AI Diaries: Two Important Facts About Generative Prose
Here, I will outline two important high-level points that anyone working with generative prose needs to keep in mind.
Hi! I’m Davy Stevenson and I help engineering teams thrive. My passion is building strong, effective and happy engineering teams and leaders.
Work with me to gain confidence as a leader, speed up your technical delivery, ensure product market fit, and strengthen your engineering management processes
Let me bring my experience to help you tackle challenges and gain visibility into your team, technology and company.
Effective engineering management requires a whole new suite of skills. Let me help you expand your experience and gain more confidence in your leadership ability.
Gain confidence that your engineering team is running at peak performance. An assessment can provide clarity into what bottlenecks are slowing down delivery.
Feeling a need for engineering leadership but don’t need someone full-time yet? Take advantage of my 20 years of experience to set your team up for success.
Here, I will outline two important high-level points that anyone working with generative prose needs to keep in mind.
What types of communication touchpoints should you be building as a Director of Engineering or as a VP of Engineering?
In this article I will dive deeper into how we as leaders can learn to take the important step back from direct management to learning how to manage through others.
One of the best skills of talented managers is the ability to identify the strengths of the members of their team and to create environments where these strengths are allowed to flourish.
I’m an experienced engineering leader with nearly 20 years of experience in software engineering and management in highly technical B2B industries. I have experienced a combined 4 successful exits, including 3 acquisitions and 1 IPO. A proponent of remote work since 2015, I’m an expert in building and leading highly effective remote-first and globally distributed engineering teams. I’ve worked across a wide variety of technical fields such as aeronautics, video transcoding, mapping and location intelligence, caching, databases, API development and more.
In addition to my strong technical background, I’m a follower of the servant-leader style of management, and am particularly skilled at growing and coaching others to become strong and empathetic leaders. I have a track record of building high performing, diverse, and happy teams of engineers, and identifying and nurturing the leadership talent within everyone.
I was continuously impressed by the advice I received from Davy as well as how I felt walking away afterwards, even if what was shared wasn’t easy to receive. Davy provided valuable input on product ideas as well as company strategy. In addition, it felt psychologically safe to have conversations about difficult topics such as how to handle challenging relationships as a CEO. Overall, Davy’s support helped me gain confidence as a leader and helped me make decisions faster.
I worked with Davy for years building products across multiple engineering teams. Davy is highly technical and is able to learn new concepts with ease. Working with Davy changed the way I thought about organization design and product delivery. I’m a stronger engineering leader today because of what I learned from Davy.
When Davy was my Sr. Director at Fastly, I especially appreciated how she modeled adapting to the needs of the team. She stepped in to provide support where needed, even in areas I would later learn weren’t her default leadership style. I genuinely had no idea it was not natural, because she’d adapted so well to provide what the team needed to succeed. I especially valued the way she chose to work with me as a partner. While I reported to her, our working relationship left me feeling empowered to make calls—exactly what I wanted and needed as a Director. I still treasure the time we worked together as a personal career highlight.
I had the pleasure of working with Davy when I was a newly hired manager within her department. Her insights on both the organization and technical domain accelerated my effectiveness in the role. Her guidance helped to shape my technical strategy on a business-critical project and be able to make informed decisions faster. Davy’s mentorship helped sharpen my leadership skills in leading complex multi-faceted projects and navigating organizations effectively.