About
A small group of senior operators, engineers, and leaders.
We've spent 20+ years helping companies make hard changes. You'd recognize a lot of the names on the wall. The work behind them is the part we're proud of.
Ripple Group started with a simple thesis: most consulting fails because the people in the room have never actually run anything. We wanted to build the opposite — a small group of senior operators who'd held the seat, shipped the product, run the team, made the unpopular call, and lived with the result.
Twenty years, 200+ clients, and 250+ projects later, that's still the thesis. We work across four pillars — Transform, Advise, Operate, and Innovate — but the through-line is the same: people who can do the work, deployed against problems where the work matters more than the methodology.
We're deliberately small. We say no more than we say yes. We refer work to firms we trust when we're not the best answer. And we leave engagements with documentation the next person can actually use.
How we run engagements
A few principles we don't bend on.
We say what we think.
If your roadmap is wrong, we'll tell you. If your hire was a miss, we'll tell you. We'd rather lose a project than soften a finding into something useless.
We write things down.
Decisions, tradeoffs, and the reasoning behind them get written down — so the team can disagree clearly, and so the work survives any one person.
We pick the right shape.
Some engagements are workshops. Some are years of embedded delivery. The shape gets matched to the problem — not the other way around.
The job ends. The relationship doesn't.
When the people, process, and product are in a good place, we hand over the documentation and step out, even when there's more we could sell. Then we stay in touch. Most clients call us back when the next thing comes up, and we pick up where we left off.
Team
Who you'll be working with.
We're a small, senior group. More names will join these as we grow.
Barber has run Ripple Group's client work for the better part of two decades. The idea behind the firm is simple: put senior people who've actually held the seat in the room and in the codebase, instead of handing over a strategy deck and an invoice. He's spent 25+ years in technology leadership, most of it running technology for companies that couldn't yet hire someone senior enough to do it themselves.
Before he focused on Ripple full-time, he led digital technology for some of the biggest names in media: Senior Director of WebOps at American Media, a $500M publisher; project management and infrastructure at iVillage, then part of NBCUniversal; and CTO at Spanfeller Media. The job was always the same shape: legacy platforms that had to keep running while they changed, and teams that needed a player-coach more than another opinion.
He's built the business on referrals, more than 200 clients over 20 years, almost every one an introduction from the last. He still does the work himself, including recent engagements like the modernization at Lucid Hearing and the product build at Podium. Barber holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from NC State, is a Vistage member, and works out of North Carolina. He's also an Eagle Scout, and the proud dad of five sons who are all Eagle Scouts themselves. The fastest way to get his honest read on your situation is a 30-minute call.
Talk to Barber
Ann helps companies turn messy product, technology, and operating problems into decisions people can actually act on. She's spent 20+ years at the intersection of product, strategy, data, and execution — usually called in where the org chart, the roadmap, the customer reality, and the technical constraints aren't quite lining up.
She led a turnaround at a product-development consultancy, restoring it to profitability within 12 months without new capital and launching a service line that doubled average deal size. As Head of Product at GoNoodle, the PE-backed kids media company, she scaled a direct-to-consumer audience, held a top-10 spot in the App Store's category, and won a KidScreen Award for Best Branded App. At a healthcare technology company she rebuilt product operations into the engine running quarterly agile planning across 15 teams and 100+ engineers.
Her strength isn't just seeing the system; it's helping the room see it clearly enough to move — naming the tradeoffs, protecting the people doing the work, and still pushing the decision forward. Recent work spans fractional product leadership, AI governance and adoption, operating-model design, and roadmap facilitation. Ann lives in East Nashville with her husband, two daughters, two cats, and a house that's become the unofficial HQ for the neighborhood kids. The fastest way to work with her is to bring a problem where the team is stuck, the stakes are real, and the answer isn't in another deck.
Talk to AnnLet's talk
Ready to make a real change?
Pick a 30-minute slot and we'll figure out together whether we're the right partner. No pitch deck, no pressure.