Leading through change
How I helped a newly merged team find stability, reduce its operating burden, and take ownership of larger work.
- Organization
- Eventbrite
- My role
- Engineering Manager, Creator Growth & Monetization2024–2026
- My contribution
- Led the merged team through the reorg; reduced its operating burden; created growth opportunities for engineers; scoped the team’s Free Tier delivery plan.
The transition
In August 2024, my Frontend Enablement team was disbanded and I took over the newly merged Creator Growth and Monetization team.
Both teams had lost their previous managers—one through the reorg and one who left voluntarily. Monetization’s services and frontends transferred with only two engineers. People were uncertain about leadership, priorities, and what the combined team would become.
The resulting team had eight direct reports and responsibility for 14 production services, three event-management frontends, and ToneDen paid social ads. We needed to reconcile that scope with our capacity.
Listening before setting direction
I started with individual conversations about how people were feeling, what they valued about their previous leaders, what they were working on, where they wanted to grow, and their work-life balance.
Those conversations helped me identify ownership gaps, knowledge-transfer needs, and development opportunities.
We ran a reteaming exercise to define working agreements, share skills, and identify potential mentorship pairings. I also created informal time for people to reconnect socially. Together, we established a clearer team identity and operating rhythm.
Making the workload sustainable
I prioritized decommissioning services to shrink our technical surface area and operating costs.
For ToneDen, I challenged support expectations based on revenue, engineering effort, and capacity. I secured agreement from our Head of Engineering to limit support to critical fixes, then had a Staff Engineer develop a deprecation proposal and got it onto the roadmap.
We also prioritized removing technical debt that weighed on the team and moving feature surfaces to Next.js to improve the developer experience.
Across infrastructure and vendor changes, we reduced spending by 40%, approximately $140,000 annually. These decisions focused our limited capacity on the systems and product work that mattered most.
Creating room for people to grow
I used the roadmap to create opportunities for engineers to do their best work.
A Senior Engineer led the largest project of his career, coordinating across teams, owning the technical proposal, delegating work, and managing delivery. I stayed involved in stakeholder alignment and coached him through the expanded scope.
An Engineer II took initiative and introduced new ideas while leading a substantial project. I helped him build influence beyond the team through presentations at engineering all-hands and the architecture guild, then amplified his results so his contributions were visible. That work helped earn his promotion to Senior.
When a high-performing engineer considered a higher-paying offer, we discussed their growth goals. I supported their leadership of a multi-quarter initiative central to our mission, alongside continued coaching and visibility. They chose to stay.
Delivering Free Tier
We went on to co-own engineering for Eventbrite’s Free Tier relaunch.
I narrowed the MVP and created a roadmap for fast follows and later improvements. We deferred building a replacement value proposition for subscription plans and used a discount instead. We also moved in-product messaging to a fast follow so we could enable Free Tier sooner.
Those choices gave the team a defined launch commitment without requiring every part of the longer-term experience to ship at once.
The relaunch removed approximately $20 million in annual seller fees and added 343,000 incremental tickets, including 115,000 paid tickets, in its first month. Those were outcomes of the broader initiative; my contribution was helping our team turn its responsibilities into a manageable delivery plan.
What changed
Over approximately nine months, team cycle time fell 60%, the bug backlog fell 75%, and throughput increased more than 40%. I tracked these changes in DX using Jira data, comparing the period before I joined with the team’s performance afterward.
All eight direct reports stayed through the remaining 20 months of my tenure, and I promoted two engineers from Engineer II to Senior.
What I learned
Stabilizing the team required changing what we asked it to carry. Reducing operational burden and narrowing commitments created room for engineers to take on meaningful ownership.
Listening first helped me understand what people needed. Following through on capacity, priorities, and growth opportunities gave them a clearer path forward.