in art. She encouraged me to be artistic. I like to have the balance between the technology and staying creative in the arts.
X: What’s the hardest lesson you’ve learned about managing people?
NM: This is my first real leadership role, and transitioning from being an individual contributor to managing a team. My last role was the lead engineer. One of the advantages I guess I have is that my team is very diverse in their skill set, so it’s pretty easy to decide who works on what in a project. The biggest challenge is picking the project to work on. There are so many opportunities, especially in healthcare. We try to pick the thing that has the most impact and that is the best for our business.
The biggest learning curve I had, I had to completely rethink my own time management. It was just completely different when I was a software developer, for the most part, previously. I had a project; I had a plan to follow. I had a certain number of features I wanted to knock out or bugs to fix. Now it’s how much time do I spend interacting with the team to get feedback, to find out what their roadblocks are. There is outreach in the community to meet with startups. Sometimes I shake my fist in the air and say, “I just want to go back to writing code!”
But one of the reasons I took this position is I met with the person that’s been mentoring me over the past couple of years. It’s kind of you can only write so much code, prototype so many things by myself. She said, “That means it’s time to have people to help build out your vision.”
X: What did you want to be when you were a kid?
NM: Oddly, I always wanted to be an inventor. I got to kind of live out my dream. I patented a number of things at AT&T. I have always been sketching out things for the future.
One of my first memories was my dad, who was an electrical engineer, he worked in the Navy and he always liked to build me my own toys. I didn’t have a lot of off-the-shelf commercial toys. There was this toy, a busy box, and my dad has this crazy idea to build one for me. This is a box that you put in front of a small child, between the ages of 3 and 6. It had dials and switches on it. He went to Radio Shack and bought a bunch of electronics, put a battery in—it was probably uber dangerous for kids—but it was probably one of the early things that planted the seed in my head.
They say that necessity is the mother of
