Jf (John Francis) Unson (He/Him) Email & Phone Number

I have been offering classes and coaching on Mobius Outcome Delivery and Software Profit Streams as part of my continuing consultancy. I have also been working out with a colleague on editing the second edition of her book on Mobius Outcome Delivery, which is soon to be published. I also co-manage the Mobius Outcome Delivery website, https://www.mobiusloop.com/. In addition, I have also co-written a book on synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. It is currently being edited. I have also been working on a self-funded stealth startup (July 2024) as a co-founder. My partner and I are working on prototyping and proving our AI-enabled consumer application idea. I’m doing most of the programming using Python, Django, and React frameworks (with AI as a partner) while we both vet the product viability and product-market fit of our consumer app. We have since discovered there is a potential business case as well, but are concentrating on the consumer side for now.

I'm working with clients as a Business Agility Consultant and Coach.

Irvine, Ca, Us

I am one of the volunteer organizers for the San Francisco Bay Area Business Agility MeetUp. SF BABAM is a community where we encourage you to be curious, share ideas, and explore the new patterns of a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world. Please check out our MeetUp page at https://www.meetup.com/Business-Agility-Meetup-San-Francisco-Bay-Area/

San Francisco, California, Us

As an Agile coach in the People Operations department, I helped Miro in building out their principles- and values-based take on Agility. I helped various teams during Miro's rapid hypergrowth during and after the pandemic. In my role, I interfaced with all sorts of teams like Sales, Marketing, People Operations, Recruiting and the like, aside from the traditional areas of Product and Engineering that most agilists cover.

Currently open to opportunities. Feel free to ping me if you have something interesting.

Sunnyvale, California, Us

I instituted JIRA hygiene practices in order to drive towards better clarity and accountability into what people were working on. When I joined, I found that most of the information was kept in either peoples’ heads, e-mail, or chat rooms instead of JIRA, making it really difficult to look at and follow-up on measurable project data.As part of the JIRA hygiene, I started establishing base portfolio guardrails on the very few project teams that were using Agile, in order to build up a portfolio view of where the various efforts of the project teams were being invested. The guardrails that I added provided insightful numbers of the cost of development against the cost of supporting customers. These statistics gave both the VP of Engineering and the VP of Product a good view of how skewed the efforts were between strategic projects and projects that kept the business functioning day to day. These statistics also provided a basis for how many more development new hires were needed to support the long term goals of the division for the year and for the rest of their roadmap.

London, England, Gb

I was given an already late and critical project, and using the data found in JIRA, I helped the leadership team understand the current state. I was able to calculate a projected completion date that went beyond the intended delivery schedule that the company needed, and provided to executive management a high level plan on how to get this project back on track.I worked with 4 teams and 2 product managers to deliver the first release within 5 months of my arrival. I also put practices in place that allowed us to release on a monthly cadence thereafter, enabling the teams rethink their releases more iteratively.I pushed engineering to focus on building up best practices such as unit testing, and releasing tested code at the end of the sprints. These changes drove towards more consistent but smaller, higher quality releases done on a regular cadence.I harvested JIRA data, and started building velocity and capacity spreadsheets and statistics. I used these measurements as a basis for rolling 3-month planning that allowed all my teams to meet their commitments to within 80% to 90% certainty. Using an Objective and Key Results (OKR) Canvas, I drove a company 100-day engineering initiative to improve product stability and performance, in order to help stem the amount of customer churn. We succeeded in saving 32 out of the 34 customers who were threatening to churn, and in the process, increased the customer retention rate.I used an OKR Canvas and DACI model to kick off a company-wide project whose goal was to unify all our products into one cloud-based platform product that broadcasters and production companies could use. This project involved coordinating all of the company’s engineering and UX teams, and product management in 6 geographical zones.

London, England, Gb

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

I serve as embedded Technical Program manager for 3 Big Data Infrastructure engineering teams. In this role, I helped facilitate and lead the quarterly OKR (objectives and key results) planning, and conveying commitments to upper management. I helped manage project risks by highlighting potential issues and problems during architecture and design review meetings. I worked w/ the team architects and leads to ensure that what we planned for the quarter was within the team’s capacity, and that they were confident that they could meet the commitment. I also helped hash out dependencies w/ other teams to ensure coordination of commitments across various teams within the company.I provided visibility through team velocity metrics, and reflect expected release dates during execution, resulting in better visibility for the team as well as stakeholders.In addition to my team duties, I served as the program manager for a company wide engineering initiative for the quarter. In this role, I was tasked to ensure that all LinkedIn product teams delivered on the information security and protection features that were required, in order to satisfy the EU’s privacy laws, which were overseen by the Irish Data Privacy Commission.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

* Hired as an engineering manager to supervise a number of development and test engineers in April of 2012. After the Google acquisition of Wildfire in September of 2012, managed the entire test engineering team in order to provide focus and direction, while continuing to manage a complete development product team.* Served as a Scrum Master on a green field project that had issues delivering. Tightened up the release planning and product management processes, resulting in the team getting more consistent and predictable delivery of product features.* Drove OKRs (objectives and key results) for both the test engineering team, as well as the green field project team, and worked on providing quarterly release plans for upper management, providing them with visibility on projects and efforts. During the quarter, provided timely updates to the status of the projects, showing key risk areas as well as progress.* Through the OKRs, enabled test engineering to increase their automation efforts, resulting in the build up of automated smoke and regression tests on all our environments (test, staging and production). The resulting automated smoke tests provided measurable health indicators for the state of our applications, increasing engineering’s ability to deliver quality code.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

* Hired as an engineering manager to supervise a number of development and test engineers in April of 2012. Wildfire Interactive was acquired by Google.

New York, Ny, Us

* Reported to the CEO and managed the software development, network operations (IT) and quality assurance (QA) teams. Served as product owner proxy for the CEO, translating his vision to deliverables and features with release plans that the teams could execute and deliver at sprint iterations. * Managed a combined software development and company IT budget of $2 million. Kept an eye on controlling costs and making the right investments at the most opportune time possible through collaboration w/ IT staff and software engineers.* Grew the engineering team from three engineers to seven engineers, and the network operations teams from two to four. Started a QA department that now has two engineers. Took an underutilized employee who was looking for career growth, mentored and groomed them to become an effective project manager and Scrum Master.* Contributed to the overall direction and company strategy for continued technological scalability and growth. Worked with the executive management team to develop the long-term vision and strategy. With the help of the software development and network operations teams, aligned long term IT and engineering needs and requirements with the company features needed to achieve the vision and strategy while keeping costs under control.* Successfully mitigated business continuity risks by instituting projects that addressed scalability and redundancy through new technologies like virtualization and cloud computing.

New York, Ny, Us

* Served as ScrumMaster to software development and IT teams, and tweaked Agile practices by tightening the Scrum hybrid practices that the company initially adopted, which resulted in increasing efficiency of Sprint meetings, visibility of work being done, and quality of deliverables. Fostered the team growth in Agile to the point where the team is currently releasing new features and bug fixes twice every week.* Instituted Kanban practices, and mentored a junior Scrum Master for the Network Operations team when my strategic workload increased. Served as strategic product owner for the team, while promoting the most senior Network Operations engineer to manager and product owner. Coached and mentored both the junior Scrum Master and Network Operations Manager to the point where the team became independent, and I served as a strategic stakeholder.* Instituted Agile engineering practices such as test first and test driven development and continuous integration and test, thereby addressing the current technical debt that was incurred, and reduced the amount of new technical debt as a result of transitioning to new products. This also increased the visibility of code quality at any time during the development process.

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

* Created training materials and taught Agile courses to Yahoo employees, averaging training at least once a month, with about 20 to 25 people per class. Classes dealt with topics such as Introduction to Agile, Scrum Mechanics, and Agile Estimation and Project Planning. Created Yahoo-specific courses that dealt with topics such as User Stories, QA in an Agile Context, Agile Product Owner, Lean, and the like.* Coordinated with the Chief Product Office (CPO) to figure out and come up with iterative ways in which the Scrum teams can meet the product approval requirements of the CPO Product Review Steering Committee.* Represented Yahoo at various Agile conferences, giving talks on Yahoo’s experiences in adopting Agile. Participated in brainstorming and reviewing proposal from other Yahoos interested in submitting to these conferences.* Analyzed teams to determine their current development situation and make recommendations based on the issues the team wanted to solve. * Coached more than 80+ teams in the past two years who wanted to adopt Agile methodologies. Coaching ranged from light engagement such as periodic visits and evaluations, to full-fledged daily embedding as part of the team. Helped product owners figure out how to iteratively release their products, as well as identify risks and convey confident schedules based on actual team performance data.* Helped teams achieve anywhere from 10% to 35% productivity gains. Facilitated team and project retrospectives to uncover root causes of issues, and enable teams to figure out solutions that they can own and work for them, thus getting their buy-in.* Provide logistics for internal Agile events such as speaker series and open spaces in order to foster the Agile community within the company.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Senior QA Engineer for the Product Delivery and Packaging group.

Us

Started the Be Here QA department.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Worked on the Solaris Desktop (CDE), using both Java and Motif/C.

Bs, Computer Engineering

Ba, Computational Mathematics