Brad Bartell

Category: General

  • My Approach to Leadership in Digital Teams

    Leadership isn’t just about managing people—it’s about unlocking potential. Over the years, I’ve led cross-functional teams in marketing, development, and UX. Whether I’m mentoring junior developers or collaborating with senior stakeholders, my goal is always the same: to build environments where innovation, accountability, and growth thrive.

    People First

    I believe the best results come from teams that feel supported and heard. That’s why I prioritize clear communication, one-on-one check-ins, and creating space for every voice at the table. I take time to understand each team member’s strengths, goals, and learning style, so I can tailor my leadership to help them grow.

    Empowerment Through Trust

    Micromanagement stifles creativity. I trust my team to own their work, make decisions, and try new ideas. I’m there to provide context, remove roadblocks, and offer guidance—but I believe in giving people the autonomy to experiment and grow.

    Cross-Functional Collaboration

    Having worked across development, UX, and marketing, I’ve seen how silos slow teams down. I encourage collaboration between departments by translating technical jargon for non-technical teams and ensuring business goals are clearly understood on all sides. This creates alignment and accelerates delivery.

    Feedback as Fuel

    I see feedback as a two-way street. I regularly ask my team for feedback on how I can support them better, and I give feedback that’s direct, actionable, and kind. The goal is to build a culture of continuous improvement—where learning from mistakes is encouraged and celebrated.

    Leading Through Change

    The digital space moves fast, and I thrive in environments where change is the only constant. Whether it’s shifting marketing strategies, adopting new tech stacks, or navigating organizational pivots, I stay adaptable and keep my team focused on the big picture.

    At the heart of my leadership philosophy is a simple belief: when you invest in people, results follow. I’ve seen firsthand how great leadership can transform a project—and a career. And I’ll keep showing up every day to lead with purpose, empathy, and a relentless drive to help teams win together.

  • Thoughts for my next role

    Recently I’ve had a few request by recruiters to connect and talk about opportunities. So I figured this would be a good place to document my thoughts and save myself from a bit of spam mail. I’d like to clarify I’m not really looking for a new role. I like the people I work with and the opportunities I have. The leadership I’m under trusts me and have my back on decisions I make.

    But like most people I can’t just choose not to work and I if one that better fits my career goals and has the right opportunities I might consider leaving my current position. So what are those things for me?

    Lead / Decision Maker

    As a developer / technical person it really pains me to see money being wasted on programs that add little to no value.

    In a previous position I watched a big name come in an absolutely mess up a product that was pretty much done and just needed a branded skin. But a VP level saw the demo and brought it back to square one. The product only ended up adding 1 feature I can recall from the process, not even a major feature very minor part. This reset ended up wasting 6-8 months and in that time we could have worked on just the skin / styling and gotten the product out and gotten the best feedback possible for real users!

    My desire is to be in the early decision making processes to avoid wasting time, money, and to improve system adoption by making sure people use what companies already built or paid for.

    Business Partners

    I want to work with teammates, not silos. The thing that drives me crazy is silos and people operating outside their role in major projects (minor decisions that have little to no impact don’t bother me).

    Teammates know who is strong in certain topics. I’m a developer, If you ask me to design something I can do it but it’s not my strength. If the company has a designer I’m going to talk with them and make the best version of their vision with the resources I have available. I would expect the same from the people I work with. If a coworker is thinking about how a system works together I would want them to talk to me about it, not to tie us to a third party that does what one of our systems already is capable of.

    I want to avoid silos because they drive me nuts. I hate when people don’t have a clue what other people are working on. It leads to ineffective work or people doing double work after realizing that what they did originally won’t work.

    In a previous position I was in our Marketing department and transferred over to IT. Because I had spent years with my feet in both worlds I had connection inside the company in both departments but neither could really name people in other departments. What I did was start a little group that would meet to play games over lunch with people from both departments. People started to get along and would chat outside of the group so people within these two departments started to understand who did what. This saved time on projects since people could directly talk with people who did specific things.

    People Leader

    One of the things I do find a lot of value in is being a people leader. I actually do miss looking at applicants resumes / portfolio sites to find people who are absolute gems. I miss guiding people and working with my team to create opportunities for growth.

    When I hired people in the past I didn’t expect them to stay forever. I told them upfront that I wanted a certain amount of time with them and to tell me what their goals were so I could find projects to help them advance. One person I gave an entire site translation for a new market, one owned a client relationship management platform’s front end code, one I worked with to create a hybrid role that empowered them to work on native apps.

    I also loved the old Google mentality to make paid time to work on their own ideas. Not everything out of these projects related directly to the company but the morale boost out of it was well worth the time. At one point we were having weekly meetings with the CTO /CIO about the passion projects people were working on. I loved that it got people who wouldn’t typically have a chance to have those meetings easily get to talk about their code and helped people feel comfortable speaking to high level leaders.

  • The Projects I am most proud of

    There have been a good amount of sites/pages I’ve had the opportunity to work on. My work as the Manager of a Front End Development team allowed me to inject creative ideas into high level meetings as well as empower my team to push creative ideas when working with other teams.

    Share API

    This one isn’t a typical project but dealt with a unique issue to the company. It was an MLM where we had a marketing site and shopping site. The marketing content was built to be cool and flashy, but they couldn’t talk to the shopping site’s cart. Now since it’s an MLM linking back to a consultant’s store is key.

    The way around this was to use cookies so that if a user came from a shopping page, we could change the links on the page to have the consultant link. BUT how would we set a cookie for a first-time visitor? well using JS we could look at a URL query string and get values out of it and set cookies. And again, we run into another issue (isn’t that the standard of any development), how do we get the consultants to share the marketing URL with their info?

    Enter the ShareAPI, through JS we were able to get cookies from the consultant browser, Link to marketing pages with the consultant info in the query string, then when a prospect of the consultant clicked the link it would cause the browser to link all shopping links to the consultants site.

    Through all of that you may say why not just create better shopping pages? We had severe limitation with our shopping platform and marketing wasn’t happy with the limitations, so we built a second set of pages to empower them to make effective marketing material

    Digital Catalogue

    Again this was created from my time at an MLM, one thing our consultants did was drop off these catalogues that had all the products in them. It was a nice leave behind but each one cost consultants something like $2 a catalogue. And in that business, you would want to give as many leave behinds as possible. Well that cost would add up and wasn’t very green, the company very much advertised how green they were. So I had an idea to make the catalogue into an epub.

    For those unaware epub is the file format for a digital book (think book apps). This offered some really cool features that couldn’t be done in a print book cheaply.

    1. We could add links to the shopping pages
    2. We could customize the book with consultant info / their store links
    3. (never realized but had a plan) remove sections if you didn’t like the product line

    I worked with the Print team manager to get the files and have him add a few extra elements for an epub document. Once I had a working example I setup a meeting with the Chief of Field Development to embrace the project and sponsor it, any major project needed an executive sponsor at this company.

    I then brought in the rest of my team to help add links and setup a web version to make it viewable in a browser. We used an open source project that we modified to make it change out links based on user cookies. Books were generated using Node.js

    Working with our DevOps team we setup a server for the Digital Catalogue using AWS Lambda to run the Node.js code. We also setup the billing to be tagged so we could track costs to this specific feature and compare it to sales in google analytics.

    Once it went live it took a bit of communication with the field to get them to start using it. 3 months in it was costing us ~$1000 a month but generating $980,000 a month in sales, use using last click attribution. Not a bad payoff for the cost.

    Unfortunately, this project died due to office politics after I left the company. There was a director who wanted to switch it to Flipping book, basically a glorified PDF, which lacked a lot of the features we had built into the epub viewer. Since consultants wouldn’t get links to their shopping links, they stopped sharing it and it has since died as far as I can tell.

    Digital Toolkit

    This is honestly my favorite project as a manager because I had very little to do with the actual writing of the code but everything with empowering people to do what leaders didn’t know they could do.

    For background at this time the company was going through a phase of offloading major projects to 3rd parties. It was killing the development team to see the fun/important projects go to outside vendors at crazy price tags, we’re talking tens of millions and in my opinion subpar results.

    Well one of my team members had been working on an app to allow consultants to take a base image and customize it with on brand gifs and fonts. I got him in front of c-level IT leadership and eventually we get told to take it to the C-level of Customer Experience. He takes this concept, which was pretty much done at this point and we just needed a UI skin, and outsources it to another vendor. This completely kills my team members morale. I tell him to keep working on it and I will find some options. Talking with the C-level of IT we weren’t able to take it back at that time.

    Thankfully the company had monthly breakfast with the CEO. I signed up to attend and let the CEO know where morale was. With all the projects moving to outsourcing no one wanted to be there since it was all upkeep work and that we would come up with good ideas only to see them go to other companies and hear about the large bill to create something we already had a Proof of Concept created.

    Thankfully he understood that we would lose a lot of talent, at this point the company had lost a lot already and brought the project in house. With the launch of the app, it enabled the consultants to create on brand content while also making our team feel valued. You can check this out at the marketing site for the App. It’s now called Content Kit but for me it will always be the Digital Toolkit since that was the Proof of Concept name. I think some of the APIs still reference it as DTK.