Jacob Fierro

N/A

In my role as CTO at Cinematique I was able to make sweeping changes to the company. From the way the company thought about and measured product success, the process by which they developed their software and, perhaps most importantly, the way in which they worked together as a team. A great team must have processes in place that allow them to work without friction. They must have open communication, the freedom and encouragement to make mistakes, and to be laser focused on delivering value. When I arrived I saw a company full of potential, but locked into non-optimal patterns. Without positive processes these bad patterns developed organically over the years. Within a week of my arrival we moved the team into SCRUM sprints with a strong focus on the cultural benefits of the process. I introduced cross-functional communication, promoted the concept of organizational learning and focused myself on removing work friction for team members. This was an emotional time for many, it can be a challenge to trust a new process but I am extremely proud of the leaps the team made in a short period of time. Within a few sprints the team was communicating and working like never before. Next, I began a program of external user testing. Having organized small, cross-functional teams we went to the streets of Manhattan with our product. After the first hour of gathering feedback the benefit was clear, we had an incredible amount of actionable takeaways. As a bonus, the user-testing program was culturally invigorating. This lead to further adoption of assumption-validation and organizational learning. Finally, within the tech team we were able to increase our velocity many times over in a few months. More accurate time estimation gave us the ability to plan with unprecedented detail. We adopted cutting edge solutions for our analytics and reduced the code weight by 75%.

I was the primary front-end developer for the company during my tenure. I built a version of their main website (no longer in use) and converted their web based touchable video player to a new version via a complete code base rewrite using Angular. I contributed to an early version of their content system leveraging React. The team was small and lean but very formidable and pushed a very large amount of product through the door in a limited time span. During my time at this start up I was regularly and intimately involved in UX discussions and planning. I viewed myself as a user advocate and had frequent and direct access to all levels of the team from tech to business and marketing.