Mike’s advice for the next generation of up and coming tech leaders:
"There are a million fires to fight, and if you try to fight them all you will never make progress on the critical ones. Let fires burn. Focus on the ones that will make a difference."
Mike’s impact:
As VP of Engineering at Envoy, Mike Chan has led the Engineering team in the development and launch of an integrated line of workplace experience tools. Under Mike’s guidance, Envoy expanded beyond its flagship products (Visitors and Deliveries) to becoming a platform, offering solutions across the entire office and opening its API to development from partners and integrators. Mike’s team has helped Envoy to evolve from a company known for its impact at the front desk, to a platform that truly impacts every employee on a daily basis.
Mike has also instilled a strong commitment to perfecting every minor detail, centered on verification that the Rooms and Envoy apps always provide a seamless user experience. He also supervised a hiring spree that included the arrival of key senior engineers, all instrumental in launching the company’s workplace platform updates.
Why he’s an Up-and-Comer:
Mike was tasked with transforming a single product engineering team into an agile multi-product team in just six months. To get there, he instilled a hybrid approach of leveraging Heroku for quickly standing up POCs, even as the company scaled. He also maximized the power of AWS turn-key services to get the most flexibility and control out of its infrastructure. These methods allowed them to swiftly maintain the infrastructure needed to innovate, yet grow more quickly. Through opening up their API, Envoy’s platform is inspiring and inviting innovators to create workplace products that have a global impact.
With a strong understanding of building delightful user experiences, Mike consistently challenges his team to pause and step back to understand the central question around software development: what are the exact customer pain points and is the software making their lives better? And, in the spirit of true innovation, Mike has filed for over 120 patents.
