Andy Ruff Email & Phone Number

Oakland, Ca, Us

Emeryville, Ca, Us

Building a passionate Product team: product management and design. From the chaos of the "wear all hats" group of misfits to an established, structured and well-executing group focused on delivering great results for the business and customers. Loves walking a balance between hyper-focused customer centric design thinking and a super analytical, experiment-measure-iterate framework.Drive new product development. Success: led the introduction of the Controls & Insights product line, 100% increase in overall company revenue with over 1m paid subscribers. Failures: drive detection and texting prevention; behavior change is hard! Work directly with strategic partners (MNOs, OEMs) to identify new opportunities for product growth. Involved in marketing execution, B2B business development, and ongoing partner management.

Emeryville, Ca, Us

Kick started the Product Management role within the company—everything from hiring process to product reviews, from bug triages to interviewing customers at Subway outside our office. Hired an awesome team. Walked the balance needed to inject PM into an organization accustomed to the convenience of a product oriented CEO and a small team that found itself much larger, separated by walls, doors, and eventually floors. We constantly tested the meanings of authority, autonomy, and ownership—all things key to a PM.The first day I started, the CEO took me to lunch and asked me to seek out potential new products. Conceived, defined, and set the vision for the Mobile Controls product line—now the largest and fastest growing revenue stream. Part of the core team that landed partnerships with AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless. More than doubled company revenue and led to 2M+ paid subscribers.Owned all revenue generating products for the company—mobile security for your family available in a SaaS model cobranded with major wireless operators. Countless releases for Web, HTML5, Android, iPhone, Windows Phone and more. Led the charge on bringing a data-driven approach to product thinking, introducing attribution and acquisition analysis, cohort analysis for retention, and experimentation to both increase conversion and reduce churn.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Started by leading Microsoft Entourage. Customers hated it, spending their days slogging away at e-mail in a slow, unreliable app. Technical debt swallowed engineers and PMs for months on low-impact efforts. I killed the product; hosting a funeral in the parking lot of Microsoft Silicon Valley.My goal was simple—lead a team that loved their work, found pride in delighting customers, and created meaningful revenue. My approach:(a) Reposition and relaunch as Microsoft Outlook for Mac - focus on customers who care about and live in their inbox. Convinced execs to position Outlook as a premium product, driving take on revenue amplifying high-priced SKUs.(b) Built a highly cohesive team - with members in Mountain View, Redmond, and Beijing; the product team brought laser focus on customer value, great teamwork amongst PMs, and tight collaboration with engineering, design, and marketing.(c) A major rewrite of the product - from networking stack to the entire UX, led a rewrite on a highly aggressive timeline. Tightly drove the shipping bar by juggling engineering schedules, key customer insights (frequent interviews, panels, and offsite visits), and marketing plans. When things fell behind, I checked-in code for several features.(d) Changed to an agile-based development cycle - reorganized a 40-ish person team into a series of small units. Made ownership clear and customer focused balancing technical challenges. Not an agile zealout, given significant we'd fail, I needed fast feedback loops to make decisions on functionality, quality, schedules, and resources.The result was a highly motivated team that delivered what PC Magazine called "one of the most powerful and best-designed apps ever written on OS X." I considered my job done when, at the post-mortem, the top "opportunity areas" from the engineering team were not focused on our process but how we could have delivered more to customers.Still thrilled when I see customers on a plane or in coffee shops.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Led the transition of Microsoft Entourage (the big purple E) from a consumer-focused personal information manager (PIM) to targeting "knowledge workers", establishing a stronger position as the consumer e-mail space went free. Managed the introduction of more advanced Exchange client functionality (e.g. Active Directory look-ups, ACL/permissions, delegation, public folders). Led feature design, scheduling, and execution. Shipped several major updates, spoke at MacWorld, and met with countless enterprise customers.I learned a lot. The codebase carried significant amounts of technical debt, a development process that favored multi-year efforts shipped in a cardboard box, and broader organizational challenges (Macs at Microsoft?). I wrangled the team and set a mission to fight for customers through a series of more regular releases aimed at quality, closing product gaps, and laying a foundation for revamping the product. Became lead of the PM team 2.5 years out of college—awarded several gold stars, a highly regarded "sticker" given to Microsoft's top performers.

A fresh-faced college student joins a 7 person startup to bring sustainable energy to the masses. Thin film photovoltaics are highly flexible, low cost solar cells laminated to foil similiar to branding on potato chip bags.Based in the middle of a Iowa cornfield, the startup was no perks, just hard work and hustle. Created all marketing collateral, corporate website, and first sales pipeline tracking (ACT!). Led outbound sales for Soltronix, a line of solar-powered consumer electronics devices. Cleaned the carpet, painted walls, and designed the logo for a now publicly traded company.

It all began with a used copy of THINK Pascal bought in an AOL forum. Self-taught Pascal, C, C++, Perl, and web development stacks. As a teenager, founded my own business to develop and publish eMe, one of the first RSS aggregators on the Mac. The sizzle feature: each morning, a warmly printed summary of the daily news, sports scores, and weather forecast.My freshman year at Iowa State, I utterly failed the algorithm questions at Microsoft's on-campus interview. But I did wheel my PowerMac G3 and CRT across the campus to demo the software I was building. I spent my next two summers as a Microsoft intern.

Bs, Economics

Bs, Information Systems