# Mike Hall _Listen like you don't know the answer._ - 8723 SE Claybourne Street, Portland, Oregon, 97266 - cell: (503)333-0109 - [Website][] - [GitHub][] - [LinkedIn][] Summary ------- I've led cross-functional groups across software engineering, IT operations, IT services, project management, and technical publications. I'm passionate about creating safe, diverse, equitable teams and I do that by listening carefully to every voice and empowering people to define success. Work Experience --------------- ### Puppet #### Senior Director of Information Technology (Aug 15, 2021 - Present) - Developed a tool governance working group coordinating the efforts of Compliance, Finance, IT, and Revenue Operations to ensure additions and changes to the Puppet portfolio were reviewed for compliance and security and prioritized for delivery. - Led a strategic initiative to operationalize SaaS delivery models for new products and incubations, coordinating a cross-functional team of go-to-market, engineering, IT, product, customer success, and HR leaders. Led strategic leaders across the company to develop and execute on OKRs and coordinate efforts between backoffice and product engineers. - Led efforts to radically simplify networking and infrastructure for Puppet corporate IT, shifting to zero-trust security principles, a 50 percent reduction in data center footprint, and increased use of DevOps practices between IT and engineering teams. ### #### Senior Director of Operations, Chief of Staff for Research and Development (Apr 1, 2019 - Aug 15, 2021) - Developed and led a cross-functional tech governance working group to provide company-wide decision-making on key technology and security issues, including digital transformation, open source policy, technology procurement process, and network security. - Drove a continuous integration improvement program that reduced developer feedback times from 10 minutes to 45 seconds through aggressive test reduction, cross-functional collaboration, and improved measurement. - Reorganized developer services to include on-site support for international software development centers. - Led a cross-functional revamp of internal security communications, ensuring engineering, customer success, and corporate infosec teams are fully engaged within hours of discovering a new vulnerability instead of days. - Led the reinvigoration of open source practices through ownership of a company-wide open source development initiative, doubling contributions to upstream open source projects. - Drove the refocus of technical documentation from a software-manual-oriented approach to emphasize user time to value. ### #### Senior Director of Business Operations, Director of Business Operations (Oct 1, 2017 - Mar 31, 2019) - Introduced network change testing practices to IT operations that drove down outages to core user services and allow for faster, more confident change. Major outages of key services caused by a lack of testing dropped from an average of 2.5 outages per quarter to zero per quarter for four quarters running. - Led the development of cloud reporting and automation efforts for AWS, GCP, and Azure, providing portfolio-level reporting of cloud expenses. - Recast the Puppet help desk from a pure customer service organization to a multi-function team able to deliver technical projects such as the addition of Windows as a supported desktop platform, the replacement of an on-premises telephony service for a 30 percent reduction in voice services costs, and project management services. Post-transformation, the team maintained an average customer ease rating of 4.8 (out of 5). #### Director of Engineering (Nov 1, 2015 - Oct 1, 2017) - Director of Puppet's platform engineering and technical publications groups, with four managers and 37 staff; responsible for the development of the Puppet language, Puppet Server, PuppetDB, Hiera, Facter, and Bolt, using Ruby, Clojure, and Rust. - Developed and directed a collaborative working group of staff and managers to redevelop an organizational structure of 170 employees, including the production of change management resources, workspace planning, team assignments, and training material. - Led a project management team, implementing an agile practices group that helped coach and guide scrum teams on Agile practices in the absence of a dedicated scrum master group. - Served as an acting vice president of engineering during an interim period, with six direct reports including managers of UX, project management, engineering operations, and technical publications. #### Director of Technical Publications, Manager of Technical Publications (Jan 1, 2014 - Nov 1, 2015) - Led a ten-person technical publications team providing writing services across Puppet: technical documentation, reference architectures, API documentation, user quickstart guides, marketing copy, HR material, and board reports. - Led the development and implementation of a Puppet-wide style guide, used by the technical publications, marketing, and education teams to ensure consistency of voice and language across the company. - Rearchitected the technical publications site to help a customer base transitioning from early adopters to early majority quickly find technical content while still serving our open source users with complete documentation of our upstream technologies. #### Managing Editor and Content Lead (Apr 1, 2013 - Jan 1, 2014) - Led the Puppet content marketing team to increase traffic to the company blog by 68 percent, increase the percentage of new visitors by 45 percent year-over-year, and drop the bounce rate by 12 percent year-over-year. - Increased the conversion rate for company blog content by 91 percent through development of new content and design practices. - Created custom Drupal taxonomies and integrated them with Google Analytics, producing automatic reporting with no need for collation from the content staff. ### Social Media Today, LLC #### Director of Technology (May 1, 2011 - Oct 1, 2012) - Led website performance optimization efforts, using proactive performance monitoring to cut site load-times in half. - Reduced new feature deployment times and errors by building virtual test environments that accurately reproduced production environments on developer desktops. - Managed external support teams, standardizing version control (SVN) best practices. - Configured and maintained LAMP-based development and staging environments. ### QuinStreet #### Senior Managing Editor, Managing Editor (Sep 1, 2000 - May 1, 2011) - Reduced editorial staff monthly reporting time from dozens of hours per month to five minutes per editor by designing, developing and managing a Rails-based content analysis application tracking 40 websites and thousands of articles. Staff received regular automated reporting on content cost, revenue and performance metrics with minimal effort. - Managed a team of seven writers as the senior managing editor on three websites, commissioning freelance assignments, managing monthly budgets, editing content, conducting SEO audits and advising redesign efforts. - Piloted the deployment of Google Analytics and wrote extensive analytics automation using the GA API and Ruby on Rails. Publications ------------ ### The Joy of Linux, Jan 1, 2001 "An alternative to a manual on Linux operating systems, offering a conversational and celebratory look at the history and evolution of Linux, as well as its cultures, communities, and controversies." ### Open Door Policy Guides, Jan 1, 2016 Led a cross-functional team of managers and individual contributors, developing guides that clarified how Puppet's open door policies worked in clear, simple language that helped employees to understand their rights when engaging in difficult open door conversations, and managers to understand their responsibility for confidentiality, safety, and coaching. Led manager training on the guides. Education --------- - Manchester University, 1986-1990, Philosophy, Journalism - Portland State University, 2012-2014, Arts & Letters [Website]: http://mph.puddingbowl.org [GitHub]: https://github.com/pdxmph [LinkedIn]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhallpdx