EPISODE 03
IdeaGen
Customer Success Engineer T3 · 2024 – Present
Engineering team made redundant. I became developer, product manager, support lead, and QA — simultaneously.
“Ship it in your free time. Own it forever.”
When the team disappears, you adapt or collapse.
IdeaGen's acquisition brought restructuring. The engineering team was made redundant. I went from senior IC to solo operator: developer, product owner, support, QA. The work didn't shrink — the team did.
Problems solved / Key contributions
SSO on Multi-Tenant — No One Knew. I Found Out.
Knowledge LeadershipSSO on our multi-tenant SaaS was completely undocumented. I read the source code, traced the full auth flow, set up a free Azure tenant and implemented it from scratch to validate my understanding. Documented everything end-to-end and shared with the team.
Situation
Multi-tenant SSO behaviour lived in tribal knowledge and scattered threads — risky for onboarding, support, and any change that touched auth.
Task
Produce a verifiably correct description of the auth flow and prove configuration in an isolated tenant before asking others to trust the write-up.
Action
Read the application source, traced redirects, tokens, and tenant boundaries end-to-end, reproduced the flow in a free Azure AD tenant, then wrote internal documentation with diagrams and edge cases.
Result
A single source of truth the team could reuse for incidents and implementations — fewer guesswork escalations and faster confidence on SSO-related work.
AI-Powered Documentation from Source Code
Identify the Gap. Build the Solution.Critical product knowledge lived only in the codebase. I used AI tooling to derive accurate documentation directly from it. Knowledge gaps that had existed for months were closed in days.
Situation
Behavioural truth for several critical flows existed only in code; written product specs lagged by months, slowing CS and solution design.
Task
Close documentation gaps quickly without parking senior engineers on weeks of prose work.
Action
Used AI-assisted extraction from the repo to draft accurate sections, manually reviewed against runtime behaviour, and published structured docs where people actually search.
Result
Knowledge gaps that had lingered for months were addressed in days — fewer repeated deep dives into the same modules for basic questions.
Acting Product Manager
Product ThinkingNo dedicated PM existed. I stepped in — sprint planning, critical product decisions, bridging technical reality with product direction.
Situation
Post-acquisition restructuring removed dedicated engineering capacity; there was no named PM to keep cadence while customer commitments continued.
Task
Keep sprint rhythm, prioritisation, and stakeholder trade-offs moving without dropping hands-on support and delivery work.
Action
Facilitated planning, captured decisions, translated technical constraints into product choices, and aligned delivery dates with what the reduced team could truthfully ship.
Result
Predictable execution during a volatile period — fewer surprise slips and clearer expectations between CS, leadership, and whatever build capacity remained.
Flagship project
★ Flutter Cross-Platform Kiosk Application
Self-Initiated · Built in Personal Time · Career-Defining
Sales were losing deals — Windows hardware cost was a barrier. I built a Flutter app for Android + iPad + BYOD. More features than Electron version. Built in personal time. Result: company landed a major enterprise deal.
Situation
Enterprise prospects were walking away over Windows-only kiosk hardware cost, procurement cycles, and BYOD friction — while the formal product roadmap could not turn fast enough.
Task
Demonstrate a credible cross-platform kiosk path (Android, iPad, BYOD) with parity or better on the workflows that mattered in sales demos.
Action
Built a Flutter kiosk-class application in personal time, instrumented the flows sales cared about, and iterated against real field constraints until the story was undeniable in demos.
Result
The organisation landed a major enterprise deal with the Flutter path as a centerpiece — proof that initiative outside the ticket queue can move revenue.
Skills this episode
Grafana + Loki across multiple enterprise clients.