Ken Judy

Executive Director
Ken  Judy
HOME BASE
New York City
BEFORE ACCORDION
  • Stride

  • The Daily Beast (an IAC Company)

  • Simon & Schuster (a KKR Company)

  • NYSE Advanced Technology Group

ALMA MATER
  • Whitman College (BA, Mathematics-Physics, Dramatic Arts)

HOME BASE
New York City
BEFORE ACCORDION
  • Stride

  • The Daily Beast (an IAC Company)

  • Simon & Schuster (a KKR Company)

  • NYSE Advanced Technology Group

ALMA MATER
  • Whitman College (BA, Mathematics-Physics, Dramatic Arts)

Ken Judy is an Executive Director in AI Products and Engineering with more than 25 years of experience in software delivery, technology leadership, and change management across media, publishing, financial services, and consulting. He specializes in agentic coding methodology and the modernization of custom legacy software systems.

Prior to Accordion, Ken spent eight years at Stride, now an Accordion company, as COO, CEO, then Senior Partner. As CEO, he kept the firm profitable through COVID-19, moved it from staff augmentation to team-based projects, and made it remote-first. Before Stride he was Chief Technology and Product Officer at The Daily Beast (IAC), where releases went from every six months to weekly and licensing costs fell by $1M. Prior to that he was Vice President of Technology at Simon & Schuster (CBS) and held roles at NYSE Euronext and at Oxygen Media (NBC Universal).

Ken’s focus at Accordion is building custom agentic software solutions and an extensible workflow for a human-centered agentic Product Delivery Lifecycle. The workflow puts AI agents to work across analysis, design, and development, with a person approving each stage, so teams move faster and stay accountable for the result. He favors measured outcomes over adoption metrics, and engineering practice over hype.

He advocates for agentic coding in Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles under human supervision. The AI analyzes the problem and drafts a detailed plan, codes test-first, verifies the result against the original goal, and prompts the human through a retrospective to improve the next cycle and reduce waste. A human stays in the loop and AI-generated code is verified in small steps, not accepted on trust.

Ken holds a B.A. in Mathematics-Physics and Theater from Whitman College, a CTA coaching certification (ICF-accredited), the IAPP CIPP/US privacy credential, and Certified Scrum Professional and Certified Software Development Professional credentials.

Something you should know
  • Spent eight years at Annex Theatre in Seattle, producing forty developmental theater workshops.
  • Loves to hike and does Pilates.
Noteworthy
  • Has written about human-supervised AI development for InfoQ and the Agile Alliance, and presented it at XP 2026 and Agile 2026.
  • Published peer-reviewed papers on agile practice and on women in software development at the Agile Conference and Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
  • Serves on the board of the Leadership Forum Community, a nonprofit and the oldest leadership community in the United States, whose annual summit is now in its 108th year.