Walter Budzian

“Principal Dumpster Fire Mitigator” wasn’t an available title.

Whatever we end up calling what I do, the job turns out to be the same: politely point to where the fire is actually burning, then put it out.

Picture a work day where you know someone is taking care of the things that have been threatening to burn the house down until now.

🔥 What this looks like

It can go something like:

Please help us grow our user base through growth hacking! We end up building a business operations machine that delivers every customer facing department the tools and data it needs in the moment they need it, and growth gets growing.

Clearly we're not hiring the right engineers because we're missing all of our deadlines. We find out the motivational framework the management team was trained in was from the 50s and is producing the exact opposite of what you intended. We teach the latest motivation science. Employee retention triples, the team ships twice as much code, and job satisfaction ratings climb 94%. Shrug emoji amirite?

Ads are broken bc we don't have anyone creative. We run incrementality tests and learn that 75% of the users we acquire through ads would have found us anyway through organic channels. We kill ads and the cost per customer drops sharply while profit and revenue climb.

🧯 Why someone from the outside

When things are stuck there can be a hundred and one Dalmatians reasons half of which are going to be ridiculously slippery to nail down from the inside. Having an outside perspective without a dog in the race is sometimes the quickest and only way to get to those goals. Engineering hits the dates it promises. Customers stop cancelling at such an honestly rude rate. You have complete and utter clarity around which dollars are working and which ones aren't. You can finally stop managing the hot burny fire and get back to the work you actually want to be doing (unless you love managing fires, and in that case, oops I took your job).

Sometimes the role to fix the nastiest company problems doesn't have a job title...or even someone to volunteer to get their hands dirty. That's usually the sign you need someone like me.

🧭 How I got here

Someone like me got their start in answering support tickets and keeping servers running. In more instances than not the call was almost never about what the caller said it was. My degrees are in anthropology and psychoanalysis, which are both, more or less, the dark art of noticing what people aren't saying and an approach for finding what's really going on. That turned out to be a superpower in business.

I've spent over twenty years in tech since those support tickets. It has looked radically different from one day to the next too.

• I ran a 35-person data engineering team at Care.com and created its matching and triage algorithms.
• At Uber I led the web product team for new rider acquisition.
• As director of experimentation at a private equity firm (Digital Fuel Capital), I taught portfolio companies how to improve net contribution margins through A/B testing.
• I spent five years at the boutique consultancy, Immersyve, being mentored by the creators of Self-Determination Theory, then co-founded motivationWorks with them.
• I held the titles Director of Growth Product Management and Chief of Staff (closest actual job description to Dumpster Fire Mitigator) to a global growth and experimentation agency.
• Today I run product and engineering at Zodiac.fm, a personalized music app based on people's birth charts.

None of these things were dumpster fire free.

🤝 Working together

You might not identify your needs today as driven by fire. That's ok too. You have a goal, and you're not sure of the path to get there. What I'll do is guide us there with as little singeing as possible.

Getting started is easy. We'll have a short call to see if we vibe. It's really all vibes in the beginning isn't it? In fact, quick aside, did you know almost every single decision made is emotional? Logic only comes in to support what you want to do to either feel or NOT feel a thing.

Good talk.

So we'll have a short call, and if it's a fit, I'll spend the appropriate amount of time finding out which path has the fires and which one has the dollars. Sometimes they're the same path, and I'll be there to extinguish those fires.

We'll figure out what the real way we should go is, through interviews, data and code. Then we do it, with me in whatever role helps most: advising, stepping in as a fractional executive, or writing code myself.

🏞️ Off the clock

Now I will make myself so approachable and folksy for you: I live in Western North Carolina with my family. Off the clock I'm usually at a creek listening to the gentle screams of the water through the rocks, or losing an argument with my English Bulldog, Ham Sammich.

✉️ Get in touch

If something in your company needs figuring out, putting out, or just getting done, write to me at walter@budzian.com. Tell me where on this doll the fire burned you.

P.S. I took the fire metaphor too far, OK? I see that. But what am I going to do, not mention the dumpster is on fire? Let me make it up to you. Tell me what you feel the problem at your company is and I'll buy you a sandwich if that ends up being the actual problem that we need to solve.

P.P.S. Oh also, I know it's early days, but I didn't mention AI bc to me at this point it kind of seems like mentioning that you do in fact know how to pull up your own pants. Yes, I work with AI. I ran marketing and ops for an AI development framework company, I did marketing for an AI employee software company, ...it might be easier to list the work I've done that did not involve being on the edge of the state of the art in AI...so that's what I did.