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. This has given me the unique opportunity to visit and live in every state in continental America. Hawaii is still one place I've never been able to visit.
What I can claim is that I have now lived in Indiana and I have lived in Fishers longer than any other place 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, and a low cost of living. That gives me time to ticker on my hobbies, catch a local hockey game, and enjoy plenty of hikes 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 put them back together better. While at a young age, this often meant I broke it, I'm getting a bit better. However, when my mom brought home a ThinkPad from work, that too tickering turned to computers. Working with computers scratched that same itch of fixing things around the house. I learned some basic programming, and in time found the web. It started with theming and playing webmaster to friends who wanted their high school band to have a wite or myspace page and grew from there.
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.