Jeff Watts Email & Phone Number

Los Gatos, CA

Seattle, Washington

Greater Seattle Area

• Direct the software development activities for the Rhapsody Mobile Application Group. This currently comprises an organization of 20 developers and QA across three teams tasked to deliver Rhapsody on the iPhone.
• Architect for wireless carrier integrations into Rhapsody’s mobile applications (Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Vivo, Movistar)
• Manage relationships and direct technical integrations with external partners. (Shazam, Gracenote, BMW, Audi, Qualcomm).
• Coach both managers and individual contributors to their optimum performance levels and support career development.
• Partner with business development to develop solutions for mobile subscriber acquisition.
• Developed Rhapsody Android SongMatch application in spare time to learn Android development.

Greater Seattle Area

• Directed software development activities for Rhapsody PC client application. Responsible for establishing technical objectives, assignment of tasks, and direction for a team of nine developers. Team management included.
• Improved overall team performance and reliability by transitioning the software development process from traditional waterfall to Scrum framework.
• Pivoted development team focus from PC to mobile application development to adjust to new company strategy. Promoted to Development Manager of the Mobile Applications group.
• Drove a usability improvement initiative to improve the performance and user experience in historically difficult-to-use areas of the product.
• Provided technical leadership on troubleshooting and resolution of issues.
• Identified by senior executives as a high performer and received additional management training through a yearlong high performer (HiPO) program sponsored by the company (2009).

Greater Seattle Area

• Managed a team of three developers whose key responsibilities encompassed design, development, and implementation of key features across the Rhapsody PC Client, RealPlayer, and RealJukebox applications. These.
• Integration of Windows Media DRM technology to support secure transfer of music content to portable music players.
• Design and development of public interface to allow application developers to write software plugins that allow RealPlayer and Rhapsody to support portable music players created by different vendors.
• Integration of CD ripping and CD burning into Rhapsody and RealPlayer. Included such features such as playback of song during ripping, normalization of volume, cross-fade of one song into another during burning, and.
• Design and development of music transcription service to convert from the Helix DRM to Windows Media DRM.
• Integration of support for playback and metadata editing for Windows Media Audio content.

Tucson, Arizona Area

• Responsible for the design, development, and implementation of office workflow applications
• Led a small development team charged with developing a server application to send notifications to a wireless application running on a Windows CE device. Managed team onsite in an office in Bangalore, India.
• Designed and developed an adapter to allow applications to send and receive data over a wireless modem on Windows CE platform.
• Worked on a small team of developers on a workflow application plugin to Exchange Server using Windows Messaging API (MAPI).

Tucson, Arizona Area

• Responsible for the design, development, implementation and testing of a VLSI 3D image processing chip funded by the National Science Foundation.
• Responsible for all steps in the design: high level design, behavior simulation, logic gate layout, generation of pin-out diagram, and test vector generation.
• Wrote a C++ application to simulate the behavior of design and generate input for logic simulation.
• Wrote C application to work around limitations in design tools.
• Developed PCI circuit board to develop knowledge to assist with chip design.