The Hardest Job in Start-ups: First time CEO.

Rob invested in me and the team to accelerate delivery and focus on the customer. He trained us up to become Scrum Master's and Product Owners in a most unconventional but highly effective way: We took a 1 hour online course on Demingway. We then met as a team to participate in a small number of highly structured workshops -- topics included empirical process control in scrum, lean canvas, roles and accountabilities, that made us think deeply and helped us understand our deliverables. It was from this training that I was able to pass my CSM and bring value to my team.

Rob in an exceptionally talented thoughtful leader in learning science and software engineering. We were able to make our Harvard-Microsoft Adaptive Learning Open Source Initiative (ALOSI) a reality due to his unique abilities in organizational collaboration via Scrum, program leadership and vision and pushing for broad goals for the project. I'm grateful to Rob for his key contributions in organizing the open source community, leading code review, performance engineering, deployment thinking and effective communication. Working with Rob on complex engineering and learning science project is a superb experience.

I had the great pleasure of working with Rob on the extensive collaboration between McKinsey Academy and edX. Rob's leadership on the project spanned bridging executive teams, building an optimal development organization and determining the ultimate technical architecture, all while stewarding edX internal priorities and fostering the burgeoning Open edX community. It is an impressive body of work.

Rob has the rare ability to understand technology stacks and engineering team dynamics and at a very deep level with an uncompromising focus on business goals. He's able to ensure technology and strategy are never at odds. And perhaps most importantly, he garners the respect of his executive peers and technical teams through his knowledge, constant insights and integrity.

From time-to-time in your professional career you're fortunate enough to work with people like Rob who inspire you, drive you, and help you to see opportunities where others only see risks or complications.
Simply put, Rob is one of the most entrepreneurial people I've had the privilege of working with. His vision, imagination, and bold ambition serve as an inspiration to me, and his careful mentoring and well-timed interventions help the teams that he leads to succeed and have also helped me to succeed as a professional.
Rob's leadership of the Microsoft Professional Program core team (which he subsequently handed off to me after it achieved a sufficient state of maturity) was a "master class" in entrepreneurial leadership. I'm grateful for our business partnership and friendship, and thank Rob for challenging and inspiring me to be the best professional and leader I can be.

During this time Rob managed to bring immense value to our organization as on top of coaching his line of business he boosted the agile coaching skills of all the agile coaches in our Center of Excellence.

Rob coached our Scrum masters, PMs and managers on continuous backlog management, effective big room planning, manage dependencies more effectively, how to use Non-Violent Communication and how to use Large Scale Estimation method for initial estimation of our roadmap features.
As OpenAI entered our lives, Rob built an interactive Product Manager workshop for OpenAI including prompt engineering guide for writing epics & stories. and led a hackathon effort to build an internal tool for PMs based on OpenAI.
it was impressive to see how Rob managed to map organization challenges and help us improve our productivity.