From scratch to market
The rest of this site shows an engineer and a teacher. This page is the foundation under both, and the part a job title never quite captured: the business record. I have taken products from scratch to market more than once, for myself and for other people's companies, and what made me useful was never the code alone. It was having already absorbed the complexities that live between an idea and a paying customer.
Someone who watched me work the Coyote cloud program from another company said it better than I can:
"Chris not only did a fantastic job in translating deep technical concepts across department silos, but his true strength was being able to recognize where the business was and helping to build the bridge into the vision Coyote had heading into the cloud. You can't get to the future without getting everyone on the same page in seeing your vision, and Chris did exactly that. He made me a believer."Mark Tomcza, worked with me from a different company
That bridge, between where the business is and what engineering ships, is the job this page documents. It is also the job I'm looking for: call it a product owner who builds, or a principal engineer trusted with the product. What I'm looking for →
The record
Twenty-three years of products, mine and other people's.
Management system for a music instrument distributorclient
Built it from scratch, wired into their third-party accounting, running their daily labor and process reporting
ReSource, eCommerce and brand managementThe Shamrock Companies
Created it: commerce modules on DotNetNuke, alongside BizTalk messaging between five order-entry systems and the ERP
Requirements to Code Mappermine
My first public product, published on CodePlex. It broke when anyone refactored, and I spent sixteen years coming back to that. The write-up →
Point-of-sale delivery platforma sporting-goods retailer, via Polaris
Designed the multi-channel deployment system for 10,000+ locations and 80,000+ nodes, and ran the 23-person development and QA org as interim manager for 18 months
A cryptocurrency exchange's launchclient
The infrastructure. The product did $22M in its first 48 hours, and the launch held
Coyote Sandbox, ephemeral test environmentsCoyote Logistics
A four-year skunkworks I kept alive until it was greenlit to redefine how the whole org built software
A TMS serving nine customers, and its successorNext Generation Logistics
Inherited it undocumented after its only developer passed away. Stabilized the business, built a team, then built the replacement on Power Platform
Socket Merlin, AI support orchestrationMetafora's Socket product line
Primary engineer, with LangFuse tracing and a production evaluation pipeline behind every agent run
Runnin' Mules!mine
All of it: game, servers, dashboards, rate limits, tutorial. Live on Cloud Run
The jobs a product actually contains
"Product owner" is a bundle of unglamorous responsibilities, and I have held each of them somewhere specific:
- The money. Ran Coyote's cloud program under strict FinOps policy with Stackwatch and KubeCost, down to per-application cost metrics. Cut AI operating costs 60% at Next Generation Logistics with caching and token controls at the gateway. Even the free arcade game has per-user rate limits, because somebody pays for every request.
- The vendors. Owned Salesforce agreements and administration at RouteFreight. Replaced a legacy Avaya phone system with AT&T Office@Hand wired into Teams and the CRM. Brought in 3Cloud and Stackwatch as partners when buying beat building.
- The customers. Consulting seats at Polaris and Metafora, fifteen-plus Azure engagements at Polaris alone, and nine TMS customers whose businesses ran on software I owned. A developer on a county project I consulted for wrote: "If it wasn't for Chris Taylor we would have never delivered our software at the high standard that is at today." (Jorgan Bradwisch, Software Developer III at Hennepin County)
- The team. Interim development manager over 23 people for 18 months. At Next Generation Logistics the deliverable was not just the stabilized product, it was a sustainable development team where none had existed.
- The launch. Deploy is not release, and revenue rides the difference. That conviction runs from the $22M crypto launch through the dark-launch, progressive-delivery release discipline I now design for clients, and it is the entire thesis of INTERLOCK.
- The first twenty seconds. Runnin' Mules! has a four-step tutorial because a product nobody can figure out in twenty seconds is a product nobody adopts. The same instinct decides what goes on an admin screen, an invoice, or this page.
The complexities nobody puts on the diagram
Each of these cost something to learn, on a specific product:
- The hardest dependency is a decision, not a technology. Coyote Sandbox was buildable years before it was greenlit. Keeping a product alive through four years of "not yet" was the actual work.
- Inherited products arrive with customers attached and no map. Nine businesses were running on the Next Generation Logistics codebase the day I first saw it. You stabilize revenue first and refactor second.
- A launch has to survive its own success. $22M in 48 hours is only a good story because the infrastructure held.
- "Is it done?" has three different answers, and the engineer, the product owner, and QA are each right. Helix exists because averaging them misleads all three.
- Adoption is the product. The Wall Street Journal piece and the GitHub keynote were never about a tool. They were about several hundred people agreeing to work differently, which is a business change wearing an engineering costume.
Strategic and tactical are the same job done properly
The person who managed me for years wrote the spectrum claim I would most want a recommendation to make:
"Many of his strengths align as a strategic thought leader, but Chris is one of those rare individuals who is also a tactical leader. For Chris, the work isn't complete until he has implemented it."Marc Griseta, Scrum Master for Northern Trust (managed me directly)
That is what covering the whole spectrum means here: I can sit in the roadmap conversation and in the pull request on the same day, and I have run every seat in between, including the ones with budgets, vendors, and customers attached.
Related What I'm looking for · Teaching · Building with AI · Projects · Experience