The Recommendation

I managed Anika for two years on the frontend team at Keystone. She was a senior engineer, but the title undersells what she actually did.

Anika was the person who’d get a feature request and ask “what’s the actual problem here?” before writing any code. More than once, she came back with something simpler than what was specced that solved it better. That instinct — building less, but building the right thing — is rare and hard to hire for.

The project that sticks with me: she volunteered to lead our design system migration. It touched every component in the app. Nobody else wanted it. She shipped it in six weeks with zero visual regressions. That kind of work is invisible to leadership, but the whole frontend team knew it was her.

Halyard is getting someone who will make their product simpler, not just their codebase cleaner.

I didn’t want her to leave. That’s probably the most honest thing I can say.