Fugue Story
Company: Fugue, Inc. (2015-2018)
Role: Director of UX, Data Visualization Strategy, Director of Product Management
Introduction
Once my tenure at HelloWallet was over, the next chapter of my career focused on a new subject – the Cloud.
Fugue was the next turning point in my career. Fugue’s mission was focused on revolutionizing the way that humans interact with cloud infrastructure – the building blocks of what makes something like “iCloud” actually in the cloud!
The CEO himself, Josh Stella, hired me as a “UX Architect” – which essentially meant that I was the first UX Designer to to join, and my mission was to bring UX best practices and processes to Fugue.
At the time, Fugue’s entire product development organization was made up of one Graphic Designer and about 20+ DevOps engineers (including former Amazon Solution Architects) – and none of them knew what UX was. This was a minor hiccup in ensuring UX could have the necessary impact at Fugue.
The first major impact I had as a leader at Fugue was to get the entire company trained up on Agile Product Development and UX processes. I used my Scrum Master (certified) knowledge to help implement and influence all engineering teams.
My Product Management (PM) skills were developed over 5 years at HelloWallet, thanks largely to partnering with very senior PMs. To my humble surprise, I was promoted to Director of Product Management due to the improvements leadership saw in their engineering teams. I inherited one Jr PM to help me, and once he started to feel comfortable with his role I started to shift back to UX Design.
By this point, the design team grew to include two UI Designers. I informally managed and led them in using the UX Design process (in particular, the LEAN model).
Fugue’s products were technically very complex, but they all revolved around the same goal – provide cloud native companies with a secure policy engine in their CI/CD pipelines to reduce the chances of compliance problems when provisioning cloud infrastructure.
In order to accomplish this goal, Fugue created a infrastructure templating language called Ludwig, an engine that would continuously evaluate any Fugue-created infrastructure for configuration drift and auto-remediate, and an IDE for composing templates of Ludwig that would visualize the to-be created infrastructure.
