Douglas Graves Email & Phone Number

Our previous startup Era Software was acquired by ServiceNow in October 2022, and we merged with Lightstep to create a most excellent observability business unit that provides a unified observability solution for our customers.

Portland, Oregon, United States

Portland, Oregon, United States

Portland, Oregon, United States

Returning to my roots, I transitioned back into mercenary mode for a stint, acting as a consultant for some large companies that you've heard of (ex: Slack)—and some exciting early-stage startups that you will hear of soon enough—in the following disciplines:- Product design- Full-stack engineering- Management philosophy and practices- Mentorship- Branding- Marketing- Competitive analysis- Recruiting and interviewing advisement

Portland, Oregon, United States

I acknowledge that a 3 month tenure looks odd, but this is a role that I occupied unofficially for 1.25 years as senior leadership navigated a lengthy year-long re-org process. By the time my official title change finally came to fruition, I had already decided to pursue other opportunities.During my time as acting Manager of Design, I added the following value in conjunction with my prior set of responsibilities as a product designer and full-stack engineer on a hectic time-sensitive product build-out:- Grew the number of product designer/engineers on staff from just myself to a team of four- Onboarded, acculturated, and mentored the aforementioned product designers to become local designer leaders on their respective product teams- Trained each of them on how to effectively conduct user interviews for their products- Collaborated with them on extending our design system, and oversaw its extension- Directed product design work and feature designs to fruition, with an eye toward synergistically leveraging each other's work and negotiating multiple product roadmaps for better efficiency- Advocated and lobbied for a dedicated initiative to promote disparate component and design work into a shared UI library that each of our product teams could have the benefit of, directing two product designers on how best to get this started during their day-to-day responsibilities until we got the official green light (this project began in earnest around the time of my departure, and is now being carried forward)- Trained and mentored several designers and engineers on effective recruiting and interviewing practices for product design candidates.- Led weekly UI/UX chapter meetups to promote organic cross-team collaboration between designers and full-stack engineers across 4 product teams.

Portland, Oregon, United States

At Thorn, my time was split between full-stack engineering and product design. I served as the organization’s UI/UX Chapter Lead, in an effort to foster collaboration, consistency, and efficiency across a growing group of talented product designers and full-stack engineering experts.- Built and iterated on the Thorn user-centric product design process- Established and extended a house UI design system- Implemented a process for effective user interviewing & testing to quickly assess the efficacy of our design solutions, ensuring we’re incrementally building useful products and features that solve real user needs- Led design-related discussions and brainstorming sessions regarding new products and features—including branding and product-naming discussions, roadmap negotiations, and design education- Provided mentorship to product designers on staff- Liaised with external vendors doing product design-adjacent work and branding for our products- Built high-quality powerful-yet-elegant user interfaces using React, Redux / React Context, React Router, TypeScript, Styled Components, and many other excellent libraries and packages- Grew and maintained Node.js APIs that provide an extensible interface to Elasticsearch, Postres, and MemSQL- Helped establish best practices for client and API development, and pair up with other teammates to teach and collaborate through difficult problems.- Explored R&D projects, paradigm shifts in tooling and current products, and potentially-risky spikes into new directions.- Assisted with running and supporting hackathons, acting as team lead or advisor as necessary, creating skeleton applications to get teams off of the ground quickly with non-trivial applications.- Co-implemented a much revered human-centric and enjoyable interview process, and train and mentor colleagues on conducting various interviews- Assisted with onboarding new product designers and full-stack engineers, and helped mentor them long-term

San Francisco Bay Area

- Built and iterated on a responsive, consumer-facing website using Node.js, Express, Handlebars, Bootstrap, Sass, and Underscore.- Built an automated content aggregation pipeline using Node.js, MongoDB, Heroku, AWS, and many 3rd party APIs. This included spidering websites, scraping content from pages of interest, cleaning up / verifying factual data, and entity resolution of fragments from various disparate data sources. We later consolidated this data into our core Postgres db from Mongo during a large refactor of the unwieldy SOA ecosystem that we inherited from the original team.- Contributed to the API at the center of our SOA ecosystem, which was based on Node.js, Sequelize, and Postgres, and run in AWS via Chef and OpsWorks.- Designed & built a set of internal admin tools to moderate the aforementioned data & items flagged from our iOS app using Node.js, Express, Handlebars, Bootstrap, and Heroku.- Created and contributed to a system of automated transactional emails on top of SendGrid and Node.js, also supporting older MailChimp and Mandrill transactional emails while migrating to the new system. This included a custom email preference manager built on the SendGrid API.- Co-developed a sane recruiting process that both measured candidate aptitude for the role as well culture fit via team building without any intellectual bullying or inapplicable Trivial Pursuit-style CS questions. This allowed us to build out a strong, senior, highly-productive engineering team.* Worked remotely for the last year of my time at Spot, continuing to deliver high-leverage value and participate in daily standups, weekly planners, remote interviews, etc, traveling to SF to collaborate with the team in person on an as-needed basis.

San Francisco Bay Area

- Acted as primary game designer for game mechanics and their balance, themes, and writing direction- Established client-side best practices, and developed an in-house modular game development library- Built several playable mobile-optimized web-based game prototypes, (a unique word game, a role playing game, and a fighting game with word game mechanics) using HTML5, CSS3, and an in-house game development library- Lead distributed interdisciplinary teams of between 3–9 to the completion of two feature-rich prototypes and one highly detailed and in-depth role playing game- Managed several external writers and audio designers- Managed a summer intern, and mentored 2 other summer interns- Established play testing practices, and led several play testing sessions to iteratively tune our games at key points during their development

San Francisco Bay Area

- Oversaw all aspects of client-facing web development for TV.com- Co-converted/trained a 40 person interdisciplinary team on an agile process where there had previous been waterfall lawlessness- Acted as ScrumMaster of a team of 7 interdisciplinary developers, coordinating with a second scrum team- Collaborated with product management on product definition- Represented engineering interests during product planning and definition- Evaluated new technologies and best practices- Established guidelines and processes for how our teams worked with external teams and resources- Mentored up to 6 engineers, and 3 interns over the course of 2 summers- Wrote high-leverage code for prototypes or new approaches that my team could then take to the finish lineAlso acted as an interim Creative Director for several months, which involved- Established a process for a highly unorganized and under-utilized design team that turned them into the most productive team in our business unit- Mentored 2 designers, and went through the hiring process for a new creative director- Greatly improved the job quality and satisfaction of the design team- Redesigned 80% of the site, meeting with key stakeholders to make sure we were inventing the right tools and feature sets to meet their needs- Established guidelines for interdepartmental design requests- Held regular user testing sessions

San Francisco, Ca

- Created several client-facing products, and new product prototypes- Converted TV.com from MooTools to jQuery, and trained the engineering team to develop with jQuery- Established front-end best practices where previously there were little/none- Converted TV.com from a slow, cumbersome homegrown PHP framework to Django, and trained the engineering team to develop with Python/Django- Assisted in establishing architectural and organizational best practices- Created several new web application products to increase site utility and reach- Collaborated with Product and Design teams to invent new products- Developed prototypes of several new products, and was listed on a patent for one of them- Evaluated new web technologies- Delivered several company-wide tech talks about HTML5 and mobile web development- Won the first company-wide hack day by developing a highly-addictive real-time multiplayer trivia game using under-utilized data

While finishing my degree, I had the opportunity to work with many wonderful small businesses and agencies. A few larger projects that I was fortunate to work on during this time:- Redesigned and built a website for a large format printing and lightbox fabrication company, as well as environmental and booth designs for trade shows, color-correction and printing-prep work for their clients (ex: California Academy of Sciences, Tourneau, etc), and some 3D modeling work in Google Sketchup. Also designed several prototype UIs, including a touchscreen info kiosk that was built for McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas- Designed and built a website for an education research company- Designed a website and built several Internal tools and integrations for a speech therapy group- Branding, and design + build-out of an interactive multimedia portfolio website for a wedding photographer- Branding, site design and build-out, and photography for an acupuncture therapist- Multiple subcontracting projects for an agency specializing in interactive Flash products using ActionScript 2

Oakland, Ca

- Worked with clients and lead designer to redesign large university and academia websites, such as MIT, UC Berkeley, Tulane, and the Creative Commons Open Education portal.- Participated in on and offsite client meetings, and was responsible for regular check-ins and support of client projects- Wireframed and designed multiple solutions to meet our clients' needs and desires, and iterated on the designs of others- Brought our redesigns to life with HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), and a bit of PHP- Rapidly completed production work of all shapes and sizes, ranging from color correcting and editing photos and videos, to exploring multiple color studies of our web designs, to hand-coding new templates or prototypes for clients, to creating presentations for client meetings.

Bachelor’S Degree, Web Design & Development

Completed a multidisciplinary degree involving Web design & development, UX design, Print design, Motion graphics, Digital audio, Digital.

Graphic Design

Blasted through 2/3 of a BFA program in less than 2 years before transferring to the Academy of Art University to focus more on web.