Prior to founding Huruda Inc., Chris Barron was a Product Management and Product Marketing veteran in Silicon Valley. His career spans a wide range of businesses from a boutique artificial intelligence firm to the likes of Oracle, Yahoo! and VMware – three of the largest software companies in the world. It also spans diverse technologies from the old days of floppy disks to multi-platform enterprise applications and SaaS offerings running in the cloud. (He also hates how incomprehensible that last sentence is to people outside of software, like his mom who, to this day, asks if he’s “working on some kind of chip”.)
Chris possesses deep experience in bringing ideas to market and managing product life-cycles, especially by applying Agile principles. In his past roles at companies using Agile methodologies, he served as ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Chief Product Owner for numerous teams. He is also unique in the Agile Marketing discipline where Huruda is the only Scrum Alliance Registered Education Provider.
With this unique breadth of experience, he’s able to apply lessons learned from both successes and failures to almost any situation. Since founding Huruda in 2013, he has worked with clients in a range of industries including finance, industrial power management, manufacturing, telecommunications, insurance, and advertising.
“I understand how easy it is to focus too much on what you’re building and how you’re building it while ignoring the other really important questions – why? and for who? Those are the factors that drive most of the change companies race to react to. I’ve seen many under-performing teams try dubious fixes – like keep doing the ‘wrong’ things but do them twice as hard. Like just make more detailed specs, just add more gate reviews, just add more resources, etc. Unfortunately, those approaches typically make things worse and start vicious cycles of downward business performance.
I’ve improved the effectiveness and success of a number of organizations by aligning teams and leadership on the same vision and road-map, from the big picture down to the details. And, of course, coaching them to follow-up through execution. It’s always an interesting challenge, but I’ve done it repeatedly and I love helping teams become more successful.”