Rob Dull Work & Capabilities
Experience

Work, capabilities, and
selected cases.

How I turn ambiguity into product decisions, operating systems, and cross-functional execution.

What I Do

I help organizations connect business intent, product decisions, engineering delivery, support operations, and measurable outcomes. My work often begins where priorities are unclear, teams are using inconsistent practices, or leaders lack a reliable view of how work is moving. I diagnose the operating system, frame the decision, design the minimum structure needed, and stay with the work through implementation.

My strongest work sits between strategy and execution: making priorities explicit, making the system visible, and helping people change how the work actually gets done.
How I Work
  1. Diagnose the system: Understand the actual workflow, decision paths, incentives, handoffs, and constraints before prescribing a framework.
  2. Frame the decision: Clarify what leaders or product teams need to decide, what evidence matters, and what tradeoffs are real.
  3. Design the mechanism: Create the roadmap, playbook, dashboard, workflow, business case, assessment, or operating model that makes the decision executable.
  4. Pilot and learn: Test the approach with willing teams, inspect the results, and adjust before broader adoption.
  5. Build capability: Teach the system, create reusable guidance, and transfer ownership so progress does not depend on the person who introduced the change.
  6. Reduce management complexity: Standardize the parts of the operating model that benefit from consistency while preserving local judgment where it adds value.
Case 1
Salesforce Project Playbook

Salesforce IT was growing rapidly across the United States, Ireland, and India. Large programs combined traditional program governance with Agile team delivery, but expectations, artifacts, and support handoffs varied widely.

The deeper value was reduced management complexity: leaders gained shared language and repeatable controls instead of having to interpret every team and program as a separate exception.

Case 2
Delta Planning and Product Investment Decisions

Quarterly planning was absorbing too much time because feature shaping, dependency discovery, and readiness work often happened too late. Technical work was also often presented as a threat rather than an economic decision.

The result was both faster planning and better investment judgment: technical debt, cost reduction, and risk work could compete credibly with customer-facing features.

Case 3
Direct Product Management at Portrait Displays

DisplayTune was a graphical calibration interface bundled with premium LCD monitors from OEM customers including Fujitsu-Siemens, Hyundai, Acer, iiyama, and Sony.

A successful gold-master release shipped with the first production monitors and generated little or no follow-up support demand. Additional feature requests provided a second signal of product value.

Case 4
Practical Scrum-to-Kanban Transition

Many transitions change board labels and meeting names without changing how teams manage waiting, handoffs, blockers, or WIP. At Delta Dental, I developed and tested a six-to-twelve-month model that treated Kanban as an organizational capability.

The model was proven with several teams and used to put six additional teams on a credible path toward genuine flow-based delivery. A separate detailed case study documents the full method.

Case 5
CTO-Sponsored DevOps Modernization

Delta Dental needed a shared approach to slow releases, inconsistent quality, technical debt, insufficient automation, and uneven engineering practices across approximately 40 delivery teams.

The initiative gave leadership a shared view of engineering maturity and teams a sequenced path toward stronger automation, quality controls, release practices, monitoring, and engineering excellence.

Additional Direct Product and Platform Work
Nokia SNAP Mobile

Managed compliance, certification, and provisioning for third-party games on Nokia's Java gaming platform. Made onboarding, release-timing, exception, and compatibility decisions; co-developed rules for interface clarity, account management, error handling, and interrupted connections; and reviewed the SDK for completeness and usability.

  • Reduced provisioning handoff time from days to hours by establishing dedicated communication channels and service-level expectations.
  • Applied judgment by tailoring error-handling requirements to the mechanics and risk profile of individual games.
Bio-Rad

Managed content and release operations for a global medical-diagnostics e-commerce platform and reduced lead time by approximately 80% for selected categories of website changes and defect-resolution work.

Representative Work Products
Product strategy, investment, and value framing
Business cases ROI models Cost of Delay Value propositions Roadmaps Release plans Kano WSJF MoSCoW Sum of Squares Risk-first proof-of-concept design

I have trained business stakeholders, Business Analysts, and Product Managers to distinguish direct business value, opportunity enablement, and risk reduction, and to express those distinctions through revenue, cost savings, avoided loss, or enabled future value.

Customer, stakeholder, and business-model insight

Interpretation of survey results, support-center feedback, product reviews, internal-customer interviews, and Net Promoter Score data; journey and process mapping; draft Business Model Canvases; facilitated alignment workshops; and translation of evidence into prioritized product or operating decisions. I do not claim direct market-facing end-user research.

Goals, measures, and value realization

Created OKRs and KPIs for organizational transformation initiatives; trained dozens of Product Owners to define meaningful measures; taught hundreds of practitioners to distinguish outcome-oriented key results from ongoing performance indicators; and introduced AI-assisted methods for drafting and refining OKRs and KPIs. Facilitated North Star and Pirate Metrics workshops, helping teams select measures appropriate to the maturity of a product, service, or program.

Delivery-ready product definition
Product requirements Epics Features User stories Acceptance criteria Given-When-Then specifications Requirements registers Dependency maps Work breakdown structures Release plans
Technical design and engineering handoff

Co-created technical-design specifications with engineers, designed reusable specification templates, and used AI to generate first drafts for review and refinement. Direct authorship was primarily for updated versions of existing products where technical architecture and constraints were already established.

Product operations and decision visibility
Feature intake systems Readiness criteria Planning pre-work Portfolio dashboards Jira and Jira Align workflow design Delivery-health measures Operating playbooks Support handoff models Progress reporting
Diagnosis and engineering improvement
Control-chart analysis Blocker clustering Retrospective synthesis Root-cause analysis Process-improvement plans Maturity assessments DevOps roadmaps Flow analysis Team-level improvement experiments
Organizational capability and performance development
Role maturity frameworks Capability benchmarks Training curricula Internal certifications Communities of Practice Workshop design and facilitation One-to-one coaching Annual role-development objectives Coaching plans Management-level annual reviews Contributions to formal performance-improvement requirements Mentoring managers in performance evaluation and improvement
Where I Have Applied the Work
The Kind of Work I Want to Do

I am most interested in Product Management, Product Operations, and strategy-to-execution leadership roles where complex organizations need clearer decisions, stronger operating systems, and better cross-functional execution. I am particularly effective when the role requires both high-level synthesis and enough operating depth to design, pilot, and implement the solution.

The common thread is helping organizations make better decisions, reduce avoidable complexity, and move important work from intent to measurable value.

Happy to walk through specific examples. Resumé, LinkedIn, or email below.