About

I’m an engineering leader who came up through design (UX, UI and print). While I tried to fully give up Design, that history still shows up in every corner of how I work. I can be deep in development, and I’ll still be advocating for good type, layout, and affordances throughout the day. I’ve also had the luxury of working for a good number of early-stage startups and that had me sitting in and hiring for myriad roles from Marketing, pre-sales, PM, Design, QA, UX research and more. I feel this has given me empathy and understanding for numerous cross-functional teams over the years.

These past 4 years I have been learning how to lead and collaborate with a growth mindset. I built my current engineering team from zero, and we’ve been together over four years with no turnover. (A few have been with me for almost 7 years!) I attribute a lot of that to periodic 1:1s, coaching them in areas they want to grow in, and pushing them into new areas in their professional life. They are scattered all over the globe, and in terms of how they collaborate and work, this is the closest team I have ever built.

AI has reshaped how my team builds for the web, and I spend a lot of time deciding what to lean into and what to leave alone: agents and workflows, MCPs for added context, and the schema and AI file work that helps AI crawlers be able to parse the content better. I write about management on Medium, speak with university programs and student groups, and have reviewed and edited technical a number of books for Packt Publishing.

I think this is where I am supposed to talk about the ‘off the clock’ part of my life and my love for good food, travel, music and finding ways to bridge gaps in communities big and small. But, I think I’ll leave that for another time.

Tristan Denyer, San Francisco