Product manager & experience designer with a passion for taming technical systems. Design thinking skills from my industrial design education are my superpower for solving UX problems in cloud infrastructure.
I have expertise in producing and shipping open source software as part of a holistic product experience. Understanding how OSS communities release software is critical to influencing roadmap, reducing risk, and aligning OSS objectives with commercial products.
Check out my keynote from Kubecon 2018 about the “Operator” initiative to bring over-the-air updates and automated application delivery to Kubernetes.
At Red Hat, I lead a team of Product Managers working on OpenShift. OpenShift 4, a major rearchitecture, is based on CoreOS technology that brings Operators and an ethos around automation to ease cluster administration.
At CoreOS, I was the lead PM for Tectonic, our enterprise Kubernetes product. Guided 50+ engineers and 6 teams to lead the container market, before our acquisition by Red Hat.
Before containers, I was pivotal in launching Rackspace’s OpenStack cloud and redesign of the customer control panel.
I learned design thinking through the industrial design program at Virginia Tech. Physical product design heavily resembles technology:
1. prototype always
2. the UX/customer journey is measured in years
3. must remain agile as the market changes
I enjoy understanding infrastructure systems and deployment pipelines, with a focus on the user.
I have designed many APIs, CLIs and distributed system features with an eye towards reducing technical debt and planning for the future.
I have quickly built credibility with engineers by understanding component relationships and using them advantageously in feature planning.
Incredibly proud of etcd, rkt, Container Linux, dex, and the rest of the open source brought to life at CoreOS.
My redesigned monitoring alerts, consumed by the millions, reduce stress for folks on call.
I love talking customers through the design patterns that form the core of Kubernetes. Simple, smart, and futuristic compared to other systems.
I enjoy running the most technically advanced, HA, over provisioned infrastructure for robszumski.com. First on Rackspace Cloud, and now in containers on CoreOS Tectonic.