Summary
Chris Butler is a product operations and AI-focused product leader with 11+ years building teams and tooling at companies from Microsoft and Google to Facebook, KAYAK, Waze and GitHub. He specializes in reducing operational toil and improving decision-making for cross-functional teams through AI/ML, adversarial mindsets, and novel facilitation techniques like Empathy Mapping for the Machine and Confusion Mapping. As Director of Product Operations at GitHub he leads Synapse, shipping open-source tooling to automate AI assessment and reporting while exploring future-of-work experiments. He also runs learning and red-teaming ventures (Liminal Practice, Symboulos) and co-founded The Uncertainty Project to operationalize resilience under bias and uncertainty. An instructor, showrunner, and science-fiction writer based in Oakland, he blends design fiction and organizational craft to surface subtle sociotechnical risks before they scale.
11 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
N/A Introduction to Computer Games (Design), N/A Introduction to Computer Games (Design) at Academy of Art University
BS Computer Systems Engineering, BS Computer Systems Engineering at Boston University