PlanEngine

I shared the product demo in my network, and got a lot of feedback on what worked, what didn't, and what things I would need to consider for this to be a valuable product.
This included things like better visualization and integrations with popular project management tools such as Atlassian.

After building the proof-of-concept, I spun this out into a more complete demo to try and get some feedback from other engineering managers and product managers in my network. This demo included a more complete set of features that better demonstrated the value add of the product.

After conceptualizing this idea, I spent a couple of weeks working to build a proof-of-concept of my solution. After a lot of thought and planning, plus some serious hands-on-keyboard time, I had built an algorithm that could schedule product work as required while respecting cross-team dependencies, priority and capacity constraints.

I have been working as an Engineering Manager for the past couple of years at a large pre-IPO startup. Long-term and short-term planning is a big part of the role and involves a lot of tedious manual labor. The effort I was wasting on these processes got me thinking about how this process could be improved.

I spent some time thinking about how our planning process worked, considering things like effort estimations, cross-team dependencies and prioritization. There was a lot to unpack, but I came up with a few straight-forward ways of improving these workflows via classic automation and best practices.

I started conceptualizing how this would look as a product and started working on a POC.