SCOTT M. JOHNSTON

EXPERIENCE

• Led a product strategy that integrated the wiki with targeted applications. Applications now appear as "page types" allowing a user to benefit from the organic nature of the wiki while leveraging the structured data in applications. This significantly impacted page creation and shortened the time it took a user to understand potential uses of the wiki.
• Solely responsible for designing, developing, and marketing JotSpot's consumer applications targeted at Family collaborations and Class Reunions. Press outreach drove traffic that shattered JotSpot's record for new customers in a day.
• Assembled a JotSpot user experience team which redesigned the JotSpot wiki and unified the look and feel.
• Managed all aspects of the ebay wiki project including the contract, budget, resources, technical architecture, and project plan. The project successfully delivered a community wiki for eBay built on the JotSpot platform. The project team included internal JotSpot employees, external contractors, ebay resources, and outsourced QA and was the largest transaction to date at JotSpot.
• Part of the leadership team that more than doubled JotSpot's size.
• Made significant improvements in JotSpot's development processes by implementing up front designs, continuous builds, continuous QA, and a feature freeze milestone. Managed product releases using agile development principles.
• Took the initiative to rearchitect JotSpot's internal billing systems after discovering significant inefficiencies.

• Built an organization and development process focused on user centered design.
• Delivered requirements and designs for over six major releases of the product suite.
• Managed teams of Product Managers, Subject Matter Experts, and Interaction Designers responsible for taking high level marketing requirements and translating them to product requirements, product designs, and front-end interface. Responsible for all aspects of the division include hiring, employee performance, salaries, bonus, and budgeting.
• Defined the requirements process and functional product direction for the IT Governance Suite.
• Interacted with customers to gather product feedback and define future product requirements.
• Developed user testing processes and regular customer feedback sessions tailored to agile development with customers such as Marsh & McLennan, Albertsons, Nike, and Hospira.

• Part of the leadership team that took Kintana from a bootstrapped startup to 250 employees ending in a successful acquisition by Mercury in 08/03.
• Developed user-centered design process.
• Owned product design for the entire IT Governance Suite .
• Managed a team of interaction designers responsible for the product interface.

• As part of an initial team of ten developers, built, architected, supported, and implemented a three-tier J2EE enterprise application targeted at IT Governance. The application is currently a market leader and business critical to companies such as GE, Cisco, AIG, and Fidelity.
• Lead a project to enter new markets and explore new architectures and user interfaces. Built a three-tier enterprise exchange that allowed customers to adopt a standard automated support process with zero infrastructure. Technology and interface was rolled back into the core suite at completion.
• Worked with Marketing to define product functionality for future releases .

• As part of the initial architecture team, responsible for flow model simulations, data analysis and general architecture decisions for a four million transistor OpenGL graphics ASIC.
• Personally responsible for the design, coding, synthesis, and simulation of a key section of the ASIC (~50,000 transistors). This included detailed verification test plans for the blocks as well as management of the test writers.
• Completely designed the verification environment for a sub-system. This included specification and coding of wrappers and watchers as well as supporting scripts and make targets.

• Part of a two-person team responsible for the architecture, code, lay-out, fabrication, and testing of an ASIC that handled communication and data transfer between 12 parallel processors for a microphone array.
• Maximized performance by modifying component libraries in order to meet throughput requirements of 210Mbits/sec.

• Part of a team to build a satellite (Gravity Probe B) to test unverified predictions in Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
• Responsible for designing and implementing a facility to create single event latch-up in satellite componentry.
• Used facility to design, build, and test recovery circuitry. Successful launch in 4/2004.

SKILLS

I have been part of the management staff that lead many releases of large software products in both the enterprise and consumer space. Some of the releases went well, others went poorly. I had more fun with the former but learned a lot more from the latter. I have been a hardware engineer, java developer, architect, manager, director, and VP. I believe titles are meaningless, as are employee numbers. If you can't tell me what have accomplished I don't care if you were employee number ten and the VP of something important.

I have written a lot of Java and have built large applications using J2EE, JMS, hibernate, XML, XSLT, JSP, Struts, HTML, CSS and other such acronyms. I was a technical reviewer for the book J2EE and XML Development and the authors still speak to me. I admit to being skeptical that SOA will deliver on everything promised. Anybody that tells you XML is the key to interoperability is full of shit. Standards are the key to interoperability and sadly nobody seems that interested standardizing. Even something as simple as RSS has an Atom.

I love PHP and Perl and worship Larry Wall but still see the value in type checking. I regularly use and abuse MySQL for fun. I built and maintain the VIM website in my free time but don't hold the look and feel or performance against me. I do have friends who use Emacs but I secretly feel superior.

When I was a hardware designer I worked with Verilog, VHDL, C, make, Pascal, MC6800 & MIPS Assembly, Synopsis (dc_shell). I can write marginal C++ but I guarantee Java has made me horrible at memory management.

EDUCATION

PERSONAL