Hello, I’m Sean
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been passionate about products. From taking apart widgets as a kid (most of which went back together) to building and launching software product companies, I’ve always been fascinated about products.
Dating back to my school aged days, I always thought my career would be meticulously planned. I couldn’t have been more wrong about that and I couldn’t be happier about it. Below is the story about how this all came to be.
With any luck, I’ll get an opportunity to work with and help you at some point. Thanks for reading about my story.
Timeline:
In corporate, I worked just about every job we had in engineering and technology. One such example was infrastructure engineering. In that role, I developed custom software applications that made such significant advancements in saving time and boosting productivity that they are still in use today. This was the beginning of my journey of developing a passion for solving business problems through technology
I spent years working in corporate and learned a ton, but mainly what I learned is I like working with innovative teams moving fast and breaking things. I decided to break some things on my own by leaving corporate.
I found my way to a few startup companies and couldn’t believe the fire and passion I had for growing something new with a small team of rock-stars. There was no looking back for me at this point. Onward and upward. Well…mostly upward.
I founded my first product company (then called Hiring) with the goal of helping people find their passion (just like I did). This started as an HR service then attempted to pivot into a software product, but ultimately failed. It’s still the best lesson I’ve had in product to date.
I immersed myself into the world of product strategy and management. I obsessed over learning everything I could get my hands on about best practices when it came to product strategy and product management. I embraced Lean and other agile methods. This journey would change everything. I put everything I had learned into action to rebuild my previous venture into a new company called StaffGeek which laser focused on specific challenges in Human Resources related to people analytics. The experience this time around was dramatically different. What I had learned had helped in a significant way.
My consulting business is officially re-branded as NxtStep and exclusively focused on helping teams that were building software products and productized services. I laser focused my vision on ‘ridding the world of product failure’. 9 out of 10 products failed and that kept me up at night. I turned my previous product ambitions around and knew I could do the same for others.
I was lucky enough to help numerous organizations launch and grow their product companies and operations. I invested time and effort into generating a library of content which helped me engage with the product community and start to build a small team of product people that shared my passion.
As I continued to learn about new effective product strategies, I launched an additional product business, this time as a productized service in Podcast Chef. I built a team around this business with the objective of helping others strategically grow their network and simultaneously generate awesome marketing content through a podcast.
Our list of clients has grown to develop patterns across various industries. We’ve begun to help clients repeatedly in several industries including technology, healthcare and nonprofits. Hopefully we can help you too.
Let’s Get Started
Regardless of where your product is at today, the team at NxtStep can help you get started by taking the right next step right now.