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Russ Arbuthnot

Associate Vice President, Product Development

United Wholesale Mortgage

About

I'm a Technical Director with over 20 years of product and engineering experience who believes that great teams make great products! I can lead your organization from chaotic to controlled without losing its entrepreneurial spirit. I am a lucky husband and father of two (a girl and a boy), living in Metro Detroit.

Interests

  • Agile Software Development
  • Process Improvement
  • Technical Product Management
  • Remote and Distributed Team Management
  • Mob Programming
  • Software Development
  • Audio Electronics
  • DIY Guitar Pedals
  • Flyfishing & Fly Tying
  • Golf
  • Woodworking & Woodcarving
  • Coffee

Education

  • BS Audio Engineering and Production, 1999

    Middle Tennessee State University

  • Wilderness Adventure Course, 1991

    National Outdoor Leadership School

Skills

Agile & Scrum

14 years

Distributed Team Management

8 years

Mob Programming

4 years

Remote Work

10 years

Java

5 years, v8+

JavaScript

14 years, es3 through es2018

Angular

5 years, v1 & v2+

Sonarqube

2 years

Jenkins

5 years

Docker

2 years

Maven

5 years

Spring Boot

5 years

Yarn

3 years

NPM

5 years

Sass

5 years

Atlassian

10+ years, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Administration

Slack Administration

3 years

MS Office

20+ years

Linux

20 years

OS X

16 years

Guitar

35 years

Golf

10 years

Parent

Since 2013

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Director of Innovation

InnerWorkings

May 2006 – Apr 2020 Chicago, IL & Remote from Metro Detroit since 2010

Skills Used: Scrum & Agile, Process Improvement, Continuous Improvement, Mob & Pair Programming, Continuous Integration, Test-Driven Development, Static Code Checking, CI/CD, Dev/Ops Best Practices, Java, AngularJS, Maven, JUnit, Cucumber, MSSQL, PostgreSQL

Role Overview:

  • Director of a distributed product team responsible for designing, developing, and delivering new products and initiatives for 10,000 users, $700 million/year processed revenue.
  • Work closely with the Senior Director of Development as well as daily interaction with CTO, Infrastructure, Finance, Operations, and Training. Report to the VP of Product Management.
  • Develop ideation pipeline process for new idea development.
  • Hiring, training, management, and evaluation of a dozen direct reports from multiple US states and Europe.
  • International and domestic travel to company offices.
  • Coach team members via one-on-ones and pairing sessions.
  • Primary facilitator of Sprint events for over 80 stakeholders and team members.
  • Independently conduct presentations and training activities for up to 50 people focusing on iterative development, collaboration, increasing code quality, functional programming, and quickly identifying code smells.
  • Deliver internal and external B2B products focused on process management, supply-chain management, revenue generation, cost-savings, automation, and collaboration.

Previous positions held at InnerWorkings:

  • Application Design Director (2016-2019)
  • ERP Design Team Lead (2013-2016)
  • Product Manager (2010-2013)
  • Business Analyst (2009-2010)
  • QA Team Lead (2008-2009)
  • Application Developer (2006-2008)
 
 
 
 
 

Audio Engineer / Software Developer

Electrical Audio

Jun 1999 – Apr 2006 Chicago, IL

Skills Used: Audio Engineering, Project Management, PHP, Linux, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, OO, Emacs

Role Overview: Engineered and recorded albums for a wide variety of global musical artists and groups. Built and maintained the company's first website using LAMP and object-oriented approach. Administered web servers, email servers, and all other software. Maintained studio equipment and electronics.

Certifications, Training & Accomplish­ments

Certified Agile Leadership for Organizations (CAL-O)

See certificate

Certified Agile Leadership Essentials (CAL-E)

A Scribe's Oath - The Future of Programming

Leadership in the Age of Agile Workshop

Java Programming Paradigms: Expert

My Java Programming Paradigms IQ is 218—that’s better than 88% of my peers.

Agile & Beyond Conference

Using the Scrum Framework: Expert

My Using the Scrum Framework IQ is 240—that’s better than 94% of my peers. Strengths: Scrum Events, Scrum Artifacts, Scrum Theory and Values.

The Power and Perils of Parallel Streams

Hacktoberfest Open Source Contributor

2016 Deyak Classic Net Team

Professional Scrum Master I

See certificate

Presenting Data and Information Course

Recent Posts

Current Coffee Setup

This was written back when I worked from home. I no longer work from home and my coffee habits and setup has changed accordingly. As a …

Projects

Valo Workflow

B2B Self-Service Portal

Valo Procure

Order Management System

Directions Direct Hire

Business website built with Wordpress

PPM4

Bid management, and order management system.

Discogs Discography

View my discography at Discogs.com

Electrical Audio Website

Business website with Equipment Database and User Forum

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Mob Programming

Six years ago I was searching for a way to get teams to increase quality and value delivery when I stumbled across a poorly filmed …

Contact