George talks with Matt Holford, the new CTO of DoSomething.org about how he approached his role and improved their tech development process. Matt discusses his three step approach of learn – plan – execute, using a faceted feature analysis (FFA) process at DoSomething.org to manage and prioritize products.

Episode 10

Speaker 1: This is Using The Whole Whale, a podcast that brings together stories about data and technology in the nonprofit world. My name is George Weiner, your host and chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thanks for joining us.

Do you ever wonder who’s going to inherit your job when you move on to your next role? Maybe find all of those skeletons in the closet? It’s an interesting thought. I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I have tracked down the man who has my job; Matt Holford, the CTO of dosomething.org. Welcome to episode 10, this is going to be a two parter because the conversation with Matt is so interesting. The first part we’re going to be finding out how he approached the job in three phases and thought about project management, thought about how to manage the product and the tech team and the expectations at dosomething.org. Alright, let’s jump into it with Matt.

Thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast, who are you and what do you do?

Speaker 2: I’m happy to be here, I’m Matt Holford and I’m the Chief Technology Officer at dosomething.org. Which used to be your position, George.

Speaker 1: My position, so we’re in a fine position overall here.

Speaker 2: I know, we are.

Speaker 1: You were recruited in and I’m very happy to say that they found somebody far smarter than I am to take over the job, which was ultimately my dream. To hand off something that was hopefully working to someone who could take it to the next level. So I’d love to kind of go through this process of you know, you walked in to do something and…what where…how did you approach this? It’s a big organization, what was your approach?

Speaker 2: Well, I had gotten recruited out of a different job working at a digital agency in the commerce world, e-commerce. And that was very much kind of my angle on things and I also have a big technical background in Drupal which was the traditional platform for dosomething .org. So there was an interesting mix for me, of challenges. But this would have been the first time I had been employed by a not-for-profit. And the thing I was most, kind of leery of coming in was walking into a situation that was poorly managed, that was disorganized. That was kind of tech in name only but didn’t really have a lot to work with. The thing that I was pleasantly surprised by when I came in was that there was a long history there with building ambitious web products. And there was a long history with Drupal in particular. So that was on the positive side. I think one of the things that we had to work through in the beginning was, I kind of mixed history in terms of how much the internal staff knew of the technology they had. And so one of the challenges was to fig