Classroom to product, by way of a typhoon.

Early Years

I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and spent my youth there. I graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 2009 with a Bachelors in Spanish and soon thereafter began interpreting at the Juvenile court downtown. Through that experience, I resolved to make more of an impact on children before they got to the court system and was drafted into an exclusive Teaching Credential program in Denver, Colorado. A wing of The New Teacher Project, I was granted funds to pursue a Masters. After a couple of years teaching bilingual elementary school in Denver Public Schools, addressing the learning needs of high needs students, I began a Masters in Second Language Acquisition research. As part of that Masters program, I had the opportunity to join the U.S. Peace Corps to study language acquisition overseas. I applied and was accepted to join Peace Corps Philippines Batch 272. After six months abroad, Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda hit my community, and I was evacuated to Manila 7 days later with fellow volunteers. In between volunteering to receive refugees at the Manila Airport, I pursued running and a nascent yoga practice.

Upon returning to the U.S. in the wake of the Typhoon and deciding next steps, I decided to pursue Education Policy as I saw the real-life impacts of how Policy can shape a society for better and worse. Half of my Masters work is in Second Language Acquisition research and half is in Policy research, including coursework in case law, policy analysis, and sociolinguistics in standardized assessment.

Tech Beginnings

My graduate focus didn’t pay the bills (yet), and I needed to get work over the summer until the following academic year to complete my studies. That’s when I was hired by Pearson Knowledge Technologies to write and edit content for a first-of-its-kind iPad app created to measure English proficiency in reading, writing, listening, and speaking using Item Response Theory and an industry-first multimodal assessment style.

This work led to a voice-of-the-customer role within the test development team, continued content development and assessment work, managing content writers, working directly with design and engineering, and eventually, transcription. After graduating, I pursued full time work in Product Development. My first stop: Scientific Learning, where one of the offerings needed a content overhaul: a web-based comprehensive literacy program rooted in novel neuroscience.

On top of delivering a new K-12 literacy content deal that saved the company $500K and building an internal custom content creation and editing tool purpose built for adding new instructional content, I led the effort internally to do three things:

• Modify performance reporting so that teachers could use results in their reporting requirements (they were already doing this, but they didn’t know the data was incorrect. After this update, they were able to report accurately).
• Fix the fluency speed recognition: we can’t call it a fluency app if it gets caught up when you read fluently. This was mostly to do with the fact that the speech recognition technology was imperfect – that is, it can allow for faster readers, but potentially at the risk of missing more mistakes for the slower ones. After months of tweaking and improvements, engineering shipped the update and teachers were elated.
• Switch the order of implementation for a sale by putting the sticky, cheaper, user friendly product first, followed by the pricier more comprehensive, much less intuitive product.

I succeeded at the first bullet after a year, the second after two years, and the third three months after I left.

The joy in Scientific Learning was hands down the learning in product management and the impact I was able to have.

By 2017, I was itching to learn more about how Product Management looked at other companies. My manager, the amazing now retired Joan Ferguson would constantly caveat her advice with: here, it’s like this, at other companies, it’s like this other way.

0→1 Platform Development

Shortly after hiring a resume writer and nailing the interview, I moved south to Orange County to begin working for PADI. Yes, that PADI.

They needed a new digital learning platform yesterday. I led the roadmap for the learning scrum team, along with some of the core services team, some .com team, a lot of the Pro services team, and a mobile development team overseas. We used Moodle’s Out-of-the-box learning app platform to build PADI’s native mobile app for digital learning. We used AWS microservices architecture to power all of the digital transformation efforts. While the digital learning platform was being built, they relaunched Padi.com, the online ecommerce store, Identity and Access management, and licensed Zendesk to supercharge customer service operations.

There is so much that could be said about my time at PADI. Saving that for the book.

But suffice to say, designing and building a digital learning platform for consumer divers, dive instructors, dive instructor managers, and dive shop owners from 0 to 1 was a massive undertaking. The teams really outdid themselves in their delivery, and I’m beyond honored and delighted that we got to do what we did. Years later and I hear Drew (the CEO) is still raving about what we built.

One of the most prescient learnings from PADI (among many) was that it was my first experience with a pretty purist Agile implementation. We had our scrum teams – one PM, 3-4 eng, 1 project manager, 1 designer. We groomed bi-weekly, held design sprints, had biweekly sprint demos for the whole company, and we ran retros. We were truly a three-legged stool: design, eng, product. The three of us would head down to customer service to listen in to calls, to talk to sales people who also happened to be seasoned veterans as one or more of the personas we were building for, and we communicated to leadership together. It was fun in a lot of ways. Hard in many others, but that will be in the book.

After a year at PADI, I could tell it wasn’t where I would be long term (I didn’t Scuba dive :\) and I was thinking about where that would be when Amazon called. I had applied to a program management role there some time back, and they called with an offer.

Amazon

After a short 6 months in global CS building and migrating an internal tool for large scale outage tracking for D2AS, I moved over to Kindle Newsstand. After 9 months on Kindle Newsstand, I realized that to make the impact I wanted, I needed to be somewhere that needed to ship. Kindle Newsstand was part of a very mature organization who had more or less accepted the state the product was. It wasn’t all for naught. The team was fantastic to work with, and I got loads of great experience doing in depth customer research an analysis to inform a strategic partnership with a global leader in publishing. But I wanted to be shipping things.

I made the jump to Amazon Kids and was there for over a year and a half – February 2021-September 2022. The team endured a few transitions, but in a nutshell, I was the PM for nearly all of Amazon Kids Fire TV’s 1-100 scale efforts through the end of 2021. Some of them I championed from 0-1, some of them inherited as earlier efforts, others I kiboshed because the data didn’t justify the priority, and others we moved up to support strategic market bets like Kids Karaoke in Japan and out-of-the-box upsell for non-Prime customers. There were a few people there who I really couldn’t have done it without: the TPM team for one, some colleagues from core Business Analytics, and a few senior engineers and engineering managers who I still keep in touch with to this day. There is a whole heck of a lot I could say about the Kids team, but by and large, the experiences I learned there have no doubt set me up to be a great PM no matter where I go.

I was itching to live in Europe, and Amazon jobs overseas were primarily copy/paste style roles, where PMs are building in x country whatever already exists in U.S.

I did however, find a really cool CPO who was building some fun stuff to serve doctors in the NHS…

UK

I began my search for Product roles in Europe, and a few places quickly came to stand out as hubs for innovation: Berlin, London, to a lesser extent Paris, to a lesser extent Lisbon. I was offered three roles: one in London, one in Berlin, one in Lisbon. The Berlin product opportunity would have been stable, but the product itself was incredibly out of date. The team knew it, but it wasn’t a priority to improve because the product was doing so well as it was. The team would have been great, but I wanted to build something new. I was offered a role at HelloFresh. The role was initially offered in London or Lisbon. By the time they got to the offer stage, it was only available in Lisbon. In the end, I accepted the role in London. I was initially not considering London, but the CPO and the team and the work I would be doing was going to be really fun. I would be building an app for doctors in the UK to swap shifts with one another, which surprisingly wasn’t as prevalent as you would think at the time.

I joined the team only to find out that the engineering manager that interviewed me was no longer there, the CPO who hired me was ousted a short time after I joined and my colleague was promoted to being my manager. Not long after, company-wide layoffs began.

I took the time that followed to explore the UK and think about what I wanted to do next.

AI Beginnings

A startup in Manchester was on the hunt for a contract PM to build a new product.

The VP of Sales had done a phenomenal job of creating traction around a Digital Key Opinion Leader, a product that had yet to be built. It wasn’t starting from scratch, though. Recourse already had a digital learning platform used to train medical students in clinical scenarios. The avatar, animation and LLM infrastructure was built. I was brought on to take the existing CX and build a web app where top pharmaceutical executives could test drive a Digital Key Opinion Leader.

Pharmaceutical companies today leverage real life physician Key Opinion Leaders who give lectures and talks and webinars to share best practices in pharmaceutical treatments for patients. Individual humans however, don’t scale when many doctors have questions they would like answered. For that reason, we were tasked with building this product, aimed to solve that problem, a proven challenge that pharmaceutical companies had grappled with.

The task was to train the LLM engine on a demo data set and build the web CX independent of the digital learning platform, where the avatar chat CX experience lived to start. We decoupled the chat CX from the digital learning platform, added accessibility features, ‘typewriter’ style text UI, but the most important was our work to get the conversational AI to spec.

We used embeddings, reinforcement learning with human feedback, and human in the loop review for accuracy. Weeks of testing and evaluation on the dataset got us to UAT approval in time for looming Sales team deadlines. I learned the training material inside out. Ask me about atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

All this was in support of hallucination targets to reach compliance for MLR approval.

As there was no MLR guidance for AI tools at the time, I came up with a policy that allowed the tool to pass MLR while still delivering customer value.

After delivering on time and under budget, I was ready to return to the U.S.

Back on U.S. Soil

A few short months later, I joined Groundlight AI as a Product Manager. Groundlight had a machine learning web platform optimized for developers and ML engineers to detect anomalies with computer vision.

What was missing however was a no-code solution, deployable to sites where there were no software engineers on staff. The primary market being manufacturing, I attended IMTS, where I saw a corvette suspended in midair from the arm of a giant robot. I learned a ton about manufacturing and importantly, how useful Groundlight AI could be on the manufacturing floor.

I led the requirements gathering and MVP for a Simple Monitoring Tool, a no-code way to harness Groundlight’s platform anywhere cameras are present. This was my first time working on a developer-focused platform with a developer-focused team. The entire leadership team apart from myself were Engineers. I had the help of a fractional Designer and lion’s share of development took place overseas.

Soon after requirements were handed off for development, we lost our Sales person and I volunteered to support. Little did I know that meant – as the business needed it – becoming a sales person full time. I hadn’t done sales before, and my CEO, who had learned it as a skill himself, willingly imparted knowledge as I came to understand how it’s done.

There was no pipeline. There was no top of funnel motion, no marketing campaigns. No sales playbook. I was learning from scratch.

In the roughly 6 months I was in the role, I got a couple of proof of concepts in the works – one with a 3D printing company as an arm of a multi-billion dollar organization, one with a billion dollar global plastics and robotics company, and talks I was able to get with NASA set us up for entry into potentially lucrative conversations with heavy hitters for NASA contracts.

After some time, conversations about runway became more and more prevalent. Shortly after, Adobe recruited me as a product management coach for internal product managers.

I worked with a great group of people whom I adore and admire to this day. It was a pleasure learning from them and getting a feel for how things work at Adobe, a world of difference from where I’d been previously.