Try Life On Media

Trylifeon.com

Financial Freedom & Lifestyle Design Coach, Host of the Try Life On Podcast, and Investor in television and media projects espousing the spirit of Try Life On.

1:1 coaching and consultations teaching countless professionals and entrepreneurs how to gain the freedom they crave in each facet of their lives and start living a life they won’t need a vacation from. How? By just taking action. By building relationships. By focusing on the 5 freedoms (time, financial, geographic, purpose, relationships). 

The fear of rocking the boat has forced too many people to get stuck in the planning stages of their lives, and miss all of the opportunities to actually live. Without that fear of the unknown or the insecurities of doing things differently, how much would your life change? Where would you live? Who would you be spending your time with? How will it feel to live a life purely built from your own values and ambitions? The only way to know is to try it on.

Financial Freedom & Lifestyle Design Coach / Try Life On Podcast Host

Quattro Capital

Founding Partner of Quattro Capital, an investment firm with foundational pillars of People, Property, Profits and Philanthropy. We locate, invest in and operate apartments complexes, mobile home parks, and other alternative investments across the United States in focused markets, primarily the Southeast, yielding strong returns for our investors. Investing in real estate purposefully is the tool that helps more people achieve wealth and the freedom to live life well. Visit thequattroway.com for more information.

Managing Partner

Unsettled

Unsettled is a global community for those who embrace uncertainty and value meaningful human connection. It's for those who believe that feeling a little bit “unsettled” is a positive impulse for change, innovation, and discovery in our lives. The experiences, virtual or in-person, as well as the community itself, are co-created journeys that give you the time, space and (un)structure to break out of your routine, build new relationships, and discover new perspectives while growing personally and professionally. With travel experiences in some of the world’s most beautiful destinations, online virtual retreats, and over 2000 alumni from 80+ countries, Unsettled is a platform that truly takes work, life, and adventures beyond traditional borders.

Member, Global Advisory Board

Accenture

Executive in Accenture's Health & Public Service (Government) Operating Group delivering systems  integration, business process excellence and technology solutions for US Federal Government clients. Currently focused on digital transformation helping organizations redefine how they serve connected customers and operate their connected enterprises leveraging new technologies including Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Mobility and AAS offerings including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (i.e Salesforce, ServiceNow, Dynamics).

Accenture Digital is one of the largest end-to-end providers of digital transformation capabilities in the world. Our offerings support every phase of the digital journey, with complete services that span customer experience, connected products and systems and intelligent analytics, which provide the foundation to drive successful business outcomes through our world-class industry expertise.

Senior Executive (Retired)

Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI)

The Air Force Office of Special Investigations has been the Air Force's major investigative service since Aug.1, 1948. The agency reports to the Inspector General, Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. AFOSI provides professional investigative service to commanders of all Air Force activities.

Lieutenant Colonel / Special Agent (Retired)

Montgomery County Police Recruiting

Senior Police Officer in Montgomery County Department of Police which includes approximately 1,300 sworn officers and approximately 700 support personnel. The Police Department was established in 1922, and today, is responsible for policing a County with a population of over one million people.

Senior Police Officer (Retired)

Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc

Actively participating in community service and mentoring activities via Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, a professional, civic-minded organization of college-educated men with similar ideas and like attainments. The fraternity’s founders chose Manhood, Scholarship, Perseverance and Uplift as the cardinal principles that every prospective candidate must possess. Our fraternity’s motto is “Friendship is essential to the soul” Since the birth of the organization, Omega has and will continue to impact the world in every profession and all walks of life.

Life Member

Generation Hope

Generation Hope is reducing poverty one family at a time by providing direct sponsorships and one-on-one mentoring to teen parents who are pursuing college degrees in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

Member Board Of Directors

Leadership Montgomery

Leadership Montgomery builds bridges between the private, public, and nonprofit sectors of Montgomery County, Maryland to improve the community -- the neighborhoods people live in and the business they work in.  We provide six curriculum-and service-based programs:  Core, Emerging Leaders, Senior, Inside Montgomery, Youth and our Corporate Volunteer Council, as well as our post-graduate programming, and special events.

🎙️Try Life On Podcast Host 💵 Managing Partner, Quattro Capital 🌏 98 countries | Investor | Freedom Coach 📚 Used 9-5 jobs + passive income to beat the system

A little about me...

I'm an investor, entrepreneur, restaurant owner and explorer of 99 countries. I host the Try Life On Podcast, and coach professional 1:1 on wealth and freedom, helping you build lifestyle you don’t need vacation from.

In 2021 I retired from the 9-5 world after 25 years as Senior Executive at Accenture, a global consulting firm. Was also a Federal Agent through my US Air Force military service. I retired after 22 years as Lt. Colonel. And I became a midnight police officer later in life for the Montgomery County Police Department as a means to give back to local community. Yes, all at the same time.

Along with partners, founded Quattro Capital, a private equity firm. I’ve acquired roughly $250M in real estate with investor partners. I started buying real estate in my 20s as a means to capture time freedom to live more. 

I have strong passion for living life leveraging freedom principles (time, financial, location, purpose & relationships) and started Try Life On Media to help others do the same. The Try Life On podcast and speaking engagements are my joy. 

I love to say I used real estate, passive income, lifestyle design principles combined with leveraging my three 9-5 professional careers to beat the rat race and build lifestyle I don't need vacation from. I’ve completed that mission and now my passion is to help others do same.

Maurice Philogene

Refactor Coaching

Leadership, executive, career coaching for those in tech.
I focus on three use cases: career clarity, landing an offer, and getting a promotion.

26 yoe across Technical PM, SWE, and Eng Mgr plus 17 yoe of coaching experience.
As seen in the New York Times, dice.com, today.com, and many guest podcast appearances.

https://www.refactorcoaching.com

Founder

The Outlier Project

Founding member of the Talent Champions Council (now The Outliers Project), the leading private membership of world-class leaders who focus on people over everything. We mobilize coaching expertise in Talent Strategy from the best in corporations, the military, and professional sports. Our membership includes leaders from the some of the greatest organizations in the world, including Google, Tesla, Starbucks, Microsoft, McKinsey & Company, Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Uber, and Goldman Sachs. We collaborate and share best practices in coaching, talent management and leadership development.

Founding Member

Coinbase

EM for Engagement team in Growth organization. Team deliverables: Referral pipeline to decomp from a legacy monolith while also enabling global rollout of Coinbase to new geos. Also delivered incremental revenue gains of $120m for a team of six engineers ($20m / eng).

Created a Community of Practice for all ~160 Eng Managers, in order to support and learn from each other as peer mentors.

Engineering Manager

Zillow

Responsible for product strategy & roadmap, plus engineering manager responsibilities for LEAP photo platform team. Drive enterprise-wide adoption of the Federated Photos platform across all 5 ZG brands & all devices. Leader of engineering management best practices across the company.

Engineering Manager:
•	Promoted to Senior Manager within 1 year of joining the team
•	Delivered Federated Photos platform, supporting ~30K QPS with 40% cost savings over the legacy system
•	Coach all developers to perform Tech Lead roles on projects (multiple promotions for the team)
•	Mentor for other ICs, Managers, Directors across all of Zillow Group
•	Peer community leader of ~200 dev managers for 4 years (sharing best practices, monthly lunches)

PM: 
•	Owner of product strategy & roadmap for photo platform team, supporting the property photo needs of all product teams at Zillow Group
•	Engage with stakeholders across the enterprise to support current & future photo capabilities 
•	Serve as OKR subject matter expert to peers, providing guidance & feedback

Engineering Talent Management:
•	Author people management framework for tech leaders across Zillow Group (M1 to M5 on the Radford scale)
•	Evangelize new expectations for Dev, PM, people managers across Zillow Group (P1 to P7, M1 to M5 Radford)
•	Owner of corporate-wide technical Brain Dumps geared toward ensuring cross-functional collaboration & lessons learned for emerging tech

Senior Eng Manager & Principal PM, LEAP team

Responsible for creation & delivery of roadmap, plus Engineering Manager responsibilities for ZG’s Build & Deployment team. Improved velocity of all product teams: reduced latency by 30x with a 10x increase in deployment volume

Manager: 
•	Doubled development team including ownership of more than 45 services
•	Drove a software developer rotation across 10+ teams (to gain experience in build & deployment & offer short-term dev resources to build and deployment efforts)
•	Created a goal-setting methodology for direct reports using role expectations, roadmap, and individual strengths using the StrengthsFinder framework

PM: 
•	Owner of product strategy and roadmap for CI/CD platform team
•	Managed backlog with input from 30+ stakeholders, significantly improved collaboration with Operations teams

Eng Manager & Senior PM, CI/CD team

Backplane

Owner of an ecommerce business (backplane.strikingly.com) that creates custom back supports for office chairs and vehicle seats. Profiled on Shopify, Lifehacker, and AppSumo as a case study in creating an ecommerce business without spending any money.

Owner

YMCA Blaze

Volleyball Coach + Club Director

Microsoft

Responsible for driving 540% MAU increase for my feature area in 13 months by listening to customer needs and telemetry via various tooling (OCV, Splunk, COSMOS, DART, and SQL).

•	Owned a session-based Office licensing experience known as Shared Computer Activation, to support shared hardware scenarios (kiosks, virtual desktop infrastructure, RDS server farms, Citrix XenApp, Hyper-V, etc.)
•	Drove multiple versions of Office 2016 releases to OEMs (Dell, Lenovo, etc.) across Engineering, Marketing, Support, Deployment, Operations, and Sales teams. Aligned Office and Windows OEM programs to improve the partner’s overall Microsoft experience. 
•	Drove weekly bug triage, created OEM images, secured part numbers for image kits, created supplemental letters for partner portals
•	Evolved both MS Office Licensing client and service teams to adopt Agile practices (retrospectives, sprint planning, limiting work in progress, use of Kanban boards, delivering value in small iterations, etc.)

Senior Program Manager, Office Licensing Services

•	Coordinated the consolidation of multiple Visual Studio SKUs across teams in Shared Cloud Services group for Visual Studio 2015 release
•	Influenced Visual Studio Cloud Services group to adopt a more data- and hypothesis-driven agile development process using data and Agile/Scrum methodologies (planning poker, monthly sprints, etc.)

Senior PM, VSO Online Commerce team, Developer Division (DevDiv)

Responsible for delivering a content authoring experience to support over 30 different workflows in the compliance tool known as Quality Essentials (QE). Delivered “continuous release” experience that resulted in a 60+% reduction of compliance work for teams that shipped on a monthly-or-faster cadence.

•	Created functional specifications, engaged with stakeholders, prioritized features/bugs for implementation
•	Met with customers, created paper prototypes & iterative MVP solutions
•	Drove sprint planning, daily standups, sprint retrospectives, and story costing

Program Manager 2, Compliance Tooling, Trustworthy Computing (TwC)

Responsible for providing guidance & clarity to Directors on how to define success. Delivered multiple BI solutions to support the organizational capability to deliver insight. 

•	Responsible for supporting ad-hoc requests from L&D organization using Business Intelligence tooling
•	Delivered an Analytic Scorecard platform to help leaders with decision making (Excel obtained a patent for it)
•	Created an Engineering Behaviors Data Service to help correlate disparate engineering data (semantic data model created to abstract the problem domain entirely out of the data tier)
•	Managed an ad-hoc analytics support program known as Insight Service Desk (educated customers on how to ask better questions, delivered reports, pivot tables, provided key talking points for leadership slide decks)

Analytics PM, Engineering Excellence, Trustworthy Computing (TwC)

Mantis Technology Group

Data analysis project for Compliance Activity across Trustworthy Computing (TwC) policies, to identify how teams performed their compliance validation. Hired by FTE sponsor seven months into the project.

Business Analyst

Data Ready Group LLC

Analyst for data quality efforts in US subsidiary of Data Management Organization (DMO) for Microsoft, including annual taxonomy updates. Created SSIS packages for ETL efforts, trained entry-level employees on the use of SQL and SSIS.

Data Quality Analyst

SolutionsIQ

Created automation tools for CD/DVD mastering of MSDN subscriptions. Reduced manual effort 12,000% (2 hours to 1 minute). Created a suite of SQL-based data cleansing services to help with accuracy for sales opportunities in Siebel CRM. Performed US Siebel Data Admin duties for sales regions (bulk updates, data quality investigations, etc.) Performed SQL data migration of national cell tower lease agreements from Cingular Wireless to AT&T Wireless. Improved ETL performance from 4 weeks of processing time to <30 minutes.

Data Analyst

✔️ Do you feel stuck in your current role? Looking for career clarity  to help decide if a new job is the right move? Are you worried now is a terrible time to switch jobs?

👇If the answer is YES to any of these questions, Refactor Coaching can help.👇


⬇️ WHAT WE DELIVER FOR CLIENTS ⬇️

We help you gain clarity for your next role (even if it's a promo) in 12 months or less with a proven roadmap based on 40 combined years in tech & coaching.

🎯We dive deep on your career goals to get aligned on timeline & impact (not just promotion)

🎯We empower you with crystal clarity on your strengths to help achieve your goals with less effort.

⬇️WHY SHOULD YOU WORK WITH US? ⬇️ 		

✅ 26 YOE across Eng, TPM, Eng Mgr & 17 YOE coaching

✅ Our clients can be found at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Zillow, Oracle, Coinbase, Stripe, Zillow, and others

✅ We don’t just know how managers think: we’ve created leadership communities of practice supporting hundreds of managers each at multiple companies


⬇️ PEOPLE WE SERVE ⬇️

We serve both Eng & Leaders in tech:
Eng/SWE, Product & Program Managers
Managers, Director+ in Eng/Product/Quality

Book a free intro consult here:
🌐 www.refactorcoaching.com

Brian Pulliam

If you want to see real joy, hand two bags of family share M&Ms to your flight attendants at boarding.

I started doing this years ago after hearing about it from someone else. It's just $25 from the airport stand en route to the gate.

The reaction? Their faces light up. They beam & ask "how did you know?". I've never seen more joy for that little.

Flight attendants deal with:
• Passengers treating them like servants
• Medical emergencies at 30,000 feet  
• Aggressive travelers who think rules don't apply
• 14-hour days that start at 4am
• Constant pressure to keep everyone safe AND happy

All while maintaining a professional smile & exceptionally good balance.

That small gesture has transformed every flight since. Small gestures matter more than we think.

Two bags of candy. Five seconds of acknowledgment. One moment of unexpected kindness.

Try it on your next flight (or find your own version). Who's invisible in your routine that could use a reminder they're seen & valued?

The ROI on treating people like humans is infinite. 🫶

#humanconnection #kindness #flightattendants

P.S. Alaska Airlines you're still the best in my book.

Equal parts Ted Lasso & Fozzie Bear | I help exhausted Eng & Leaders land fulfilling tech roles | 26 yrs in tech & 18 yrs in coaching | NYT, Today, Dice

LeadDev just featured me in their piece on brilliant jerks (thank you Kelli María Korducki for the collab!) I've been around enough of them to spot the pattern from a mile away. 🚩

In the past 10 years I've seen two brilliant jerks **destroy multiple teams** before leadership finally stepped in (too late to retain some fantastic leaders). I've even worked for a company that bred them — luckily I didn't stay long enough to be affected. 💀

We all know the type: saved the company years ago, earned "pasture time," or they're someone's "battle buddy" from the trenches. They're untouchable until something really bad happens or (even better) they get a new leader.

**If you're an interviewer** 🔍, listen closely to their conflict resolution stories. Brilliant jerks can't help but tell you how they were right. Ask about a time they had to rescue a project, as they love playing superhero. 🦸‍♂️

**If you're an applicant** 👀, ask your potential manager to break down their weekly focus: business results vs. people results. Good people managers spend at least 40% of their week on people. If they're spending 80%+ on business results? Run. 🏃‍♂️

**If you discover you ARE the brilliant jerk** 🪞, great work on self reflection. Now go spend 20% of your week to relationship building. Your team will thank you... eventually 🙏

If you have to deal with a brilliant jerk (coworker, boss, or direct report) and want help navigating the clown show 🤡, DM me "jerk chicken" so we can set up time to create an action plan.

Sometimes you need a jerk sherpa who's seen the pattern & helped teams recover. 🎯

#techleadership #workplaceculture #careercoaching

When you hire a jerk, you look like a jerk. 

I wrote for LeadDev about why tech leaders are reverting to the industry’s favorite Hail-Mary hiring play—and why it’s pretty much always a bad idea.

Open article: The brilliant jerk is back by leaddev.com

Just dropped some truth bombs with Maureen Wiley Clough on her podcast It Gets Late Early. 💣

Spoiler alert: young people haven't been old yet (stick with me).

We spend a lot of time frustrated that younger colleagues or hiring managers don't see the patterns. They make the same mistakes we watched happen 10 years ago. 🤦‍♀️

OF COURSE they don't! They haven't been there yet. 🧠 💡

It's like being mad at someone for not knowing the plot twist in a movie they haven't seen.

We have the experience to understand our value. We've seen the cycles, survived the layoffs, navigated the politics, built the systems that scaled (and the ones that crashed spectacularly).

The problem? Most of us are terrible at articulating that value in a way that resonates.

We say things like "20 years of experience" when we should be saying "I've seen this exact problem tank 3 companies, here's how we avoid it."

We list our tenure when we should be sharing our pattern recognition.

We talk about what we've done instead of what we've learned (that they haven't had time to learn yet).

It's not their fault they don't know what we know. But it IS our responsibility to build the framework that makes our experience tangible, not just a number on a resume.

Your experience is future problems prevented, expensive mistakes avoided, and shortcuts only visible to someone who's taken the long way before. 🎯

Want to hear the full conversation? Check out "It Gets Late Early" (see my comment for Spotify & iTunes links).

How do you communicate the value of experience to someone who hasn't lived it yet? Drop your framework below. 👇

#careeradvice #experiencematters #podcast #leadership

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Maurice Philogene

Brian Pulliam

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