Andrew Korbel
VP, R&D Operations & Chief of Staff
Actions
I’ve never had a set destination when considering my career—my first job out of college was as a cartographer! I’ve always gravitated toward opportunities that challenge me to think differently while bringing a balance between big-picture thinking and execution.
Unsurprisingly, my interests have led me to various roles within software companies. Today, I currently lead R&D Operations at Clari. Before this role, I was a VP in the Product & Technology Center of Excellence at Insight Partners. While at Insight Partners, I worked closely with portfolio company executives to accelerate growth and create operational capabilities through lean and agile processes and data-driven strategies. Being a part of the team at Insight allowed me to leverage all my learnings and failures throughout my career to give back to Senior Executives across their portfolio of companies. Previously to Insight Partners, I was the VP of Product Operations at Carbon Black, where I designed and built their product operations capabilities. I’ve also been Chief of Staff to product and engineering leaders, along with leading R&D Operations at Rally Software and SignalFx through their ScaleUp journeys. I’ve also spearheaded engineering at other B2B SaaS companies.
I love sharing my knowledge and experiences in scaling and orchestrating R&D organizations. I live in Colorado but grew up in West Virginia. I enjoy spending time with my family and taking advantage of all that Colorado offers, including hiking, camping, skiing, and the Nuggets, to name a few. I’m an avid bike rider and Pittsburgh sports fan, and I love to cook and read!
Transforming Planning and Execution by Leveraging The Big Room: True Stories from the Frontlines
Abstract: Has your Engineering and Product organization grown exponentially through the pandemic, increasing the number of teams? Has this created more complexity in how you plan and execute? This session is targeted to help you create new ideas to bring back to your organization through storytelling and answering the following questions:
How can you align the organization around a compelling vision of where we are going with planning and execution? (The Pain)
What are the typical ingredients needed to ensure a strong foundation for success? (The Work/The Teams/Values)
What are some practices needed to get to the Big Room? (The Prioritization of Investments)
What happens in the Big Room? (Creating “Our” Plan/Appreciation/Quick Decisions)
What happens after the Big Room? (Steering the Plan)
Why this isn’t the destination but the starting point? (Creating Better Systems and Ways to Work)
There is not a one-size fits all solution to make any organization magically shed all its issues to reduce complexity. However, from our experiences running R&D organizations and advising many CTOs and CPOs, patterns have emerged on how to jump-start an organization in the right direction for them to create their more prominent destination and find the bottlenecks in the system. Join us as we tell stories of our past experiences and show what we have found to be successful in transforming how Product and Engineering organizations plan and execute.
Product Development’s Secret Weapon - R&D Operations - Balancing Outputs and Outcomes
Do you find yourself in a feature factory where it’s all about outputs? Have you over-rotated towards its all about product strategy and lost sight of product development team effectiveness and execution? Maybe you, as a leader, find yourself spending inordinate amounts of time in strategic planning and/or the product development execution black hole just trying to figure out which way is up. This session is targeted to introduce you to the concept of R&D Operations to help you understand how this function helps you and the product development organization be more effective by answering the following questions:
Why R&D Operations?
What are the components of a great R&D Operations Team? (Product/Engineering Operations)
What are the 4 key R&D Operational Domains?
What is the evolution of Operations in Product Development?
When should I invest in this function?
How do I get started?
With the advent of Product Operations now in concert with Engineering Program Management, you can create that secret weapon that drives the balance of outputs and outcomes in your Product Development Organization. Join me as I talk through the importance of the R&D Operations function while providing the patterns I have seen throughout my career working within software companies and being an advisor to 100s of R&D Leaders across many different startups and scaleup software companies
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top