Rob Dull
Product Management & Product Operations
San Francisco, CA | rob.dull@gmail.com | linkedin.com/in/robdull
Summary Skills Tools Experience Earlier Roles Metrics Education Certifications

Product manager and operations leader with 20+ years working at the intersection of product strategy, customer insight, and delivery. At Salesforce and Delta Dental, I worked embedded within product and engineering organizations during periods of rapid growth, helping teams prioritize more clearly, ship more predictably, and stay closely connected to the customers they were building for. Earlier in my career I held direct PM roles in mobile and consumer software, managing products from customer research through engineering delivery. I bring genuine curiosity about what users need, a practical orientation toward outcomes over process, and experience applying AI tools to accelerate and improve product work.

Core Skills
Product Roadmap Planning
Synthesis of market research and customer-centric discovery
Feature Prioritization & Trade-offs
OKR / KPI Framework Design
Lean Cadences for Dependency and Risk Management
Cross-functional Stakeholder Alignment
Backlog Management & Requirements
Delivery Health & Dependency Tracking
AI-Augmented Product Workflows
ROI Analysis & Cost-of-Delay Modeling
User Journey & Empathy Mapping
PM Enablement & Community of Practice
Agile & Kanban Delivery Practices
DevOps Maturity & Pipeline Assessment
Executive & Board-Level Communication
Tools & Technology
Jira & Jira Align
Confluence
Miro (power user)
Tableau & PowerBI
Salesforce Platform
Salesforce Einstein AI
GitHub
GitHub CoPilot
Microsoft CoPilot
Microsoft Teams
ChatGPT
Claude Code
Claude Design
Planview
Google Suite
Slack
SharePoint
Prompt Engineering for Product Workflows
Experience
Delta Dental of California
Expert Agile Coach & Product Operations Lead  |  San Francisco, CA
March 2021 – April 2025
Embedded product and operations partner across 35+ teams and 5 portfolios covering insurance systems, consumer mobile app, and member and provider portals. Worked closely with Product Managers, engineering leads, and VP-level stakeholders to improve how the product organization planned, prioritized, and delivered.
Product Strategy & Prioritization
  • Introduced cost-of-delay analysis and OKR/KPI frameworks that shifted portfolio prioritization from stakeholder preference toward financially grounded, customer-outcome decisions — increasing ROI transparency across product and business audiences
  • Worked with product leaders to identify and track North Star metrics for acquisition, conversion, and retention, connecting team-level delivery decisions to business goals
  • Developed product strategy templates and facilitation approaches — including business canvases, value proposition frameworks, and empathy-based user research methods — that gave product managers practical tools for grounding roadmap decisions in customer needs
  • Partnered with product managers on quarterly planning across all five portfolios, improving the quality of roadmap commitments and reducing planning cycle time by 70% through better pre-work and stakeholder alignment
Product Operations & Delivery Health
  • Improved backlog intake and refinement processes, reducing scope creep by 90% through clearer requirements, incremental validation, and earlier dependency identification
  • Strengthened cross-team dependency coordination across all portfolios, achieving 100% visibility into interdependencies through structured tracking and proactive communication
  • Increased team delivery velocity by up to 80% and on-time story completion to 90–100% by addressing root causes in backlog quality and dependency management rather than adding process overhead
  • Implemented Jira and Jira Align for real-time portfolio visibility, replacing ad hoc reporting with consistent delivery health metrics across all five portfolios
  • Led Scrum-to-Kanban transitions for multiple teams where continuous flow better matched the nature of the work, improving throughput and release frequency
AI-Augmented Product Workflows
  • Championed early adoption of generative AI (GitHub CoPilot, ChatGPT) in product workflows, developing prompt engineering templates for feature specifications, acceptance criteria, and requirements documentation
  • Established behavior-driven development practices using Given-When-Then specifications as both a product quality standard and as the foundation for AI-assisted code generation, tightening the connection between product intent and engineering output
  • Drove adoption of AI-generated technical design specifications, reducing documentation overhead for product managers while improving precision
DevOps Maturity & Engineering Partnership
  • Co-developed an Engineering Excellence assessment framework covering 24 practices across 11 stages of the deployment pipeline, giving product and engineering teams a shared picture of maturity gaps and an 18-month improvement roadmap
  • Championed product manager ownership of built-in telemetry and feature value measurement — establishing the expectation that a feature is not done when it ships, but when usage data confirms it delivered the intended customer value
  • Worked with engineering and product leaders to shift release cadences toward continuous delivery, decoupling deployment from market release and enabling more responsive feature rollout
PM Coaching & Organizational Development
  • Provided 1:1 coaching to product managers and scrum masters on product strategy, stakeholder communication, and difficult conversations — including contributing to formal performance evaluations and improvement plans
  • Participated in the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence, coaching VP-level Engineering and Product leaders on transformation priorities and organizational decision-making
  • Developed role maturity frameworks and capability benchmarks for Product Owners and Scrum Masters, giving managers a structured foundation for development conversations
Salesforce
Sr. Agile Coach & Product Operations Lead, IT  |  San Francisco, CA
January 2014 – July 2020
Served as the primary product operations and agile coaching resource for Salesforce IT through a period of rapid growth — from 25 to 115+ teams across US, Ireland, and India — during 30%+ annual headcount growth. Worked closely with product, engineering, and program leadership to improve how the organization planned, delivered, and learned.
Product Operating Model & Delivery Standards
  • Developed the IT Product Delivery Playbook — a practical operating guide covering product workflows, delivery standards, and cross-functional coordination — that became the reference document for new teams and leaders onboarding into the organization
  • Published a Global Scrum Operating Model and Agile Quality Management Playbook, establishing consistent delivery and quality practices across US, Ireland, and India offices while leaving room for local adaptation
  • Partnered with PMO to adapt delivery practices for large ERP implementations (Oracle RMB, Workday), designing hybrid approaches that maintained agile principles within compliance-gated delivery contexts
PM Enablement & Customer-Centered Product Practice
  • Designed and delivered a Product Owner and Product Manager training program to 250+ practitioners, covering product strategy, roadmap planning, stakeholder engagement, user research methods, and Salesforce-specific tools — including SAFe POPM certification
  • Trained product managers on customer-centered research practices including user interviews, persona development, journey mapping, and jobs-to-be-done analysis — practical methods for grounding product decisions in real user needs rather than internal assumptions
  • Established a Product Management Community of Practice supporting 50+ Product Owners with peer learning, shared tools, and ongoing operational guidance
  • Created and administered PM maturity assessments and internal certifications, giving managers clear benchmarks for product capability and development pathways for their teams
Metrics, Visibility & Continuous Improvement
  • Designed a metrics framework and executive dashboards (Tableau, Salesforce Platform/GUS) providing leadership with real-time product health and delivery visibility across all portfolios
  • Developed and administered an annual Agile Maturity Survey across 5 capability dimensions; at peak, 500+ respondents, with results analyzed using Einstein AI to identify systemic improvement opportunities and prioritize coaching investment
  • Hosted 72+ multi-day training events over 6 years (~1,300 total attendees), covering agile delivery, product management, and customer-centered product practices; managed all coordination, logistics, and virtual transition at COVID onset
Cross-functional Alignment & Change Leadership
  • Led product and delivery integration for the ExactTarget acquisition, unifying product processes and delivery practices across two merged organizations — achieving 80% improvement in delivery velocity through alignment rather than mandate
  • Contributed to executive briefings for enterprise customers (Anthem, Dell, HP) at the Salesforce Executive Briefing Center, presenting on product operating models, delivery metrics, and transformation approach
  • Supported Hyderabad office expansion by onboarding and enabling local delivery coaches, extending consistent product operations practices to a new geographic population
Earlier Experience
Nokia
Product Manager — Consumer Mobile Platform
San Francisco, CA  |  2007–2009
PM for Nokia's Community Games consumer mobile platform. Defined SDK and certification requirements for third-party game developers, collaborated directly with engineering on feature delivery, and built mobile interface prototypes to validate UX decisions before committing to implementation. Reduced developer onboarding time by 75% through process redesign informed by direct developer feedback.
Portrait Displays, Inc.
Product Manager — Consumer Software & Firmware
Pleasanton, CA  |  2004–2006
Full PM ownership of consumer software and firmware products for OEM customers including Fujitsu-Siemens, Sony, and Acer. Translated customer requirements into engineering specifications, managed delivery, and owned international deployment across 25 language localizations. Applied rapid iterative delivery based on direct customer feedback.
Bio-Rad Laboratories
Web Publishing Manager — E-commerce & CMS
Hercules, CA  |  2012
Managed 30+ releases for a global medical diagnostics e-commerce site. Implemented Lean process improvements to content change and defect workflows, reducing lead time by 80% through structured root cause analysis and process redesign.
Independent Consulting
Business Process & Marketing Consultant
Bay Area  |  2010–2013
Provided product operations and digital marketing advisory to technology and non-profit clients. Engagements included SEM strategy for a mobile app marketplace (750,000+ titles) and business process standardization for an established services company during a transitional period.
Selected Outcomes
90%
Reduction in scope creep through improved backlog intake and requirements validation
70%
Faster quarterly planning: 3.5 days to 8 hours through better pre-work and alignment
80%
Delivery velocity improvement through backlog quality and dependency management
115+
Teams supported at Salesforce IT, growing from 25 across US, Ireland, and India
250+
Product managers trained on customer-centered product practice and delivery methods
1,300+
Training attendees across 72+ multi-day events over 6 years at Salesforce
500+
Annual survey respondents, analyzed with Einstein AI to prioritize improvement areas
100%
Cross-team dependency visibility through structured coordination and proactive tracking
Education
MBA — Managing Technology & Innovation; Marketing
Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA
BA — Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA
Certifications & Training
Agile & Product Delivery
  • SAFe Program Consultant 6.0 (SPC) — trainer-certified, all modules including Product, Portfolio, DevOps
  • Certified Scrum Professional — Product Owner (CSP-PO)
  • Kanban Management Professional (KMP) & Enterprise Services Planning (ESP)
Customer Practice & Human-Centered Methods
  • MIT/Sloane — Mastering Design Thinking
  • Salesforce Ignite! Process Innovation Bootcamp
  • Crucial Conversations & 5 Dysfunctions of a Team
AI & Analytics
  • Google AI Essentials (Coursera)
  • Microsoft CoPilot for Productivity (Coursera)
  • Salesforce Einstein AI & Platform Analytics
  • Prompt Engineering for Product Workflows
Volunteering
  • Taproot Foundation — Project Manager for pro-bono consulting teams serving non-profit organizations
  • Salesforce.org — Agile coaching for social entrepreneurship and non-profit technology teams