David Simpson

I'm Joining the Assembla Team

Posted on March 26, 2014

It has been far too long since my last post, you'll learn why below. This year i'm going to do a much better job of documenting my thoughts on designing and developing user experiences to share with others.

But first, I have a few big things to talk about. It has been a wild-and-crazy year. After moving to Cambridge to be closer to HubSpot - a few months after that I proposed to the love of my life!

I have now moved back to Salem to be with my fiancé and our new puppy - Oreo. I am really excited to be be getting married this October to this amazing and beautiful woman. I am a very lucky guy.

And now we have all that personal stuff out of the way - let me catch you up on my professional life;

Signing off at HubSpot

For the last year and a half at HubSpot, I have had a great opportunity to learn and grow. As everyone knows, HubSpot is growing fast and getting ready to go public. While I was there I was able to accomplish a lot of great feats for the Product Marketing team. After this, it was time to hand the baton off.

I was really fortunate to meet and work with some incredible people there across many teams. There is no question that HubSpot has some great talent in Cambridge.

Deep down this just wasn't the right spot for me because of my desire to transition onto a Product team. At HubSpot they are a little too far down the path to want to join the product ship - so I set out to find a smaller startup that I could come in on - and be a key player in.

After at least a month of searching and interviewing, I found what I think is the perfect fit. And that company is Assembla.

What is Assembla?

Assembla was founded in 2005 in order to recruit and manage distributed development teams. They worked with commercial startups, and they adopted some of the tools and practices that make open-source teams effective.

Today, joining the Assembla team means being trusted by over one million users in 100+ countries. We now deliver innovative tools and processes for the cloud era, based on the idea of continuous delivery. We are moving teams from the typical Scrum agile toward something that is more continuous, distributed, and scalable.

In addition to joining a great company, I'm also looking forward to working and learning from Andy Singleton, the fearless leader of Assembla. After doing all the research on all the opportunities I was considering - his background as an entrepeneur and engineer, as well as launching over 20 different product lines - really caught my attention.

Not only that, he is in the process of writing a pretty cool book, Unblock: A Guide to the New Continuous Agile. Here is a quote from Andy on the Assembla product:

"At Assembla, we are committed to helping teams build software faster with less stress. To reduce your stress, we experiment on our own team first. We work as a truly global team. We moved from releasing every two weeks to releasing ten times per day. We are figuring out Continuous Agile. Everyone here helps us with discovery."

Andy Singleton · CEO, Assembla

I really look forward to learning as much as I can from Andy in the years to come. I also think that with him investing in the User Experience team here and after joining the Assembla team, the road for the product is looking mighty bright.

Words can't express how excited I am about this career opportunity. I'll be joining the Assembla Product team as the Manager of User Experience. I'll be working with our designers and developers to start focusing on usability across the product.

The Assembla Challenge

Assembla has actually had a lot of problems similar to HubSpot. It's a very powerful all-in-one software platform. It does so much - it can be hard to boil down the interfaces and experiences in a simple way.

Although I don't have immediate answers as to how we will divide and conquer the big task at hand - I am so glad to be part of figuring it out.

And, a big Thank You - to everyone that helped in my search for the next awesome career opportunity!

The end

What do you think?

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