My name is Paul Gambill, and I am a Project Manager who is focused on leading cross-functional teams to produce the best quality work possible. I'm passionate about using feedback-driven mechanisms for improving process, and I even wrote an iOS App to gauge meeting productivity.
I live in Seattle, Washington, and I love spending time outside - whether at the beach or the mountains. I'm fond of experimenting with nutrition, and take great pleasure in cooking an elegant meal.
With a focus on using Agile and Lean principles to break down unnecessary systems and get to the root of issues early and often, my teams deliver quality software both quickly and efficiently. I am inspired by groups of individual contributors who come together and take responsibility for a project as a team. My job is to construct the organizational systems that encourage the confluence of all these things.
My educational background is in both engineering and management, and allows me to understand problems from multiple perspectives. I can quickly grasp complex technical tradeoffs and compare them with business needs. I am able to move from engagement discussions with customers and clients to development architecture discussions with ease.
As the Scrum Master for a 14 person cross-functional team, I coached in Agile processes and unblocked their way to delivering an iOS mobile point-of-sale application for a large athletics retailer in just 3 months time. After an initial pilot program in two stores, the client's executive leadership was so thrilled with the results that we began scaling the application for deployment to every store in the United States. As a response, I led the team in a transition from Scrum to Kanban (Scrumban) so that we could remove unnecessary processes and better respond to changing needs from production.
I also drive the strategic vision and architectural design as the Product Owner for an internal intranet web development project. Motivated by the process changes I led in my own client project, this team has 12+ volunteers from both my existing team and outside it. Under my direction, we pivoted from a wiki-based system to a custom Ruby on Rails modular application in just 2 months to improve our development process and work in separate streams.
I worked as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer on several different iOS projects for clients, including Showtime Anytime. I wrote test cases that ensured effective test coverage, and paired with developers on bug fixes and ensuring the mobile solutions we delivered were free of defects and delighted both consumers and the clients.
When not actively engaged on client work, I successfully completed the Stanford iOS Course so that I was better prepared for working with development teams from a technical perspective. I also built a Ruby on Rails web application in 3 weeks to meet a departmental need for automated testing of web services.
In this one year Master's program, I focused my studies both on project management and general business. Courses were designed to teach students from engineering backgrounds the fundamentals necessary to succeed at all levels of business.
My very favorite course was called Designing Customer Experiences, and it taught me the value in learning who your users are and how they use your product. The best unseen aspect of this program, however, was the incredible diversity in student population. I had the privilege of interacting with so many different cultures and ways of working that I felt significantly more prepared than my undergraduate peers in entering a globalized industry.
During my four-year engineering program at ASU, my studies focused mainly on hardware architecture and computer science. Working my way up from the construction of a transistor to the logical design of CPUs, I learned a uniquely systematic way of approaching problem sets. The greatest skill I acquired from my engineering degree was the ability to understand and solve complex problems.
Aside from my engineering studies, I worked in the Undergraduate Student Government as the liaison to the Student Athletics department. I also worked in the ASU Decision Theater as a student worker. There I aided various research programs intended to help cities and companies make smarter decisions about their development with respect to sustainability.
iOS App
Projects and Contributions
Blog posts
