Jon’s Accomplishments

Shipped Real Product Work Fast

Jon jumped into the user enrollment pipeline, a modern Next.js/React product with a lot of custom, non-standard flow management, and was contributing meaningfully to the team within his first two months.

Made the Team Better at Being Vulnerable

Jon is genuinely humble. He’ll say “I don’t know” without hesitation and ask “help me understand that” in a way that fundamentally changes a team’s dynamic. In an intellectual workplace where people usually guard against looking wrong, his willingness to be vulnerable gives permission to everyone around him to do the same. It makes the work environment better and it makes the team smarter because people stop pretending and start actually collaborating.

Bridged Engineering and Everyone Else

Jon can talk about technical concepts in plain English to non-engineers. He worked really well with our marketing and analytics teams. He understood what they actually needed and came back with solutions that were both smart and realistic for what engineering could actually do.

Spoke Up About What Wasn’t Working

As a manager, it can be hard to get real feedback from people. They don’t want to complain or step on toes. Jon was forthcoming about things that were painful or inefficient, but he framed everything around what would make the team better, not as complaints. He was especially thoughtful about our analytics process and how we think about data. He had an idea about attributing a dollar-and-cents value to user actions that I’ve been using ever since to shorthand-estimate the value of any initiative we’re planning.

Sought Out Growth and Took It On

Jon was clear about what excited him and what he wanted to learn. He identified that he wanted to do more Go work and some systems design, areas where he felt he had gaps. We got him on some feature work for our eligibility system (written in Go) and design documentation for some analytical and marketing features. He jumped in eagerly to both, even though they were unfamiliar territory. That eagerness to try things he hasn’t done and openness to feedback on how it goes are both things I valued highly as his manager