What I do.

The BACK STORY.

Like many of us who saw the Internet become a Thing over the course of our careers, I am an accidental product person.

I stumbled into a field I love via a circuitous route that led through a decade in journalism. My teams did some award-winning investigative work over the years, and were on the front lines of conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and beyond. As a reporter and editor, I witnessed the emergence of the Web as a disrupting force in media. For me, it provided a new channel to reach people in need of news and information, and to tell stories in new and exciting ways.

By 2008, my interests had expanded far beyond multimedia storytelling, and I began exploring the underlying technology stack that supported our digital publishing efforts, the user experience principles that inform effective Web design, and the digital business models that offer the possibility of a sustainable future to legacy media.

In short, I was becoming a digital product leader -- I just didn't know it yet.

FROM PRINT
TO PIXELS.

The turning point was when my publisher decided to take a chance on making an ink-stained managing editor her next director of online operations, responsible for all day to day business affairs of the company's new and nascent digital team. I had just enough staff to cover most of the roles that needed filling, with two notable exceptions: Product and project management. I took those duties on myself and never looked back.

Nearly two decades later, I've held product management and user experience roles from individual contributor to the executive level at companies including Gannett Co., Capital One, Total Wine & More, Strategic Education Inc, rareLife solutions, and Brightspot. Along the way, I've led product management and design teams in small- and enterprise-scale Agile software development environments.

Catalyzing CREATIVITY.

I was first exposed to human-centered design methods in 2010, and in the years since I've developed a complementary set of skills in user experience research and design -- with particular emphasis on the use of pen-and-paper sketching as a catalyst for both creative thinking and rapid and collaborative experience prototyping with fellow designers, business stakeholders and end users. My learnings from those pen-and-paper experiences form the core of a workshop I frequently facilitate called “Building Creative Confidence Through Sketching.”

Later, during the early COVID-19 social-distancing efforts in 2020, I took the opportunity to also build a user interface design toolkit by completing two specializations from the California Institute of the Arts focusing on graphic design and UX/UI design.

The common thread throughout my work at the intersection of product management and UX strategy has been my desire to put the customer's need at the center of the product development process with the aim of solving interesting, challenging, and meaningful human problems.