Elliot is currently a Senior Faculty Member at Lean Startup Company, where he teaches organizations how to build systems for innovation and apply lean startup methodologies in their business. He conducts workshops, serves as a coach for both executives and teams, and is embedded into teams to level up their ability to deliver.

Elliot has served as a senior leader of both product and technology organizations, at companies both large and small. His career started in Technology, but shifted to focus on Product Management after his experience leading the technology organization at Curb (formerly Taxi Magic, a company helped you order a licensed taxi).

Elliot helped Curb become incredibly sophisticated in its delivery of technology, transforming them from bimonthly deployments to deploying code over 20x/week. They automated testing, created push-button deployments and rollbacks, separated monolithic services into microservices, etc. Ultimately, despite a 2-year head-start against Uber, they still lost. What happened?

The key difference between a taxi and an Uber is that a taxi driver can legally pick up a street hail. Because taxi drivers often rent their vehicle, they start their day down the cost of renting their licensed vehicle. The day is essentially a gamble: will I find more business than it cost me to rent this vehicle? As you might imagine, they’d much rather take the guaranteed street hail than take a chance that the rider who called in advance might not be there. Riders know that drivers often no-show, and thus call multiple taxi fleets, leading to a destructive cycle within the taxi ecosystem.

The technology we built at Curb was significantly more complex than what actually needed to be solved – establishing accountability between the rider and the driver. As a result of this experience, Elliot shifted his career to focus on solving this problem: How do we figure out what is even worth building in the first place?

Since that time, Elliot has built and lead R&D, Product, Growth and Technology teams. One particularly noteworthy experience was when Elliot was asked by the global CTO of AOL to chair their first-ever Product Guild. The Product Guild is the mechanism by which all of AOL’s CPOs and CTOs provide feedback on each other’s products. In this role, Elliot helped transform the way all of the organizations within AOL communicate about and experiment on the products they intend to create.