Hello
My name is Jade Rubick. I build thriving engineering organizations. My specialty is humane, results-focused organizations.
Background
I started out as a developer and have spent most of my career leading engineering teams. I was a VP of Engineering at New Relic, where I wrote the product handbook that described how our product teams worked. I led engineering and product at Gremlin and Campus, and was CTO at Flatfile.
Since 2020, I've stepped into engineering leadership roles at startups like Mode, Castle, RevolutionParts, and SimpleConsign, usually to stabilize the organization, improve how it delivers, and then hire my permanent replacement. Doing that over and over has taught me a lot about how engineering organizations work, how they fail, and what it takes to hire the right leader for them.
These days most of my time goes to advising CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and CEOs at startups.
What I believe
I don't think you have to choose between effective and humane. The organizations I most admire ship well because they treat people well: people know what's expected of them, can see why their work matters, and are trusted to figure out how to do it.
I treat organizational changes as experiments. Explain the reasoning, try the change, see what happens, and keep or roll it back. Most of the time the lightweight fix beats the heavy one.
Underrepresented people are the best test of a company's culture. Improvements you make for them usually make the company better for everyone. At New Relic, we achieved an employee NPS that was equal across demographic groups. At Gremlin, underrepresented representation in engineering went from 7% to 38% in a little over a year. What helped was engineering levels, fair compensation, a good promotion process, and a humane hiring process.
What I write, and why
I like to share what I've learned. Most leadership advice is either simplistic or too abstract to use, and I try to write the practical, specific version I wished I'd had.
- Engineering Leadership Weekly: one essay a week on building humane, effective engineering organizations.
- Decoding Leadership: a podcast where we break down the elements of humane and effective leadership.
- A course for new managers, delivered by email over five months.
- The wiki: my working notes on engineering leadership topics.
Working together
If you lead an engineering organization and want an experienced partner, see how I work with clients. Or just say hello.
Most popular posts
This blog's code is open sourced on GitHub thanks to Atte Juvonen and others before him. Feel free to submit corrections or use the code to create your own blog (but do not host my content elsewhere).