Jade Rubick Email & Phone Number

Portland, Or, Us

I've helped over twenty startups improve their product development. Thirteen venture capital firms have directly referred me to their portfolio companies. I can help you with these problems:- Scaling engineering.- Helping leaders navigate unfamiliar terrain.- Improving delivery and quality.- Getting organizations to coordinate more effectively.I help in a couple of ways: as an advisor, coach, interim leader, or on a project basis. Typical projects are doing evaluations and offering recommendations, upleveling the management team, or helping an organization improve project delivery. Clients or former clients: Gruntwork, Jeli (acquired by Pagerduty), Honeycomb, Campus (interim VPE/VPP), Maze, Paymentology, Mode Analytics (acquired by ThoughtSpot, interim VPE), Veruna, Vitally, a prominent company in the analytics space, Loft Orbital, Forestry/Tina, Orbit, Spot AI, Formations, RevolutionParts (interim VPE), FindHotel (now Vio.com), Magnetis Investimentos, Pypestream, DAT Freight and Analytics, ReadySet Technologies, Flatfile (interim CTO), Castle (interim VPE), and Surface Ventures. A few are unlisted.

San Jose, California, Us

When I joined Gremlin, the engineering organization was struggling to scale. I set up the team structure, managed teams directly and hired managers to lead the teams as we grew. We doubled the team in nine months, adding more diverse and technically deep talent. I set up architectural oversight for the team, to ensure high quality decision-making, and emphasized good communication and a high-trust environment. A manager I hired said: “I had the best year of my career there, and that was almost entirely due to Jade and some wonderful peers.”Several candidates praised our improved hiring as the best of the experiences they had had while interviewing. We made our onboarding more systematic, so that everyone received helpful information after they joined. We set up engineering levels and a review process that several engineers described in a surprised tone as "actually helpful" and "a review process that doesn't suck". I worked with People Ops to set up standardized pay scales to pay fairly within Engineering. And I helped the company define and document how things work so that communication could scale as the company grew.Delivery was transformed, from huge monolithic projects that missed the mark, to highly incremental delivery, with constant customer feedback, and product metrics driving future iterations of work. A customer said: "Opening up the product every day is like Christmas every day. There is always something new.”

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Led product engineering at New Relic (4 of 5 product lines). Primary author of New Relic's internal book on product development. Developed our standards for teams, projects, and meetings. Developed a team health self-assessment. Played a key role in developing New Relic product org's organizational structure. Developed engineering levels, twice. Developed a career plan process that was adopted by the whole company. Set up an internal referral program, interviewed hundreds of candidates and hired scores. A company survey identified me as "one of the things people love about working at New Relic". Another survey said I was one of the people they most trust to represent them. An internal learning and development program described their goal as creating more "leaders like Jade". My manager said that I "learn and grow faster than anyone I've met". I managed 9 teams directly (in turn), and served as manager of managers for up to 8 teams at a time, including 4 of 5 New Relic product lines. My reputation was as an organizational fixer -- I would get the teams that often were having challenges, and often six months later those teams would be among the best performing teams in Engineering. Almost every year, my teams' work was featured at our annual conference. I've planned and executed countless reorgs, created many new teams, and had a reputation as one of the best program managers in engineering. I had a prominent role in New Relic's servicification initiative, which involved up to 22 engineers in 3 locations. Philosophically, I'm interested in delivering value iteratively and continuously to the world, not shipping features. I'm interested in creating a space for people to do their best work, and for a humane, meaningful workplace. I am both results and people-focused. I want to work with people who will make me better every day.

I was the founder and President of Stop Abuse For Everyone, a national non-profit organization providing services and information for underserved victims and survivors of domestic violence. The organization began in 1996 as a website, and was officially incorporated in 2000. We were featured in the Associated Press, CNN, Tokyo Broadcasting, the Boston Globe, the Jesse Lee Peterson Radio Show, the O’Reilly Factor, the Al Rantel Show, the LA Daily Journal, Dear Abby, the LA Times, Fox News, ABC News 20/20, and many more programs. In addition, we were selected by the National Crime Prevention Council as one of the 50 most promising programs in the United States for combating domestic violence. I was recognized by the Points of Life Foundation for my work. I managed the web site, which was for years the core of the organization, bringing us multitudes of volunteers and interest in our organization. The web site provided an inexpensive mechanism for effectively communicating our message to a large number of people.The organization has changed a bit since I left, as has the web site.

United eWay was a non-profit software startup within the United Way system, that eventually became a company (Truist).I led the software team for online volunteering technology (half the product offering). Truist solutions at the time were employed by over 1,000 customers in more than 50 countries, representing 3,000 programs, 700,000 donors, a million volunteers and $2.5 billion in charitable contributions.I was responsible for bringing many best practices to the organization, including Scrum, improved QA, test-driven development, improved monitoring, better source control practices, and much more.The former CTO told me I was the best communicator in the entire company. This is not because I spent an inordinate amount of time communicating, or because I flooded people with information, but because I am very conscious of the need for a structured flow of just the right amount of information.

Integrated Bakery Resources was a small product development company in the baking industry. I led all projects that involve the use of technology, and I coordinated the technical direction of the company.I was hired to evaluate the needs of the company and design and implement an intranet to help meet those needs. This required me to understand everyone’s job within the company, effectively communicate with all parties about their problems, prioritize solutions, develop designs, implement them, and evaluate and improve the designs. The intranet became a sort of "Github for product recipes" within the organization. It centralized the recipes, ingredients, pricing, and nutritional content of IBR’s products into a web-based intranet database. These changes drastically reduced errors, noticeably increased productivity, and stopped several bottlenecks in serving the needs of customers. It allowed the company to produce instant pricing and nutritional statements, activities that used to take hours by skilled practitioners to produce.A fellow employee told me that he thinks I contributed more to the company’s success in the last three years I worked there than anyone else.I led a project to bring better project management processes and technologies into the company, to better organize the thousands of complex projects the company is involved with. I was the primary author of a web-based project-management application, and I collaborated with open-source developers to improve the software. I worked with people throughout the company to ensure the software would bring solid benefits. In the first year, I realized that there was a lot more to creating a product than building the system. The problem was not just a technical problem, but involved changing processes within the company, introducing changes in meaningful chunks, and effectively training people to use the new system.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

I was a teaching assistant for a Human Computer Interaction course.

I worked under Prof. Bill Buxton, a world expert in multi-touch input (long before multi-touch interfaces were popularized by Apple), and designed a two-handed drawing program that explored a number of innovative two-handed drawing techniques. The challenge of working at Alias was facing five different steep learning curves while programming a next-generation drawing and design program. These included learning OpenGL, MFC and MS Visual C++, tackling graphics programming for the first time, and reading in two-handed data from a Wacom Intuous tablet. I successfully confronted all of the learning curves simultaneously by systematically searching for resources and ways to train myself. The program was shown for years after I left in research labs all over the world as an example of Alias research.

I created an intranet for the company that showed each group what the rest of the company was working on. I automated many file conversions and routine tasks. This saved development time, so I completed my three-month contract a week ahead of schedule. As a Game Scripter, I created the levels for a game using an arcane and difficult proprietary tool, which I learned very quickly, according to my supervisor. As a Production Assistant, I developed many timesaving tactics, such as using macros and PhotoShop Actions. This allowed us to leave our computers on overnight, letting them accomplish days of work that we had been doing manually. My supervisor asked me to take over his position when he was promoted to another job in the company.

Owner: "[Jade is] the best thing that ever happened to this company."When I joined DPM, the owner was contemplating bankruptcy. He was deep in debt and working sixty-hour weeks. He was dyslexic, and had difficulty with paperwork.I spent three years at DPM, part-time, showing the owner how to make his business more efficient. I developed a tracking system for him and his workers, and taught him to use the computer to do his billing. When I left, he had cut his work time in half, was making more money, and was finally out of debt. The systems I set up were successful even after I left the company. The owner was popular with clients because he made extraordinary efforts to respond to their needs. His service ethic has become a model for me in my own career.

I set up the original web pages for the Honors College and administered a UNIX server. I compiled and installed software, set up scripts to ease maintenance and backups, and troubleshot problems.

Masters, Computer Science

Bachelors Of Arts, Computer Science, Japanese, Asian Studies

Business, Japanese