About
Dr. Jen Anderson - Founder
I spent 10 years studying how brains detect patterns—PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience at University of Illinois at Chicago, dissertation on visual perception and signal detection. Then I spent 10+ years leading engineering teams—fractional CTO, advisor, Senior Director of Engineering, and on the executive team, with teams up to 40+ engineers. I built CI/CD pipelines, shipped platforms, hit (and missed) deadlines, and learned what actually predicts team success.
The Problem I Couldn't Solve
Every engineering leader knows this feeling: Something's off with the team. You can't quite name it. Velocity looks fine. No one's explicitly raising red flags. But your gut says trouble's coming. Three weeks later: someone burns out, a key person quits, or the project implodes. Traditional metrics miss the signal. Velocity, cycle time, deployment frequency—they're all lagging indicators. By the time they drop, damage is done.
The Origin Story
I was leading a 30-person engineering org. We were tracking all the standard metrics. Everything looked fine on paper. Except it wasn't fine. I could feel it. So I started measuring different things: when people were committing code, how communication patterns were shifting, how work was distributing across the team. I built a crude dashboard pulling data from GitHub, Jira, and Slack. The data told a story velocity couldn't: Late-night commits up 200%, Slack collaboration density down 35%, Work concentration: 60% of critical path through 2 people. Three weeks later: two senior engineers burned out. One quit. I had the data. I saw it coming. I just didn't have it early enough or clear enough to act. That's why I built Operion.
Why Operion
Operion is the system I wish I'd had throughout my entire engineering career. It combines behavioral neuroscience (pattern detection, signal processing, drift measurement) with engineering leadership experience (what actually matters, what's noise, what interventions work). It's not about tracking productivity. It's about measuring behavioral health—the leading indicator that predicts everything else.
Other Things I Do
- •Run Aurvia Group, LLC - decision science consulting for engineering leaders
- •Train for swimrun competitions (because endurance sports and engineering leadership have more in common than you'd think)
- •Study Italian, travel to Europe, raise a family