Hi, I'm Andrew Millspaugh

I'm a product-oriented engineering and operational leader with a focus on building cohesive and productive organizations. I've architected and built complex services in novel domains, hyper-scaled engineering orgs, defined product processes and built the teams to run them, established operational processes, built talent acquisition teams, designed and executed operational processes, and am always looking for a challenge.

I have 14 Years of experience, with roles as a consultant, founder, engineer, and leader.

I believe in honest and transparent communication. My value system provides insight into how I work and what I expect from others.

Integrity
I believe in doing the right thing, even if nobody is looking. Honesty and moral consistency are deeply important to me.
Quality
I always strive for high quality in everything I do. That bar changes depending on circumstances, but it’s always top of mind.
Trust
I aim to build trust with the people I work with, in both directions. Trust is an important part of an effective workplace - if everyone has to double check everyone else’s work, everything goes much more slowly. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose, so trust-losing actions are deeply painful to me.
Transparency and Truthfulness
I believe extremely deeply in the value of honesty, even for the smallest of nitpicks. I also want others to be as truthful with me as possible, because I need that information in order to improve.
Empathy
Emotions drive many behaviors. It’s important to be able to understand how people are feeling, because it can help you predict and react to their behaviors.
Open-mindedness
I always welcome being proven wrong, and I often actively seek it out. It’s important to me to find the best answer, even if that answer isn’t mine.
Leverage
I believe that we should always be focusing on how to make any given unit of work go further. When I am considering what work to do, I often ask myself “which of these things has the most leverage?”, both from the perspective of my output, and the output of others.
Risk Tolerance
I work in startups for a reason. The downside of risky bets pales in comparison to the upside. I believe we should always be taking calculated risky bets, at every scale.
Hard Work
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And working smart isn’t itself enough - we’re competing with some of the smartest people in the world. We should be working smart and working hard.
Adaptability
Nothing we do should be too fixed - rigid processes lead to poor outcomes for unexpected events. I aim to take any unexpected occurrences in stride, and adapt my behavior to reflect the changed view of reality.
Understanding
It is easy to criticize another person if you don’t actually understand their situation. In general, we tend to under-estimate the complexity and difficulty of others’ jobs and inflate our own. It is important to work hard to understand the true complexity of a task before criticizing someone's performance on it. Further, if we write off our competition without deeply understanding their position, we’re going to miss important signal.
Aesthetics
I care quite deeply about how things look. I think it is often a useful proxy for the amount of thought and care put into it.
Incremental Improvement
Any time work can be broken into smaller chunks without huge overhead, it should be. Incremental improvement (on a product, as a person, as a team) allows us to be agile and gather information as quickly as possible, and reduces the likelihood that effort will be wasted.
Simplification
I am skilled at relentless simplification. I often ask a lot of questions in order to get to a deeper understanding of something. I strongly resonate with the oft referenced and usually misattributed idea of 'If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it'.
Abstraction and Higher-level Thinking
In line with my ability to simplify, I am also good at understanding the bigger picture. I lean fairly heavily on this behavior in order to guide action - even if something makes sense at one level of thinking, it might not make sense in the bigger picture.
Cross-domain Thinking
Throughout my career, I have found a lot of value in being able to work across domain boundaries. Communication impedance drives many inefficiencies - being able to deeply understand multiple domains significantly has large, meaningful impacts on both your efficacy and the efficacy of collaboration with others.
Empathy
I consider empathy both a value and an ability of mine. I have a very strong track record of building a deep understanding of the perspectives and emotions of my teammates, and using that to optimize my behavior.
Communication
Especially when given the time to prepare my thoughts, I am often praised for my clear communication. As a company scales, I find this to be an increasingly important ability to lean on.
Independent Thinking
I tend to be very good at thinking about things in a different manner than other people and not being too influenced by their thinking.
Software
I have spent the vast majority of my professional career in software. Every single role I've had has involved software IC work. I have worked in C++, Scala, Python, Java, Rust, and more.
Management
Though my titles don't reflect it, I have frequently worked as a people manager. Getting the best out of people is both energizing and in-line with my value system.
Documentation
As I’ve worked to scale teams, I’ve leaned quite heavily on documentation. Even in my one large company role, I was praised for my ability to build approachable documentation for complex subjects.
Product Definition
At most startups that I’ve been at, I’ve been either directing or an active participant in the product definition process. I’ve seen (and been part of) many failure modes, and am more prepared because of it.
Talent Acquisition
I have spent a lot of time hiring and I think I’m particularly good at it. Specifically, I’ve gotten very good at building hiring processes and at interviewing. I have built hiring processes at three different companies. I am, however, not good at sourcing.
Graphic Design
I have worked in a lot of startups, almost all of which had no graphic designer. Given my deep interest in the aesthetics of products, I have often taken on that role in addition to my core one. I have designed logos, websites, user interfaces, and other marketing content.
Process
I have spent a lot of time in my career focused on process. I believe that good process is fundamental to reducing mistakes and communication overhead. In addition to talent processes, I have also implemented the following: OKRs and other alignment processes, Development processes ranging from bespoke to by-the-book Scrum, Feedback processes, Strategic risk analysis.
Org Design
I’ve read extensively and thought deeply about org design, And gone through several major reorgs, usually motivated by hyper scaling.
Culture Building
I’ve often had a very active role in building and promoting culture at the startups I’ve been at. This has typically fallen into two buckets: team activities, and feedback processes.
Software Security
I have too often relied on others to evaluate the security concerns and implications of products that I have worked on. That has resulted in my understanding of security practices being relatively weak.
Build vs Buy
I probably lean too heavily on building and don’t spend enough time on evaluating existing tooling. Though building obviously provides the most flexibility, it often comes at the cost of development speed and maintenance burden. I would like to be more deliberate about these decisions in the future.
Sales
Like many engineers, I struggle to be an effective salesperson. I recognize the importance of optimism and looking forward, but I have a hard time expressing certainty about anything that I don’t actually know. I would like to get better at balancing optimism and honesty for the sake of being a better salesperson, which is an important part of building a successful organization.
Deliberate Action
Though I know I should be optimizing for the most impactful work, I often catch myself performing many small tasks that aren’t actually that important. I now use a personal task board that ranks things both in terms of impact and urgency, and aim to review it every few days.
Public Speaking
I consider myself a good speaker when speaking with a group of people that I know well. However, public speaking is hard for me. I’d like to put more effort into getting better at this.
Work handoff
I have a tendency to make too many assumptions when handing off work, and then get disappointed when it’s not done to my standards. I would like to get better at making sure the other person is fully up to speed and that they have the space to ask questions.
Perfectionism
Even though I recognize the diminishing returns on continuing to make something better, I often have a hard time calling something 'good enough'. This can cause me to waste effort or push deadlines.
Conflict Avoidance
I have a tendency to avoid conflict, even if engaging in the conflict would be the right thing to do. This is in direct contradiction to my value of transparency and truthfulness, and often an impediment to solving problems, so I’d like to work on more often productively engaging in difficult discussions.
Binary Thinking
I often see things as either good or bad, and struggle with shades of gray. I have an especially hard time with this on the lower end of the spectrum. Once I see a thing as below my standards, I tend to put it into one bucket, whether it’s just below my standards or actually a complete disaster. This means that I sometimes do a bad job at efficiently allocating effort to fix things.
Self-advocacy
I have a very hard time ever advocating for myself. In order to do it, it takes me a tremendous amount of motivation (or, more often, frustration). This has caused me a few painful experiences in past roles, including me deciding to leave one company because of the impact of not advocating for myself.

I'm always interested in new opportunities. Feel free to reach out via email at millspaugh.andrew@gmail.com or via social channels.