Robert has a lifetime of experience working with technical product development teams.
With certifications in Agile, Lean, Project Management, Six Sigma, and Scaled Agile, he is the Process Mechanic you are looking for.
Yada, yada, yada. How about an origin story?
My journey began after attending college and a journey to Los Angeles, California. I’d moved there only to find my contacts on the business side of music dried up. Frustrated and about to give up, I wriggled into a manager opportunity on pure will with a chain selling music and renting movies.
Trouble would find me once again. The day before starting the new position, I stood in the front doorway of the building where I would be managing, and the air was filled with the smell of someone smoking a joint.
Gathering my resolve, I set to work the next day fixing things and rebuilding the team. After five months of hard work, revenue was up 1.7x, costly theft was down 6x, and half of the original team went on to become managers for the company.
Our success was due to empowering the people on the team to solve problems and innovate in ways any of us alone could not. The team was running their store. They became a self-improving high-performance team, in spite of the fact that most of them were part-time teenagers earning minimum wage.
Driven by the desire to create environments that engineers want to come to everyday, today he guides the way small and medium businesses operate to get 30% or more out of their product development engine.
“I’ve always admired his competency, patience, the way he dealt with people and senior management, and how he could get things done. It seemed almost simple but imagine running multiple projects dealing with several releases of a product in different stages of implementation. Add to that all possible factors of complexity, such as sharing of resources, moving goals, changing scopes, and dealing with conflicting interests. Sprinkle interdisciplinary flavors (hardware, software, QA, pre and post sales), and you’ll start to understand who we’re talking about here.” – Carlos Saraiva
