Why I Joined govSlackers: Government Work Changes Everything

I didn’t start my career in software. I started in civil engineering with real physical projects, real constraints and critical paths, real deadlines. You learn quickly that structure matters, communication matters, and systems either work or they don’t. That mindset stuck with me.

When I eventually moved into tech and discovered Slack, it made sense immediately. It had the same "bring order to chaos" feeling that civil engineering did. I spent nearly a decade in the Salesforce ecosystem, and I used Slack everywhere. I ran QA teams, partnered with engineering and product groups, and led consulting projects with customers. Every time, I saw the same pattern. People worked better when Slack was used well. It wasn’t magic. It was structure.

When Salesforce acquired Slack, it clicked for me to build 21b. Slack was never going to be just another tool or another line item. It was going to become the front door to Salesforce and eventually the place where work actually happened. We built 21b intentionally: early, specialized, and focused on helping companies treat Slack as part of their operational backbone. For years, commercial Slack consulting was my world. I worked across financial services, healthcare, high tech, manufacturing,  legal and other industries. I loved the fast pace and the problem solving.

The Government Difference

My first major federal project with govSlackers changed everything. On the surface, it looked like the same Slack work I had been doing for years: migrations, architecture, environment cleanup. But once inside, the scale was different. Thousands of independently run workspaces were being merged into a single Slack Grid. Tens to hundreds of thousands of users across agencies, sub-agencies, and internal divisions all needed to operate on one cohesive platform and collaborate through Slack Connect.

The technical architecture required a different mindset too. In commercial projects, you design for fast growth or departmental scale. In government, you architect for longevity, federation, data boundaries, layered security, and operational realities that span dozens of independently run units. Every decision had downstream effects on authentication, identity management, data sharing, workflow automation, cross-agency collaboration, and increasingly AI driven capabilities that had to operate securely and predictably at massive scale.

Delivery itself had to mature. Commercial work often moves in fast cycles. Government work demands structured delivery processes, rigorous change control, disciplined documentation, and repeatable frameworks that keep hundreds of stakeholders aligned over long timelines. It pushed me to elevate how I planned, communicated, and executed.

It wasn’t "commercial work but bigger." It was a different kind of complexity. Governance mattered more. Reliability mattered more. Integrations couldn’t break because they sat inside mission critical workflows. Change management moved differently because it had to. Decisions had real impact on people doing real work that affects the public every day.

That was the moment I realized these were the hardest problems I had ever worked on. They were also the ones I wanted to keep solving.

The Mission Shift

From that first project forward, we kept working together because it felt right. Everything I had learned in commercial consulting translated directly into these environments: managing complexity, aligning stakeholders, designing systems that scale, and turning chaos into something predictable. The relationships were different too. They weren’t quick or transactional. They were long term partnerships built on consistency and trust. That matched how I naturally work.

But government work added something new. A sense of meaning. When you improve systems for a federal agency, it affects real people doing real work that matters to real people.

Why I’m Here

Joining govSlackers wasn’t a pivot. It was the natural continuation of everything I’ve been building toward. This is where scale, mission, delivery, and architecture meet. This is where the systems you build have to last. This is where reliability is not optional. And this is the kind of work where engineering discipline, commercial consulting experience, Slack and Salesforce expertise, and leadership all come together.

If you are a federal customer building or scaling Slack at government scale, you need partners who understand this and who have done it. You need people who know what it takes to get it right. That is govSlackers. That is us.

‍