Oracle
Director, Software Engineering, Mobile
Every customer could customize the learning app, and every customization made shipping harder: the app itself became a tangle of special cases and every update had to be tested against each customer's version. Made In Motion is built so customers can customize freely without forking the product. That design choice comes straight from this pain.
I spent a little over a year at Oracle as a director of mobile engineering, working on their cloud learning systems. I led a team of ten iOS and Android engineers through a re-architecture of the e-learning mobile product, integrated it with Oracle's enterprise learning web services, and put an agile process and continuous release flow in place for the group.
Honest take: it wasn't a great fit for me. The work was real and the team was good, but I had come from founding and running small companies, and a large enterprise organization moves at a different pace and rewards different instincts. I learned what I needed to about how big software companies ship, and I left after seventeen months to get back to building.