From Product Development to Guitar Hero
A Few Questions with Ryan Gay, Decision Lens’ Director, Software Engineering
You were one of the first employees at Decision Lens – what were some of the motivating factors to make the switch from your previous companies?
Before Decision Lens I was a software engineer with E*TRADE Financial, and with a consulting company in the DC area called Digital Focus. I had known Decision Lens’ Chief Operating Officer, Tony Serafino, for years through a mutual friend.
When (Decision Lens CTO) Dan Saaty approached me about joining, I saw that Decision Lens was creating its own niche product in its own market of decision technology, where there was nothing else available. The position would allow me to use all the skills and experience that I had gained working at other companies, while being able to completely lead development and bring the products to market. It was a very exciting opportunity to do everything the way that I saw best to help make the company successful.
Through the interviewing process I discovered that I liked the people leading the company. They had good business sense, a very good business strategy and a great product. The idea of a startup company giving me the opportunity to lead development really appealed to me.
Tell us about Decision Lens 3 – and what are most excited about going forward with the new platform?
I'm really excited about the flexibility that it gives us, and the power it offers to not only deliver our unique decision-making technology, but to provide an enterprise-level platform that allows our customers to consume our decision-making technology in the best way possible for them. They can use our user interface, and they also can call our Web Services Application Programming Interface (API) directly. That allows people to consume our decision technology in a multitude of different ways, and to create decision models through our user interface.
With DL3, our technology can integrate with client data systems, exporting their data out of our system into their own reporting tools. They can even interact with their decision data in whatever external systems they may want, or potentially even build their own decision applications on top of our technology. DL3 also allows us to expand into social and mobile markets. It really lets us get our technology out there and not just be confined to a tool.
Throughout the development process you and your team are using an agile scrum method – can you explain to our readers a little more about it is and what are the benefits?
Product stakeholders identify feature functionality, and other things they want included in the application. Agile scrum is a development methodology that allows us to very rapidly develop and deploy production-ready features based on priorities of the product stakeholders.
Typically there's more of a backlog of those features than we have time to develop. The scrum process allows us to prioritize each feature so we can estimate the cost of implementing those features, and break up the development process into two-week iterations.
During those iteration periods, we look at the highest priority features. We've already determined how much time it would cost us to develop those features, and we can rapidly implement those features on a two-week turnaround basis. The benefit to the business is complete visibility into exactly what we are developing, with actual production-ready deliveries every two weeks. The software is constantly being updated; there's no need to wait months in order to get a change.
This allows us to adapt to changing business priorities much more quickly and easily and to implement new features based on those changing needs within the very next iteration. We don't waste time building features into the software that are of limited use to the company.
Do you have a favorite app or tool that makes your life as a Director of Software Engineering easier – such as Yammer or basecamp? If so, what is it and why?
We have been using a tool called Polarion, which has been great for us. It allows us to define our features and requirements, and to log any bugs that come up, as well as any user enhancement requests that come up. Then we are able to categorize those things, constantly looking at an up-to-date list of everything in our product backlog. That way we can constantly prioritize and change what we're doing on an iteration-by-iteration basis.
Now, most importantly – how and when did you become so awesome at Guitar Hero?
That's a great question! I was introduced to it on a ski trip about five years ago. From there I was hooked. I actually don't play it as much as people think I do, but as I was learning I played it about a half-hour a day each evening after work. Over the course of about four or five months I just seemed to pick it up. I'm sorry to say that's my claim to fame.
So you’d characterize yourself as awesome as well?
Yes, I would! Although since having been so involved in the development of DL3, my skills at Guitar Hero have deteriorated considerably.
