About Michael Mongon
Note to the Audience
Few people enjoy writing about themselves, and I'm not one of them. I prefer to promote others instead of myself, so forgive the awkward verbiage you may find ahead.
Personal
I've never had a good answer from where I'm from. My parents were the type that moved us across the country several times. I can say that it has given me the opportunity to visit every state in America but Hawaii for some amount of time.
What I can claim is that I have now lived in Indiana longer than any other state in my life. While this doesn't make me a Hoosier, it does mean I appreciate many of those midwestern ideals of good schools for my children, a low cost of living, and a little more relaxed time to focus on family friends, and hobbies. I appreciate the many parks to go hiking and watching the local hockey team, the Indy Fuel, with the family.
From a young age, I always enjoyed tinkering with things. It's been a lifestyle of taking things apart and seeing if I could build them better. When my mom brought home a ThinkPad from work, that too turned to computers. It scratched that same itch of fixing things around the house. The love of creating and building things.
Professional
I am an engineering leader with 15+ years of development experience. I’ve had the privilege to work as an individual contributor and as a people manager with some extremely accomplished individuals. As an individual and manager, I’ve gotten the opportunity to continually learn by developing and cultivating a safe and strong collaborative spirit with those around me. I’ve been able to create a customer-first mentality through rapid iterations by hiring and promoting the right individuals and fostering the right culture.
I like to develop engineers to have realistic work-life balance; goals of growth and self-development. Technology is replaceable, but those that build it are not. They need the right understanding of a project, guidance on how they and their projects fit into the company's greater vision, and the autonomy to create something better than a single individual alone.
In my most recent role as Director of Engineering at Angi (formerly Angie’s List), I led four full-stack teams of 25+ engineers. I ran and helped with strategic planning across three domains (Angi.com, Homeadvisor.com, Handy.com) focusing on SEO and CRO. These full-stack teams were the spearhead to our customers' first view into what Angi did and the services Angi offered.
During my tenure at Angi, I played a pivotal role in the HomeAdvisor merger, fostering integration between the two companies, and helping establish core expectations across the combining organizations. I’ve run several large migrations, most recently porting a Drupal 7 stack of ~50 million unique pages to a next.js front-end with a contentful backend. With work like this earned me the 2018 Angi All-Star Award, an internal award that 5 individuals received for ‘outstanding leadership and contributions to Angi, showcasing an unwavering commitment to exceeding expectations and driving success.’
Resume
Take a look at my resume to learn more about my professional background.