#personal

Farewell, Nexmo/Vonage!

11 Apr 2021 in Odds and Ends

After almost 4 years, the time to move on from Vonage has come. I wasn’t really looking for a new role when I chatted to Phil about their open PHP developer advocate role, but the opportunity to work in the community full time rather than using time off to do it was too alluring.

Over the years I went from being team member number 13 as an individual contributor through leading the documentation team as a manager, docs and server/client SDKs as a senior manager, then docs, SDKs, dashboard and UX/UI design as a director.

Each step of my journey at Vonage was another opportunity to learn more about business, about people and about product management. I won’t lie and say that I was ready each time it happened, but I found my feet quickly each time and leave the team with many more skills than I had when I initially joined.

Vonage is where:

  • I first discovered GitHub Actions (and subsequently went on to write a book)
  • I learned about UX research techniques such as card sorting and tree testing
  • I had to make the hard choices about how people did (or didn’t) fit into our overall strategy
  • I first managed managers. It’s a totally different skillset, which I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to develop
  • I served on the OpenAPI business governance board (and built an OpenAPI parser + renderer, including prototyping the OAS 3.1 webhooks support)
  • I made friends that I’ll know forever

I couldn’t possibly list out everything I learned or everything that we achieved as a team in my time there, but the above is a good mix of things to give you an idea of the variety of things I tackled in my role.

When I left Digi.me I said that I was enjoying the operations role but wanted to do more learning and teaching. In my next role I’ll be combining the two as the Director of Developer Relations for Kong. It’s an opportunity to learn more about community + education, whilst continuing my developer experience journey; all in the infrastructure space which I previously (and still do!) enjoyed.

Kong’s products span everything from API design through governance, deployment and monitoring. It’s the perfect mix of products for me and I can’t wait to dig in and learn more - maybe even in public on Twitch if things go to plan.