Darren Hodder

01. about

02. experience

1. 2023 — present Ottawa, ON

   Head of Product / Owner @ Ravenblack / Atomic Meridian

   • Owner and sole contributor of the AI portfolio and strategy. Delivered an AI-powered user interface designer and code-generating tools.
   • Productized the existing portfolio and took it to market with a complete product lifecycle management programme.
   • Built and launched developer and administrator tools for OpenText's Content Server ECM platform.
   • Introduced code management practices and a CI/CD pipeline.
2. 2018 — 2023 Ottawa, ON

   Shopify

   Technical Program Manager 2022 — 2023

   • Defined the vision and technology path for a year-long program to improve performance of the core Shopify platform, which led to a new data strategy and collection platform for measuring merchant and customer performance.
   • Set goals and metrics, secured executive buy-in, shipped the first data instrumentation and set the long-term roadmap.

   Manager, Technical Programs 2021 — 2022

   • Led 4 engineers as product owner to research, design and build a new internal product for managing merchant-reported defects.
   • Shipped production Ruby on Rails features on the front and back end, including data models and the bug submission UI.
   • Rewrote the product playbook for 100+ crafters building internal tooling, and trained them on agile and product practices.

   User Experience Manager 2019 — 2021

   • Built a team of four UX researchers and designers for a 50+ person R&D org, and set clear guidelines for developers.
   • Teams adopted UX principles and shipped new features and products 40% faster.

   Senior Product Manager, Support Technology 2018 — 2019

   • First product manager on a 30-engineer internal tooling team, owning all merchant self-help products.
   • Led new ML products that map merchants' support journeys to the best resolution. They cut unnecessary advisor conversations by 38% across thousands of daily interactions, saving $14 per avoided conversation.
3. 2012 — 2018 Ottawa, ON · Cardiff, UK

   OpenText

   Product Manager, Content Intelligence 2014 — 2018

   • Owned the full lifecycle of Content Intelligence, a suite for tailoring and customizing OpenText Content Server.
   • Shipped quarterly releases on roadmap and grew license revenue more than 10% year over year, from $200K to over $2M annually.

   Senior Solutions Consultant / Technical Pre-Sales 2012 — 2014

   • The sales team's sole technical member. Built custom demos and solutions that closed over $1M in enterprise deals.
4. 2005 — 2012 Hamilton, ON · Cardiff, UK

   Resonate Knowledge Technologies (acquired by OpenText)

   Support Manager 2009 — 2012

   • Built a custom support system and issue tracker, defined SLAs and standard operating procedures, and improved quality for 100+ customers.

   Developer 2005 — 2009

   • Shipped full-stack features (client UI, server-side rendering and database layer) for what became OpenText Content Intelligence, using OScript and OpenText's SDK.
5. 2002 — 2005 Hamilton, ON

   MARS Officer @ Royal Canadian Navy (Reserve)

   • Maritime Surface and Sub-surface officer focused on navigation and leadership.
   • Regular participant in PAXSims simulation-based conflict and peacekeeping scenarios.

03. projects

Personal and professional projects where I wrote real code and features. There's more on GitHub.

Merchant Bug Tracker

An internal Shopify product for tracking merchant-reported defects to resolution. Three engineers and I built it from the ground up in four months.

Read the case study

Problem

Every month, support escalated hundreds of validated merchant defects. Over half went to the wrong team's GitHub repo (there were more than 12,000), and few of the rest were resolved on time.

Solution

We did more research on the workflows and jobs to be done on both sides: support, who report bugs, and R&D, who fix them. We wrote a tech design, circulated it for feedback, built a one-sprint prototype to learn from and then threw it away. Then we built and shipped the real thing within a month.

Impact

Support got a clear UI for reporting bugs. Automation routed each one to the right team and opened a matching GitHub issue. R&D got notifications and SLAs, and leadership got complete, accurate quality data. Resolution within SLA rose above 80%.

• React
• Ruby on Rails

again.wtf

A site that analyzes sentiment in natural-language queries with Google's Natural Language API. Built and deployed on GCP.

• Ruby on Rails
• Google Cloud

view source ↗

Custom Synth Oscillators

Custom effects and oscillators for the Korg Minilogue synthesizer, written with Korg's logue SDK.

• C
• C++
• DSP

view source ↗

Advent of Code

Placed 3rd in a team Advent of Code challenge, solving most puzzles in pure Ruby.

• Ruby

view source ↗

Conference Sign Up

A Rails site for a cloud innovation conference that collects attendee sign-ups in a database.

• Ruby on Rails

view source ↗

Design Agency

A website for a design agency with a database for capturing sign-ups.

• Ruby on Rails

view source ↗

04. skills

education & certifications

• 2005B.A., Mathematics & Physics · McMaster University
• 2019User Experience Researcher · Akendi
• 2018Certified Scrum Product Owner & Scrum Master · Scrum Alliance
• 2015Level III Product Management · Pragmatic Marketing
• —Amateur Radio Operator · ISED Canada