Courtney Hemphill

About Courtney Hemphill

I have 25 years of experience building and leading product engineering teams across a diverse set of industries and companies. Partnering closely with executives and founders, I have delivered high quality, user-centric products that reached millions of users. Recently I led a team of 400+ developers, designers, and product managers within the PXEL practice at West Monroe. Prior to that, I worked with the talented founders of Masterclass, FertilityIQ, Grand Rounds, Better Therapeutics, Naza Beauty, and many others to launch the first versions of their platforms. Many of these companies quickly reached millions in revenue; some surpassing that many times over. I was also fortunate to partner with executives at rapidly growing companies like Chime, Compass, and Attune as well as enterprise intrepreneurs at Autodesk, Moody’s, and Commerce Bank to develop products that supported strategic corporate initiatives with strong financial results.I\'ve served on the programming committee for QCon and spoke at various technical conferences worldwide including QCon, GoTo, and the CTO Summit. Currently am a board member/advisor to several early-stage companies and have mentored Techstars\' entrepreneurs for over 10 years.Proud member of the Golden Gate Board of NatureBridge, which connects young people to the wonder and science of the natural world, and a long-time supporter of RailsBridge, which teaches underrepresented people in tech to code. Also a formerly sponsored, and still avid rock climber for more than 20 years.I believe in a pragmatic approach to software development supported by a balanced product trio. Establishing a set of rigorous first principles with supporting methods and systems will accelerate teams far more than basic metrics and measurements that can easily be gamified. I work to have the right people in the right conversations at the right time and always over-index on inclusion.

Experience

1. Board Member

   8th Light

   Jan 2024 — Present

Education

• University of Chicago

  Bachelor of Science (BS), Biology, General

  1995 — 1999

• Harrison-Metal

  FOUNDATIONS: GENERAL MANAGEMENT

  2015 — 2015

Skills

• Ruby on Rails
• Agile Methodologies
• User Experience
• Mobile Applications
• Javascript
• Ruby
• Jquery
• Software Development
• Web Applications
• User Interface Design
• Web Development
• Git
• Software Engineering
• Scrum
• Css
• Html 5
• User Interface
• Information Architecture
• Test Driven Development
• Ajax
• Mysql
• Agile Project Management
• Node.js
• Extreme Programming