Wow what a year. It has flown by and as you can see I haven’t gotten to the blog since I upgraded the site earlier this year. Looking in my drafts it looks like I was intending to write a post about travel, but I didn’t get back to it. Anyway given that the year is rapidly ending I figured it was time to start looking back on it.

I never imagined how busy this year would be. We went from the start of the year where we created a plan on what we were going to build for the year to drive to an MVP. We were building out what we thought would be our alpha release, but discovered in user testing that we needed to pivot. Along the way one of my employees left. We then drove the new concept to an early access release grew the engineering team and it has been an amazing ride. 2020 is going to be focused on product market fit and hopefully upon achieving that, rocketing into a growth phase. Given how crazy it was to build what we have built on such a lean team a lot of my themes for the year fell to the wayside especially this blog. When you are super busy and tired this is an easy thing to drop.

Recap for 2018

As is my tradition it is time to review 2018 and see how my year unfolded. The first thing that I always do is review my themes for the year and see how many of them I hit.

In general 2018 was an interesting year. The year started out with me on vacation. When I was on vacation I realized that I would have to change jobs in 2018 and luckily it all worked out for the better. I can say making that move was one of the best decisions I have made in my career. The difference between the first half of 2018 and the last half was a study in extreme opposites on the career front. Probably the biggest takeaway from that whole situation is that company culture may be the most important thing when it comes to choosing a position.

Recap for 2017

Now that I am off of work for the rest of the year I decided that it was a good time to work on my annual year end review for 2017 and see how my year went. This is the post I did at the start of the year for my plan on what I was going to focus on: Themes for 2017.

I am going to start with just an overview of my year and then I will drill down into my themes. 2017 was a whirlwind of a year. In the 4th quarter of 2016 we made a push to make Choose a profitable company. We achieved that by the beginning of the year and in my mind we were going to run hard for another year and really grow the revenue and hopefully sell the company in 2018. Instead the board decided to sell the company in May which led to major changes for me.

End of year recap

It’s that time again. Time to reflect on my themes for the year and see how I did on them. This is an annual tradition of mine to see how I am doing in general. I find it is a useful accountability tool for myself to make sure I am not wasting too much time on unimportant things and am spending the time that I would like on personal development.