My Best Work Is Other People's

The most valuable thing I do usually isn't my own work - it's getting the people around me to believe theirs is worth sharing.

The apology that comes with the draft

An engineer sends me a blog post and apologizes for it before I've read a word. "It's probably too in-the-weeds," they say. "I'm not really a writer."

What they've actually handed me is a hard-won lesson from building software - the kind of thing another engineer, three cities away and stuck on the same problem, would give a lot to read. The writing needs work. The insight doesn't; it never did.

I've spent my career on that gap: the distance between what someone is capable of and what they believe they're allowed to put their name on. Capable people count themselves out. My job is getting them to count back in.

Everyone had a story worth publishing

At Revelry, I was the managing editor - which sounds like a job about words. It was really a job about permission.

I built the editorial engine so that every person on the team, not just leadership and not just the self-identified "writers," could document what they were learning as they built. We tracked ideas in the open. I kept the calendar. And mostly, I convinced engineers who were sure they had nothing to say that they were sitting on exactly what our audience needed.

Then I edited. A draft that arrived moderately useful went out as something that could genuinely change another builder's path. One of my teammates put it better than I could:

"She is an amazing editor and many times turned my own blog posts from moderately useful to well thought out content pieces that had the ability to impact other people's journeys in building software. Her strong communication skills made her a joy to work with by making everyone around her better."

"Making everyone around her better." That's the part I'm proudest of - not my byline, theirs.

The mic goes to the people who won't grab it

As part of the senior leadership team, I owned the quieter version of the same work: internal communications, employee experience, and building real career pathways so people could see a future for themselves inside the company.

I paid particular attention to the people who don't raise their hands. I became a kind of voice for the team, especially our underrepresented engineers - rolling out one-on-ones and personal-development follow-ups so that being quiet never meant being overlooked.

And when there were stages to be had, I didn't reserve them for executives. I found conference talks for contributing engineers, wrote their speaker bios, shaped their scripts, and pointed them at the rooms where their specific expertise would land. The move was always the same: find a person who counts themselves out, and hand them the microphone.

The same move, at ecosystem scale

Eventually I was doing this between whole organizations. I managed partnerships across open-source and innovation communities - the Open Source Summit, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the Linux Foundation, GAN, regional economic-development groups - drawing people and institutions into the same rooms to create value none of them could build alone.

When Collision left New Orleans, I helped conceive and execute INNO to fill the void, convening a citywide conference out of a network of relationships. And by 2022, I was aiming the same move at small businesses and government innovation programs - convincing a manufacturer that the Air Force wanted their technology, or that a NASA solicitation was describing, almost exactly, the thing a founder had been quietly building for years.

Different logos, different scales, one job underneath: closing the distance between a capable person and a room that was already theirs.

The real work is belonging

The visible version of all this looks like editing, communications, events, and partnerships. The real version is belonging. An organization - or an ecosystem - isn't a stack of programs and outputs; it's a group of people who believe they're allowed in, and allowed to speak.

Most of what quietly limits a team isn't a missing skill. It's a capable person who ruled themselves out before anyone got the chance to say yes. I've spent my career on that side of the ledger: not inventing the opportunities - those already existed - but handing people the microphone, and the permission to walk up and use it.

Make the people around you believe they belong, and they get better. So does everything they build.