About

I’m Keith Doyle. I’m Senior Manager of Engineering Operations at GameChanger, where the job is to make it easier for engineers to ship the right things. I write here about engineering leadership, AI-assisted workflows, and whatever I am building.

Most engineering organizations have the same problem. Talented people do good work, and the work doesn’t connect to outcomes. Features ship. Metrics don’t move. Strategy lives in a slide deck nobody opens after Q1 planning. My job is the machinery in between: connecting execution to objectives to strategy, removing the coordination overhead that eats a week without anyone deciding it should, and building the operating rhythms that let leaders think about strategy instead of status.

I got here the long way. Seventeen years at SEI, starting in operations support and ending as Director of Web Development, where I owned the platforms, the standards, a $500K budget, and about ten vendor relationships. We cut post-deployment bugs by 73% in a year and moved releases from monthly to several times a week. Neither came from hiring geniuses. They came from standards nobody was allowed to skip. After that I ran the PMO at AscellaHealth, directing ERP modernization in specialty pharmacy, which is as regulated as software gets.

The one that taught me the most

A junior developer deleted our entire production site from Azure. The whole thing.

We were under SEC rules requiring a live site with investor information. We had backups. They were not stored for fast restoration, which is a thing you only learn at the worst possible moment. The team was panicking.

I ran the restoration and got the site back. The real work started afterward. We ran the post-incident exercises, built the guardrails, and redesigned the backup system until full restoration took minutes instead of hours.

Good operational systems don’t prevent every problem. They decide how fast you recover, and whether you learn anything.

Building and learning

Cage Keeper is a stats app for lacrosse goalies, built in Flutter and live on iOS with Android coming. Goalies run the offense, direct the defense, cause turnovers and make clears, so tracking saves alone misses most of the job. The app captures the whole contribution while the game is happening.

There’s a golf one too. My friends and I play a lot of side games and kept losing track of who owed who what, so I built a shared scorecard for nine of them: Nassau, Skins, Wolf, Vegas and the rest. One person keeps the card and everyone else follows along on their phone. It might go public eventually, but for now it just settles arguments in my foursome.

Shipping these myself keeps me honest about what I ask of other engineers. The same goes for staying a student. I’m in the fall cohort of MasterClass Executive, built with Chicago Booth. Earlier: a BA in political science from Iona, and certifications in AWS, Docker and Scrum. Learning is a professional practice, not a phase you grow out of.

Away from the screen

The screen is not the real world, and clarity usually arrives when I step away from it. Most of that time goes to my wife and our kids, and to the plain pleasure of watching them grow up. The rest of it I spend fly fishing for trout in Pennsylvania streams. Fly fishing is patience with a complex system you cannot fully see: observe, adapt, refine. It translates to hard problems more directly than it has any right to.

I mentor first-time adult hunters through the National Deer Association’s Field to Fork program. I teach woodsmanship as well as the digital side of it: how to read terrain and property lines with OnX and a GPS, and how to read them without one.

Before software

I started in the Marine Corps as an ammunition technician. It taught me how to work under pressure, communicate without ambiguity, and earn trust from a team. It left me with a bias toward action, structure and accountability that still shapes how I work.

It doesn’t define what I build. What defines it is a belief that engineering organizations can be dramatically better with the right systems in place. Not more process. Better process.