I build the operating practices that help Product and Engineering teams make clearer decisions and deliver more effectively. At Salesforce and Delta Dental, my work included enterprise playbooks, product planning, capability development, delivery visibility, and engineering improvement. My current consulting combines operating-model design with built AI-assisted Product Management workflow prototypes.
Highlights
~80% of IT teams
Salesforce: the Project Playbook I authored became the reference model for large programs involving roughly 80% of IT delivery teams.
3 days to 2
Delta Dental: common quarterly planning cycles across multiple teams, after moving refinement and dependency discovery into continuous preparation.
9-step prototype
Now: an AI-assisted Product Management workflow with human review gates, published at
robdull.com/tools.
Professional Experience
Problem, action, and result detail for the main examples is on the Selected Cases page.
Advisory work on operating-model design, process architecture, and change management, alongside building AI-assisted Product Management workflow prototypes.
- Advise on operating-model design and process architecture, including reusable transition guidance for teams changing how they plan and deliver work.
- Built a nine-step AI-assisted Product Management workflow, from persona and journey mapping through intake, business cases, prioritization, roadmap, backlog, and batch planning (regular delivery cycles of 2 days to 2 weeks), published as working prototypes at robdull.com/tools.
- Designed the prototypes with human review gates and deterministic validation checks between steps, so AI output is inspected before it moves downstream.
- Evaluated with a small group of practitioners. These are working prototypes, not production systems.
Embedded partner across more than 35 product and engineering teams and five portfolios in a regulated insurance environment, working with Product Managers, Product Owners, Engineering leaders, Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineers, business stakeholders, and the Lean-Agile Center of Excellence. Scope included product operations, planning, delivery visibility, and engineering improvement.
- Moved refinement, readiness, and dependency discovery into continuous preparation. Common quarterly planning cycles across multiple teams fell from roughly three days to two; one highly mature team reduced planning from approximately 3.5 days to one.
- Reduced scope creep through clearer requirements, incremental validation, and earlier dependency identification.
- Worked with Engineering Managers to frame business cases and quantify expected returns for technology-driven development and system upgrades, for stakeholder communication and tradeoff analysis alongside Product-driven business cases.
- Combined business and technical roadmaps into one ranked view using relative Cost of Delay, giving technical debt, cost reduction, and risk work a credible basis for competing with customer-facing features.
- Co-created a CTO-sponsored engineering maturity assessment and improvement process involving approximately 40 delivery teams; directly coached close to 30 teams across two survey rounds, helping translate findings into quarterly improvement roadmaps extending 18 months.
- Co-created Delta Dental's Product Management Toolkit and delivered guidance and training for product definition, prioritization, business cases, and delivery readiness.
- Lead contributor to Product Manager job-family definitions; contributed to Delta Dental's Scrum Master role guidelines.
- Developed and tested a six-to-twelve-month Scrum-to-Kanban transition model with several teams and used it to put six more teams on a path toward flow-based delivery.
- Piloted Microsoft Copilot backlog workflows with Product Owners and Scrum Masters, using transcripts and source documents to draft features and stories with business context, measures, dependencies, and acceptance criteria.
- Improved delivery systems supporting insurance claims, including a customer-facing support bot that escalated unresolved issues into ticketing and a document-management team balancing roadmap work with service demand.
- Co-authored Write It Right with Tanya Jones and Karen Benbow, a whitepaper on how one team fixed story writing upstream to shorten quarterly planning.
Sole dedicated Agile Coach for Salesforce IT for three years, during growth from approximately 25 to more than 115 teams across the United States, Ireland, and India. Scope included organizational transformation, program playbooks, delivery operations, and capability development.
- Authored an enterprise Project Playbook at the request of the CIO and PMO leader: a three-phase model for initiation, iterative delivery, and operational transition, with required artifacts and support handoffs.
- Rolled out the Playbook through workshops and project-start walkthroughs; it became the reference model for large multi-team programs involving roughly 80% of IT delivery teams.
- Designed and scaled a longitudinal maturity assessment from approximately 30 teams in five verticals to 80 teams in eight verticals over about eight cycles in five years, peaking at more than 500 respondents.
- Used Einstein AI to analyze results from the Team Health Surveys and delivery workflow data from GUS, Salesforce’s internal work-tracking tool (comparable to Jira).
- Prepared recurring dashboards, decks, and recommendations for the CIO staff and the PMO leader, supporting decisions about staffing, team structure, coaching investment, priorities, sequencing, and operating changes.
- Maturity findings helped leadership decide to keep QA separate from Development; contributed to analysis of team size, geographic distribution, backlog health, and delivery performance behind global team-design guidance.
- Supported operating-model and delivery integration after the ExactTarget acquisition, helping teams reconcile different processes, tools, roles, and expectations while delivery continued.
- Designed role-specific capability programs, internal certifications, workshops, and onboarding, and founded the Product Owner and Scrum Master Communities of Practice; hosted more than 72 multi-day events reaching approximately 1,300 attendees and trained more than 250 Product Managers and Product Owners.
- Lead contributor to Product Management and Business Analyst job-family definitions.
- Taught Product Managers and Product Owners prioritization methods including Kano, Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), and MoSCoW, plus a riskiest-failure-mode-first approach to proofs of concept.
- Taught Sum of Squares estimation, which sizes a backlog of Epics or Features from ranged estimates (a 50%-certainty best guess and a 90%-certainty near-worst case) instead of single-point estimates, which are less reliable and overly optimistic.
- Led the workshop “Agile Portfolio Estimation; Buffering with Risk and Dependency Analysis” at AgileCamp Silicon Valley 2017, presenting a method for breaking down major releases, estimating at any level of detail, and building plans that account for team-level risk.
- Led Kanban transitions for support, maintenance, design, and rapid-release teams whose work did not fit a two-week sprint.
Earlier Experience
Bio-Rad Laboratories
Web Publishing Manager, E-commerce and CMS
2012
Managed content and release operations for a global medical-diagnostics e-commerce platform. Reduced lead time by approximately 80% for selected categories of website content changes and defect-resolution work.
Independent Consulting
Business Process, Product, and Marketing Consultant
2010–2013
Advised technology and nonprofit clients on operating processes, digital products, and marketing strategy.
Nokia
Compliance Testing Manager
2007–2009
Managed platform onboarding for third-party game developers on Nokia's SNAP Mobile Community Games Platform for Java games, covering compliance testing, certification, and provisioning. Reduced provisioning handoff time from days to hours by establishing dedicated communication channels and service-level expectations.
Portrait Displays
Project Manager; promoted to Product Manager
2004–2006
Owned consumer software product management for DisplayTune, a calibration interface bundled with premium LCD monitors from Acer, Sony, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hyundai, and iiyama. Managed two-to-six-week OEM launch windows, production schedules, support-site delivery, feature tradeoffs, validation, and releases across 25 language localizations.
Education and Credentials
Education
- MBA, Managing Technology and Innovation; Marketing, Santa Clara University
- BA, Swarthmore College
- MIT Sloan, Mastering Design Thinking (2018)
Certifications
- SAFe Practice Consultant 6.0 (SPC): Product/Portfolio Management, AI SAFe, and DevOps trainer-certified
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
- Certified Scrum Professional, ScrumMaster (CSP-SM)
- Certified Scrum Professional, Product Owner (CSP-PO)
- Kanban Management Professional (KMP)
- Enterprise Services Planning (ESP)