Work
Ari, and trunk-based delivery on a customer-facing surface
Two intertwined initiatives as Technical Team Lead: the architecture and launch of Ari, our natural-language analytics platform, and the move to trunk-based development with containerized CI on a widget that ships to property managers every day.
- Technical Team Lead
- 2025
- Product · Reliability · CI/CD · Trunk-based · Leadership
The lead role was a chance to do two things at once: ship a product surface operators would actually adopt, and tighten the delivery system underneath it so the team could move with confidence.
The framing
Two threads. One was a product question—what does the dashboard look like if it is designed around the decisions an operator is actually making? The other was a delivery question—what does the release loop look like if every change is small and shipped against the same environment production runs in?
What changed—Ari and the workflow
Ari is Actionable Renters Insight, our B2B natural-language analytics platform. An operator asks a question in plain language and gets back rich reports and visualizations: complex line, bar, and pie charts, plus tables with downloadable artifacts, all rendered through a schema-driven generative UI. Underneath it is a RAG, vector-driven, LLM-powered analytics system.
- Led the architecture and launch of Ari end to end.
- Redesigned operator workflows into intuitive single-page UIs—fewer hops, fewer modals, fewer screens that exist only to bridge other screens.
- 60% growth in dashboard adoption post-launch.
What changed—delivery
- Trunk-based development as the default; long-lived branches treated as a smell, not a strategy.
- Containerized CI so every change shipped against an environment that matched production.
- 85% reduction in production bugs.
- 99.9% uptime sustained on a customer-embedded widget.
- Code review to production deploy compressed from days to minutes-to-hours.
The harder work
Most of the harder work was not technical. It was building the team’s confidence to push small changes without ceremony—and being willing, as the lead, to be the person who reviewed the first ten of those small changes carefully so the eleventh felt safe.
Outcome
A surface operators chose to use, on a delivery pipeline that stopped surprising the people who depended on it. Mentored engineers carried the new defaults forward after I rolled into the post-acquisition work.