Jacob F.

N/A

In my role as CTO at Cinematique I was able to make sweeping changes to the company. From the way the company thought about and measured product success, the process by which they developed their software and, perhaps most importantly, the way in which they worked together as a team. A great team must have processes in place that allow them to work without friction. They must have open communication, the freedom and encouragement to make mistakes, and to be laser focused on delivering value. When I arrived I saw a company full of potential, but locked into non-optimal patterns. Without positive processes these bad patterns developed organically over the years. Within a week of my arrival we moved the team into SCRUM sprints with a strong focus on the cultural benefits of the process. I introduced cross-functional communication, promoted the concept of organizational learning and focused myself on removing work friction for team members. This was an emotional time for many, it can be a challenge to trust a new process but I am extremely proud of the leaps the team made in a short period of time. Within a few sprints the team was communicating and working like never before. Next, I began a program of external user testing. Having organized small, cross-functional teams we went to the streets of Manhattan with our product. After the first hour of gathering feedback the benefit was clear, we had an incredible amount of actionable takeaways. As a bonus, the user-testing program was culturally invigorating. This lead to further adoption of assumption-validation and organizational learning. Finally, within the tech team we were able to increase our velocity many times over in a few months. More accurate time estimation gave us the ability to plan with unprecedented detail. We adopted cutting edge solutions for our analytics and reduced the code weight by 75%.