Dwayne King is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rutabaga, a startup building a decision intelligence engine that turns fragmented, unstructured customer insights into actionable knowledge accessible across the organization. 

Rutabaga’s mission is to help companies become genuinely customer-centric by eliminating the barriers between scattered data, institutional memory, and daily decision-making.

Key Takeaways

• From Data to Action: Rutabaga ingests qualitative, unstructured customer data (such as interviews, call transcripts, and research reports) and transforms it into structured, actionable insights directly within existing team workflows.
• Solving Institutional Amnesia: Dwayne observed that companies often repeat research and lose valuable insights due to organizational silos and staff turnover. Rutabaga acts as a persistent, searchable “brain” for institutional memory, so teams don’t lose history or context.
• AI-Powered Speed: Their ingest engine dramatically reduces “time-to-insight”-what previously took a week of manual analysis now takes about an hour, thanks to AI, graph databases for connection mapping, and integrations with tools like Jira and Figma.
• Embedded in Decision Workflows: The team learned it’s not enough to collect and centralize insights; actionable data must appear in the tools and moments where decisions are made, not just in a standalone repository.
• Continuous Customer Feedback: Rutabaga’s roadmap evolves with weekly user research and prototype testing to avoid building a product that only serves their own perspective. Customer feedback consistently shapes functionality and integrations.
• Iterative Product Philosophy: Product vision at Rutabaga evolves through ongoing customer discovery, not from a single “aha” moment-dispelling the myth that tech startups are born fully-formed from a founder’s head.
• Ultimate Goal: Build an intelligence engine that future-proofs institutional knowledge, enables faster iteration, and supports better business decisions at every level.

About Dwayne King ___

Dwayne King is the Founder and CEO of Rutabaga, an AI-native platform helping product teams make smarter, faster decisions by turning scattered customer insights into strategic clarity. With over 20 years of experience in product development, UX design, and human-centered innovation, Dwayne has led transformative work for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups alike.

His career has centered on a single theme: helping organizations align around what truly matters to their customers. At Rutabaga, he's tackling one of the most persistent challenges in tech—fragmented decision-making—by building the connective tissue between insight and action. Dwayne is passionate about designing systems, teams, and experiences that don’t just ship faster, but ship smarter.

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