Greg Unrein

Contact info

Overview

I'm a software engineering and product leader, advisor, and investor who loves to design, program, and talk to users. 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.

Work experience

2023 - present Currently exploring ideas in observability.


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)

Personal interests

Family time, programming, computer science, mathematics, hiking, forestry, ecology, soil, road trips, history.