Ben Brookshire

Own product strategy and engineering leadership for many of the flagship Spiceworks products, including the Cloud Help Desk and Tools products, core drivers of user engagement, advertising and data revenue at Spiceworks.

Manage product direction and directly manage engineers and engineering teams that build and maintain the Cloud Help Desk and other IT Pro tools, Community product, and the supporting Identity service.

• Negotiated, directed and successfully launched a complex $2.5M product migration for the cornerstone of the multi-product Spiceworks experience - transitioning the business from the bespoke product to a SaaS platform. Led multiple global teams and departments to collaborate, rearchitect and transition multiple dependent services and content types by creating new services or reusing services in new ways.
• Led a major modernization and frontend technology transition on the Cloud Help Desk web application. This multi-year effort enables a feature rich product to reach an even larger global audience, supported by external integration partnerships and a tiered pricing model.

In this role I lead multiple engineering teams in different capacities, including teams building IT Pro facing web applicatons, web forums, and email.

Lead product strategy and software engineers at various experience levels, and other engineering managers.

• Direct product strategy for the primary new user registration driver by delivering a complete rewrite of the Cloud Help Desk product’s web frontend, modernizing the tech stack and selectively addressing a backlog of technical debt.
• Leveraged “responsive web design” in rapidly building and delivering iOS and Android applications for the help desk, ensuring low effort long-term maintenance.

In this role, I led teams of 2-6 frontend & backend engineers in both creating and maintaining products. Each day I balanced consensus with pushing for results, and served as a driver and source of technical information for making the right product decisions.

• Built a Hubspot integration to sync CRM contact records with the Spiceworks ABM product (Control Center)
• Brought the purchasing contracts feature to market in our Device Inventory product
• Led the team in tight iterations to resolve long-standing issues between client software and our cloud services
• Coordinated contractors & product team to define a 3rd party solution to incorporate into our product suite
• Integrated international engineering teams with local teams
• Applied iterative/Agile methods and technical product expertise to launch a product MVP together with an India based engineering team
• Fostered and pushed engineers to grow technical and collaborative skillsets
• Clarified employee evaluation and promotion pathways across development org
• Provided technical guidance, timeline conflict resolution, scope enforcement, and evaluated product growth and vision with product team counterparts

I took on this role to continue growing my technical skillset and challenge myself with management and leadership responsibilities. I grew the team to provide a higher standard of support. My personal growth opened up an opportunity for me to have a wider impact in the organization by changing roles to work directly with engineering teams.

• Hiring and managing a support team of 10+ support engineers
• Automated and simplified support efforts by developing automated database repair toolkit, and browser plug-ins for customization of support software
• Technical guidance and escalation for complex issues
• Implemented support metrics and reporting to reduce response times
• Managed technical writers, including building out feedback mechanism and working directly with writers to expand and improve written documentation
• Triaging and prioritization of bug fixes with development team leads
• Collaboration with software engineers on debugging and problem solving
• Development and reporting of internal metrics and user base health
• Support website build-out and maintenance
• Obtained AWS SysOps Administrator certification

In this role I provided personal technical support for the help desk and network inventory product suite for tens of thousands of IT pros across the world. I was an IT-guy for the IT-guys. Deep-diving into our technically complex products was fulfilling for me. As our product suite grew and expanded I honed a strong interpersonal skillset that tuned me in to how to handle conflict and focus on results.

• Troubleshooting complex network and OS related asset inventory product
• Application performance troubleshooting and database repair
• Reporting and SQL support with personalized templates
• In-depth email, forum, and phone support for product suite

In this role I provided general application, email, hardware, and network support to a small business. I applied previously acquired skills to simplify the team's daily tasks. I also rolled out a new company website.

• Operating system deployment and automated builds for workstations
• Management and support of Active Directory and SQL Server
• Designed and led a Windows Update server roll-out and associated deployment configurations
• Re-design and a re-organization of the company website and its content
• Standardization of workstation configuration using Group Policy