“As far as Segment engineering talent goes, William is like a hidden gem prodigy at this company. I have had the absolute delight of being able to partner with William and also witness his astonishing growth over the last year. William started as an intern less than 1 year ago... and he now leads development on Visual Tagger and is the product engineer who I most rely on for solid critical thinking and feedback. I will sorely miss working with him in our new teams, but I am more excited than ever for the future of the VT team under his leadership.

1. Product + engineering skill. The most important competency for William’s role as a product engineer is skillful engineering with a highly customer-focused, business-sensitive lens. This is exactly where William shines. From core onboarding flows in the Workspace Home to building the foundation of what eventually became the Visual Tagger product that we launched, William has been a critical part of the success of Visual Tagger. I think his greatest hits are: the aspects of the Workspace Home that serves VT to new customers, the e2e VT onboarding and setup experience, the prerequisites modal that prevents users from using VT if they don’t meet the right conditions, productionizing the VT iframe view, creating the first iteration of the VT Home. In my memory of his work, I just recall encountering very, very few bugs or issues + blazing fast implementation. This level of skill is what has allowed us to build and iterate on Visual Tagger so quickly and well, through many cycles of feedback and validation. Without his ownership and competency in this dimension, this would not have been possible. I want to call out again that this type of skillful product engineering should NOT be underestimated for its level of complexity and difficulty. The simplicity and intuitiveness of the desired experience is exactly what makes the implementation of this so difficult to do well.

2. Customer obsession, usability focus, & being vocal about it. From Day 1, William has been an incredibly vocal, relentless advocate for best-in-class user experience. He is incredibly critical about anything we consider building and launching to ensure high-quality UX that looks and feel intuitive. He shows up for EVERY customer call without fail — and we’ve had a lot at very odd hours like 8am — and he very actively discusses and distributes learnings from those calls. He is also unafraid of being wrong or debating opinions — he will just keep engaging anyways to obtain deeper understanding and contribute to important product decisions. Because of this level of engagement + his hunger for learning/ growth mindset, William has developed a very honed product sensibility in a short amount of time. Whenever there is a decision or a usability problem that we encounter with customers, William is the first person who I think of who will be able to provide very good feedback and direction on path forward. What I find even more impressive is his ability to provide feedback on goals, OKRs, and metrics. I was under the impression that it takes most people a pretty significant amount of experience to gain the ability to do that well, but I guess William has proved me very wrong. I also love his level of engagement in debates on different decisions in Slack/ Paper/ wherever, thoroughly questioning everything with a critical eye — that is what will end up making a great product.

3. Team management & grit. William is a great teammate and leader. I deeply appreciate his level of ownership and his stepping up to essentially TL the VT team for the last quarter+. I love that I can leave the week-to-week prioritization to William, and that the other engineers on our team trust his judgment and leadership. It has also been a treat to have him with us since the very early days of VT — no matter how difficult or bleak things got, William was always a “can-do” voice on the team.

I want to call out William’s very tangible impact to the business:

• William was one of the key product engineers building and launching the VT Beta, from very early initial Alpha/ hackweek days → the full production-ready Beta launch. This most recent launch increased dataflow activation rates by 67% for the experiment cohort of the VT A/B test launch, proving that Visual Tagger is a home run as a dataflow activation strategy.

• By validating the initial direction of VT, the company as a whole refocused around the non-technical marketing audience and opening a huge, untapped TAM to Segment.

• William was a key part of building the VT team and its culture to where it is today. He was also a key part of defining and iterating on the activation metric and its strategic value to Segment.

• Visual Tagger’s early signs of success caused the company to make an even bigger, dedicated investment into developing VT on its own, resulting in the formation of an entire team just for continuing development of VT in the Instrumentation Pillar.”

“TL'd Visual Tagger to a successful Public Beta (67% lift relative to a control group without Visual Tagger over a statistically significant sample of net new customers):

• Took on a large fraction of project management responsibilities (backlog grooming, work item definition, rough estimation) - in addition to assisting product with prioritization
• Helped maintain a rapid velocity across the team (and mostly lock-free development process) by designing isolated work streams that could be executed in parallel
• Onboarded new engineers, by leading technical architecture overviews, pairing with others on small features, and being almost always available to answer questions as they arose
• Worked directly with customers to resolve issues as they arose

Delivered key VT features that led to a successful Public Beta:

• Implemented a new workspace home experience for the Visual Tagger intro in the A/B experiment
• Event validation feature to give customers assurance that events were instrumented correctly (which led to a large reliability improvement both real and perceived)
• Was often the first line of defense when newly released features were shipped with bugs -- highly proactive in identifying, fixing, and communicating to stakeholders and customers when resolutions were in place

Continued to grow into a natural engineering leader outside of the Visual Tagger team:

• Mentored Daniel, and assisted with his transition to FT employee from Intern
• Started getting plugged into the hiring process by reviewing a candidate takehome and providing feedback
• Continues to be a dominant figure in the Vancouver (and SF) office cultures - his rapid career trajectory often inspiring engineers of all skill levels to achieve more”

“Great leader:

1. William is capable of taking decisions in any level (product, design, project management, technical) on our product (VT/WH).
2. I've seen William grooming JIRA more times than I can count, defining epic <> tasks hierarchies, planning the week's work and defining the direction the team should go to during a defined period of time.
3. He knows what the team is working on and how to unblock each person, as well as how/to whom to delegate each task he planned.

User obsessed:

His product/design decisions have taken VT's experience to a new level (small UI tweaks to make VT easy to use, splitting the new pages hierarchy into Home, Prerequisites and Tag Creation). He is always focused on the best user experience and how to create the best tool in the market.

Technical knowledge:

Even though Will has started career as a software engineer recently, he is unstoppable. As I mentioned before, he is able to take technical decisions and guide the team to implement them without any support. He is a solid engineer, always seeking more knowledge.

Always ready to help:

William is always gonna be there for you! He'll help you review your work, unblock you when you're struggling, even organize QA sessions around your work to make sure you're good to go.”

“Ownership:

William went above and beyond when it came to taking Visual Tagger to the finish line. He wore a variety of hats and did whatever was required to aid in not just getting the product to a complete state, but an optimal one. He has a hand in all the major features that are going through for Visual Tagger and is proactive when it comes to identifying potential usability issues and bugs.

Thoroughness:

William is fastidious when it comes to reviewing other people's work without ever becoming overbearing. He has frequently caught bugs with my code that I had missed during my own QA and is always happy to review other people's work so that they can get it out.”

“William's project management skills stand out among all others. Visual Tagger is an excellent example of this. William has managed the project through ticket creation and prioritizing, being an active communicator to other stakeholders (engineers, product, and design), taking part in user onboarding sessions and helping to synthesize feedback therefrom, and carefully shepherding the product through the various stages of release. Look no further than the fact that William is generally the go-to source of truth for the product - be it roadmap, current state and releases of the various components, or general functionality - for proof that he is exceedingly skilled at balancing responsibilities.

Another top strength of William's is his initiative. William consistently takes ownership of tasks and responsibilities outside the scope of a traditional engineer. This willingness to own streams of work outside what might be considered his normal responsibilities makes him a strong team member. One specific example is the fact that William is Visual Tagger's best user researcher. Having dedicated hours to studying user interactions with the product, and yet not sacrificing delivering on other responsibilities, William contributes to product design with insight and data to back up his suggestions. This is only the case because he chooses to go the extra mile.”

“William is one of the best young engineers I've worked with, and he contributed far above and beyond his role as an intern during his time at Change.org. I particularly appreciated his curiosity and his ability to think holistically about the user and business problems we were trying to solve. William proactively asked great questions, collaborated with others across the engineering and product teams to find creative solutions, and always stayed in great communication while being in a different office. Any team would be very lucky to have William, and I can't wait to see where his journey takes him next.”

“William's work at Change.org was at a level of quality and consistency far beyond that which the label of "intern" would suggest. As a member of the revenue team, he handily learned the ins and outs of our payments UI and architecture, and made excellent contributions both in the form of his own code as well as in the code review process. He's a fast learner who is unintimidated by the prospect of stretching his skills to new areas, and it was easy to forget that he was "just" an intern—he became as core a member of our team as anyone and his attitude, skills, and work ethic were missed when he returned to school.”

“I would like to highly recommend William Grosset for the co-op work exchange program. I believe he is an ideal candidate who would bring strong communication skills, team skills, and leadership qualities to any work environment. As an all-round "people person" and team player, I believe William would be an especial asset in an international environment, as he is articulate, well-spoken, polite, and respectful.

I know William as a student from my Engr. 240: Technical Communications course (Fall 2015). The course is designed to prepare students for the writing and speaking demands of co-op placements and, beyond that, the technical workplace. William performed extremely well in the course, showing impressive commitment to, and proficiency in, the technical writing techniques, formats, and design principles taught in the course. He strived to achieve clarity, accuracy, and concision, as espoused in the best plain language principles, rising to the challenge of carefully reviewing and revising his work to achieve his best.

As well, I saw William put commendable effort into fostering positive team dynamics in the course's group project. This project required students to work collaboratively to solve a problem and produce a formal recommendation report and team presentation, based on their analysis of the findings. Maintaining a paper trail and keeping worklogs was part and parcel of the project and, again, taking on a shared leadership role, William was instrumental in motivating the team, asking questions, getting things done, and helping keep the project on track.

In all, I found William to be a self-motivated student, committed to meeting learning outcomes to the best of his ability and keen to push himself to achieve his best. He gave the impression of being sincere and honest, with a strong work ethic and desire to learn. With 27 years of university-level teaching behind me, I have no hesitation in recommending William as a student of all-round excellent potential. I believe he is fully capable of making the very best of any opportunities offered to him and would be a real asset in any coop work program. Certainly, I wish him every success in his future endeavors.”

“This is a letter to recommend William Grosset. During the 2015 fall semester, I was his instructor for CSC 115 (Fundamentals of Programming II). In this course, I found him to be proactive and engaging. He put in a considerable amount of effort which not only resulted in him being one of the top students but it also ensured that he now has a firm grasp on how to overcome programming challenges.

William is enthused about advancing his programming skills through various means, such as a future co-op placement. He is eager to learn, welcomes new challenges, and has a positive attitude towards the learning process. Furthermore, he is realistic about the amount of effort required to succeed in specific projects. Hence I feel confident in recommending him; his energetic personality will undoubtedly increase his chances for success in future endeavours.”