survives being retold by someone who wasn't in the room when you set it. Good leadership means you stay in the room even when you're not in the room, and that happens only when you've told the story in whatever shape each audience needs to carry it forward without you. Storytelling gets filed as a soft skill right up until it's the thing that breaks.

The longer version of how I work is in my README.

Before

  • Achieve — SVP, Product, Design & Engineering (2022–2024); VP of Engineering, Consumer Products (2020–2022)
  • SmugMug — VP of Engineering (2018–2019); Director of Engineering (2017–2018), through the Flickr acquisition
  • Ten-X / Auction.com — Senior Engineering Manager (2016–2017)
  • Yahoo / Tumblr — Senior Engineering Manager (2010–2016)

Elsewhere

  • Built In — “When Designing a System, Think Evolutionarily,” June 2024
  • CTO Studio — interview with Josh Rubin, June 2026
  • 7CTOs — “Mastering Minutes: Time Management Tactics for Busy CTOs,” 0111 Conference, San Diego, 2023
  • The CTO Podcast — “How To Do Skip Level Meetings,” with Etienne de Bruin and Scott Graves, June 2022
  • Achieve — byline archive

I advise a small number of technology teams through High Leverage.