Healthtech SaaS - Y-Combinator W11
DrChrono
In 2019, I joined DrChrono after spending 20+ years working in the data storage industry at huge multinational corporations. Initially, I was brought on to be a Senior Full-Stack Engineer. I was one of only three people in the engineering team of 20 that had more than about three years of experience. At that time, I was working in Python/Django as well as with AWS Lambdas and was helping the team to directly implement new features.
After about 3 or 4 months, the one manager we had left the company. So, I went to the VP of Engineering and told him that he was going to have a difficult time managing 20 engineers directly, that I had management experience from my EMC days, and that I was willing to help him out. His response was, "Great! Here are some teams to manage."
A few months after I took over as the Engineering Manager, the VP also left the company. So, at that point, there was me and about 19 engineers. I was going to have to run the entire team.
And so, I took over running the entire DrChrono engineering team and ended up working directly with one of our co-founders (and COO). I developed a hiring plan and interview process which lead to hiring 29 people in 10 months from all over the world. I reorganized our entirely flat engineering team into a pod structure with Agile principles (Scrum and Kanban) across those teams. I re-levelled everyone on the engineering team according to a career matrix that I developed as well as worked to align everyone's compensation to those levels. DrChrono now stands at a team of 45+ across web and mobile development, QA, DevOps, and Scrum Masters.
In addition to just building out the team, improving the engineering culture (-50 eNPS to +70!), and organizing engineering processes, I also worked to move our technology forward by organizing our technical roadmap, by working with my counterparts on the product team to prioritize those items, and directing the major infrastructure shift of moving to AWS from our previous service provider.
My time at DrChrono has been an adventure in all of the people, product, and process fronts. I have worked with people from across the company; from finance to customer service, marketing to sales, people operations to the legal team.