Chris Butler

Chaotic Good Product Manager

Oakland, California, United States

About

Chris Butler is a chaotic good product manager, writer, and speaker. He brings extensive experience in product leadership and operations from top companies including Microsoft, Waze, KAYAK, Facebook Reality Labs, Cognizant, and Google. Currently, Chris serves as Director of Product Operations for GitHub's Synapse team, where he leads bold experimentation in process automation powered by AI.

Experience

  • GitHub (Remote)
    • Director of Product Operations
      Apr 2025 - Present · 1 yr 3 mos

      * Lead for Synapse, focused on for tooling and automation, leveraging AI/ML, to reduce toil for cross-functional teams. Includes speculative experimentation about the future-of-work for cross-functional teams. Product player coach and engineering manager. * OSS release of AI Assessment Comment Labeler and Reporting Rollup and Away that will help teams reduce toil in their day-to-day with AI. * Standing up operations for Agentic Workflow team that handles customer feedback collection, triage, prioritization, and reporting.

    • Staff Product Operations Manager
      Jan 2024 - Apr 2025 · 1 yr 4 mos

      * PM'ing the PM experience and linking strategy to execution for the AI & Productivity team (aka GitHub Copilot). * Lead Responsible AI Champion.

  • Founder at Liminal Practice
    Jun 2025 - Present · 1 yr 1 mo

    Learning and development focused on AI. Sample workshops: AI Product Design Patterns, Spec-Driven Prototyping, and AI case studies (decision-forcing cases).

  • Founder at Symboulos Inc.
    Jun 2025 - Present · 1 yr 1 mo

    Make better decisions faster. Red teaming tools enabled by AI.

  • Co-Founder at The Uncertainty Project
    Feb 2023 - Present · 3 yrs 5 mos

  • Advisor at Dotwork
    Jan 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 6 mos