Kenneth S. Rubin
Kenny Rubin provides Scrum and agile training and coaching to help companies develop products in an effective and economically sensible way. A Certified Scrum Trainer, Kenny has trained over 18,000 people on agile and Scrum, Smalltalk development, managing object-oriented projects, and transition management. He has coached over 200 companies, ranging from start-ups to Fortune 10.
Kenny was the first Managing Director of the worldwide Scrum Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on the successful adoption of Scrum. In addition to this book, Kenny is also the coauthor of the 1995 book Succeeding with Objects: Decision Frameworks for Project Management. He received his B.S. in Information and Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Kenny’s background is rooted in the object-oriented technology community. He started as a Smalltalk developer on a NASA-funded project back in 1985 and developed the first blackboard expert system outside of LISP. In 1988 he was fortunate to join ParcPlace Systems, a start-up company formed as a Xerox PARC spin-off, whose charter was to bring object-oriented technology out of the research labs and release it to the world. As a Smalltalk development consultant with many different organizations in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Kenny was an early adopter of agile practices. His first use of Scrum was in 2000 for developing bioinformatics software.
In the course of his career, Kenny has held many roles, including successful stints as a Scrum product owner, ScrumMaster, and member of development teams. In addition, he has held numerous executive management roles: CEO, COO, VP of Engineering, VP of Product Management, and VP of Professional Services. He has also overseen the development of five commercial software product suites, generating over $200M in aggregate revenue. In addition, he has been directly involved in raising over $150M in venture capital funding and assisted in taking two companies public on the NASDAQ.
His multifaceted background gives Kenny the ability to understand (and explain) Scrum and its implications equally well from multiple perspectives: from the development team to the executive board.