Joe Schwendt
About Joe Schwendt
I truly love bringing together diverse teams to build products that make lives better. I’m a hand-on technology leader with over 20 years of experience managing and scaling high-performing teams as large as 50 people, both local and remote. I have a diversified and highly entrepreneurial background across many industries including consulting, government contracting, semiconductors, FinTech, Mobile, Recruiting, Medical Devices, and Legal. As a leader, trust is my number one goal. I strive to create psychological safety among our teams, empowering people to ask for help or admit when mistakes are made. I recognize and celebrate failures as it’s how we learn and grow together, becoming stronger as a result. I’m always looking to support and build up everyone around me and enjoy the opportunity to get into the weeds to help solve problems. I want people to feel secure enough to experiment and take risks. This is the type of environment where innovation thrives. I do my best work when faced with big challenges. I embrace uncertainty and use it to consider fresh opportunity. One of my favorite projects was an app we built to make US currency notes accessible to visually impaired individuals. We worked with the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing to build and release the iOS app called Eyenote in the early days of iPhones. It was beyond rewarding to see it in real world use and how it was changing people’s lives, allowing them to become more independent. I also really enjoy selling things that I believe in, both internally to stakeholders and externally to customers. Whether it’s products and services or frameworks and ideas, nothing makes me happier than seeing people smile at the results. I’m comfortable pitching investors and senior leaders, while also happy to directly field technical questions from the trenches and craft end-to-end solutions. I recognize that people and process are just as important as technology. As such, I’ve helped establish centralized and embedded CoE’s (centers of excellence) to help drive the success of technology in large organizations. Specialties: Building and leading technical teams, architecture & systems, building APIs, complex system integrations, mobile software development, responsive web apps, SaMD (Software as a Medical Device)/Digital Health, InfoSec, DevOps, cloud (Azure/AWS), Agile (Scrum/Kanban), user centered design, product strategy and roadmapping, software purchasing & negotiations, challenging the status quo Languages: Javascript, Swift, Objective C, Kotlin, C#, Java, PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby