Culture > People > Todd Girvin |
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| I live for experiences and get to experience a lot as a member of Improving. Variety makes me happy. I generally consider it a strength, especially when growing a business like Improving, to have an interest in a lot of different areas of the business. I started my career in software development as an at-home programming hobbyist, and then in college became a tester of “features” in telecom systems, doing both manual and automated testing. For a year after college, I maintained a mainframe system and wrote cross-platform code. Then object-oriented programming came along, and I was swept into issues of patterns, layered software design, and distributed system architecture. As I began consulting, I enjoyed learning about team organization, project management, business development, and mentoring people in process and technology.
I like people, too. I like to learn how people think and project myself into their mindset when communicating with them. Whether it’s psychoanalyzing friends, advancing the levels of expertise and consciousness of clients, or just interacting with colleagues, I like to get to know people and understand how they think. Early in my career I experienced the rush of coming in cold as a new consultant on a project, learning the customer’s problem domain in a short time, and then explaining it back to them with simplifying abstractions or patterns to which they could relate, ultimately improving their understanding of their own problems and possible solutions. In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure of contributing at an executive level to the formation, marketing, internal operations, and delivery of product and services for new companies. As an entrepreneur, I’ve had great experiences working with really smart people who believe in what they’re doing and work hard. And, the lessons I’ve learned along the way seem to feed my consulting and training work. There are few things more satisfying than bridging the gap between business needs and the technology required to meet those needs. |
