90-Day Plan | VP of Engineering, Tithely
A focused roadmap to strengthen reliability, delivery speed, and cross-team alignment. Operate as a driving force, ensuring Tithely’s platform continues to scale in support of its mission.
The first 90 days are about clarity: understanding what’s working, what’s slowing teams down, and where reliability can improve. My focus at Tithely would be to get close to the people, the systems, and the delivery process, then make practical changes that build momentum fast.
The 90-Day Plan
Phase 1: Diagnose
Goal: Understand where the team wins, where it’s slowed down, and what’s getting in the way of consistent delivery.
- Review architecture, release practices, and CI/CD flow to see how code moves from commit to production.
- Benchmark reliability (incident trends, deploy frequency, MTTR) and identify recurring blockers.
- Map data dependencies across products—particularly within Giving, CHMS, and related APIs, to find pain points and technical debt.
- Meet with engineering leads, product managers, and support teams to surface what’s working well and what needs immediate attention.
Output: a concise baseline report summarizing key metrics, critical bottlenecks, and immediate reliability priorities.
Phase 2: Design
Goal: Create clarity around how Tithely builds, ships, and measures success.
- Define shared release standards and paved-path workflows that make delivery predictable.
- Draft a modernization roadmap that balances debt reduction with key 2025 product initiatives.
- Introduce simple, visible dashboards (DORA, uptime, defect ratios) for a shared view of progress.
- Establish a lightweight operating cadence suited to the team’s distributed structure.
Output: a 90-day engineering playbook outlining standards, visibility metrics, and the roadmap for improvement.
Phase 3: Deliver
Goal: Build trust quickly through visible, measurable wins.
- Launch two first-quarter initiatives:
- Reliability Win: Reduce incident rate and improve deploy frequency through release automation and clearer on-call ownership.
- Product Win: Partner with Product to run a small-scale improvement experiment in Giving or CHMS that lifts engagement or conversion.
- Introduce developer productivity tools (Copilot, Cursor, etc.) and improve onboarding/documentation speed.
- Present engineering KPIs to leadership and product teams—showing early improvements in velocity, reliability, and visibility.
Output: early wins that demonstrate impact, set cultural tone, and create momentum for long-term improvement.
How I Build and Lead
I lead with clarity and accountability. Teams do their best work when expectations are clear, systems are reliable, and wins are visible. My focus is on creating an environment where engineers feel trusted, delivery feels predictable, and progress compounds week over week.
Reliability
Build systems that prevent surprises.
Velocity
Ship often, measure results, and iterate.
Culture
Create space for ownership, trust, and growth.