Greg Unrein

Contact info

Overview

A user-centric software engineering and product leader, advisor, and investor who loves to help people, talk with users, design solutions, and program. I can lead, manage, and directly do the hands-on work for design, implementation, deployment, customer discovery, and business+product strategy. I'm particularly interested in observability, monitoring, measurement, resilience, continuous learning, fast cycle times, methodology, simplicity, and great user+developer experiences.

As a hobby I work on forest and riparian conservation with my family as part of Buncombe Hollow Forest and similar volunteer activities.

Work experience

2023 - present

Currently exploring ideas in observability.

2020 - present

Steward and conservationist - Buncombe Hollow Forest
Restoring native species to suppress invasives, improving beaver habitat, and fish passage on this award winning family tree farm.

2021 - 2023

CTO - Hasura
https://www.hasura.io/
At Hasura I helped clarify the product and technical strategies while I grew and matured engineering, product management, and product design.

  • Hired strong leaders for engineering and product management; invested in developer experience, product quality, faster lead time and release cadence (from twice per year to every two weeks), architecture improvements, documentation team, and product analytics
  • Reorganized Engineering, PM, and Design to increase connection to users, increase team satisfaction, reduce context switching, increase focus, increase ownership, and reduce lead time
  • Made architectural improvements in all areas of the product and services
  • Collaborated with the executive team on business strategy, product strategy, pricing, and packaging; increased transparency through weekly, monthly, and quarterly updates
  • Improved processes, tools, and documentation to foster a psychologically safe learning environment that captured knowledge regularly; DORA metrics, incident response, first formal reviews, structure and checklists for improvements, releases, and launches

2020 - 2021

Limited Partner - Oregon Venture Fund
https://oregonventurefund.com/
Participated in diligence and investment in multiple companies.

2013 - 2020

Group VP of Engineering, Group VP of Product - New Relic
https://www.newrelic.com/
Progressively took on more responsibility starting in product management then moved into engineering as the company grew from ~350 to ~2200 people.

  • At various times led engineering and/or product management for the APM, Infrastructure, Browser, Synthetics, Logging, Serverless, and parts of the platform (not all at once)
  • Advocated for and sponsored New Relic's participation in OpenTelemetry and led the engineering group who published New Relic's proprietary agents as open source (some were source available before)
  • Coached and mentored leaders; helped grow organizations and teams; fostered the culture
  • Helped establish product management as a function

2011 - 2013

Director of Product - Cedexis
https://www.cedexis.com/
Responsible for product management and design for the RUM (real user monitoring) and DNS-based adaptive global load balancer products.

  • Collaborated with the CEO and co-founder on product direction
  • Worked closely with the VP of Engineering, engineering team, and designers on requirements and designs; programmed small parts of browser UI
  • Worked with sales engineers to understand challenges and opportunities in the field
  • Engaged customers around user needs, buyer needs, designs, and the roadmap

2011 - 2011

Product Manager - Jama Software
https://www.jamasoftware.com/
A brief tenure focused on product management for the company's requirements management product.

  • Organized and led the company's first CAB (customer advisory board) meeting
  • Collaborated with the CEO and co-founder on product direction
  • Worked closely with the VP of Engineering, engineering team, and designers on requirements and designs
  • Engaged customers, sales engineers, and sales reps around user needs, buyer needs, designs, and the roadmap

2004 - 2010

Senior Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Support Engineer - Jive Software
https://www.jivesoftware.com/
Joined when the company was bootstrapped and < 10 people; grew to about ~350 people.

  • Started, led, and managed the customer engineering team which was brought in when there were particularly challenging technical issues with customer deployments
  • Product managed Jive's XMPP-based IM server and client as well as the flagship Clearspace product
  • Established the support department as the first support engineer focused on scaling and troubleshooting the Java-based server and interfaces to various relational DBs (usually Postgres, Oracle, or DB2)

Notable activities

Personal interests

Family time, programming, computer science, mathematics, hiking, forest and riparian conservation, ecology, soil, road trips, history.