For eight years, I solved problems by writing code. That was the job. Understand the requirement, build the thing, ship it. I was good at it, and the people around me let me stay in that mode. My managers, my leadership, they shielded me from the noise so I could focus on my craft.
I didn't realize how much that was changing until I stood in a room at Accelerate last week, Contentstack's annual conference in Austin, surrounded by sales engineers, solutions architects, customer success leaders, and product managers. I'd packed black boots and black jeans for the trip — the theme was "get your boots muddy," and I figured I'd dress the part (also, Texas). Left my Patagonia jacket and cap at the hotel. My Pacific Northwest defaults, the ones I reach for without thinking, suddenly felt like the wrong costume for the room I was walking into.
It's been a year since Lytics was acquired. And the growth I've experienced in that year has humbled me more than I expected.
what shifted
AI changed the equation. Over the past year, I watched execution shift left in a way that's hard to overstate: planning, implementation, testing, formatting, the mechanical parts of building software got faster, then faster again. What didn't shift left was understanding why you're building it. Who it's for. What their day actually looks like, and what problem they're trying to solve versus the one written in the ticket.
The more AI handles the how, the more I found myself sitting with the who and the why. And those are human problems. They require the kind of connection you can only build by going places code can't take you, which is, I think, the whole point of muddy boots as a metaphor.
what we had
Lytics had something special. A small team with a startup's hunger and a craftsman's care. We shipped fast because we had to, but we shipped well because we wanted to. The culture rewarded experimentation. If you had an idea and the conviction to build it, there was room. Nobody asked you to write a business case first. You just built the thing, showed it, and let the work speak.
That energy is hard to describe to people who haven't felt it. Twelve people or so, deeply technical, each carrying multiple hats, each trusting the others to carry theirs. I miss the simplicity of that sometimes, not the lack of resources, but the clarity. When the team is small enough that everyone knows everything, alignment happens through proximity. You don't need a process for it. It's just there.
where the boots get muddy
The transition to Contentstack introduced structure I hadn't navigated before. Bigger organization, more layers, more stakeholders. Familiar shapes showed up quickly: the same drive to experiment, the same appetite for building things that lift the people around you. But the mechanics of getting things done are different when there are more people in the room.
I've been working on my communication. That sentence is easy to write and hard to live. For the past eight years, my default mode has been heads down, building, coding. I didn't fully appreciate how much I was shielded until this year, when I started stepping into spaces where the craft alone isn't enough — where you need to articulate not just what you built, but why it matters to someone who will never read the code. The conference rooms in Austin felt like that. A lot of people who were fluent in a language I was only beginning to recognize.
Getting your boots muddy means going to those spaces anyway. I'm far from where I want to be. But I'm further than where I started.
the pitch that didn't land
It was the third night in Austin. Pete's Dueling Piano Bar, then karaoke, then sitting downstairs to recover over a glass of wine with my teammates. The kind of night where the conversation loosens up and ideas feel bigger than they are.
That's when I tried to pitch myself as a technical CSM to Margriet, our Customer Success leader. I had this vision: someone who could bridge the gap between what customers need and what the platform can do, someone technical enough to dig into the data layer and human enough to translate it into outcomes.
It didn't land. Not even close. But the conversation that followed was one of the most educational hours of my week. Margriet walked me through the difference between pre-sales and post-sales, how customer success operates differently from solutions architecture, where a sales engineer fits versus a solutions architect, roles I'd been vaguely aware of but never understood from the inside. I sat there with my wine, a little deflated, taking notes in my head.
I think the pitch failed because I was trying to describe a role I'd invented without understanding the roles that already exist. That's a pattern I recognize from engineering. You can't design a good abstraction until you understand the concrete things it's meant to abstract over. I was trying to abstract before I'd done the fieldwork. But the fieldwork is exactly the kind of mud worth stepping into.
getting closer to the customer
That fieldwork started before Accelerate. I've been joining more customer calls, sitting in on deepdives where we dig into how specific customers use Lytics, what their workflows look like, where the friction lives. It's a different kind of learning than reading documentation or building features. You hear someone describe a problem they've been working around for months, and you realize the solution has been sitting in the codebase the whole time — just never surfaced in a way that made sense to them.
That gap between what exists and what's understood is where I keep finding the most interesting work. Not building new things, but connecting what's already built to the people who need it. It's a communication problem dressed up as a product problem, and it gets more important as AI takes over more of the building. Meeting the Contentstack sales organization at Accelerate put this in perspective. The scale of it, the number of people whose entire job is understanding customer needs and translating them into solutions. We were twelve or so at Lytics, doing everything. Here, there are teams dedicated to each piece of that puzzle. The specialization is humbling, quite honestly. It made me realize how much I don't know about the business side of what we do, and how much richer my work could be if I understood it better.
familiar shapes
What keeps surprising me is how much of what made Lytics special is still here, and how it keeps showing up in unexpected places. Tod has been at Contentstack for six months, a Sales Engineer whose name I'd been seeing float through Slack, asking CDP questions, trying to get his bearings on the Lytics side of things. Just a name and a question until Austin.
Shane and I had overlapped at Lytics for years without ever quite finding the time. He'd found his way to Contentstack through his own route, and somehow we'd both been here a year before Austin put us in the same room. I learned more about him in one evening than I had in all that time before. That kind of thing doesn't happen over Slack.
And then there's Kylie. She'd already given me quite a bit of her time before the conference, walking me through her workflow as a marketer, prepared and thorough, so I could actually build something that would make her day easier. I got to say hi to her in Austin for the first time. She'd helped me before we'd ever met in person.
I don't know exactly what to call that, save for human connection, and I hadn't realized quite how much I'd been missing it.
what I'm carrying forward
A year ago, I would have described myself as someone who builds. That's still true. But this year taught me that building is only part of it. The other part is making sure what you build reaches the people it's meant for, and that I can't do from behind a keyboard.
The hustle that defined Lytics isn't gone. It just has a bigger stage now. And I'm grateful for both: the small team that taught me to build with care, and the bigger organization that keeps putting people in my path I didn't know I needed to meet…
I showed up in Austin wearing boots I'd never broken in before. I'm still breaking them in.