I’ve been working on the web since I was a teenager. I started playing with some freeware program my dad showed me in middle school and something about making a janky text and bubblegum background website made me fall in love. From there I spent some time learning Flash and making those oh so cool overly animated websites and learning to freelance with friends and family websites. I even worked as a designer/developer for a new design agency for a while where I got to work on my first *big name* client work. Shout out to clearph which is still going strong almost 20 years later.

From there I went back to school, decided that wasn’t for me, started my own agency and eventually decided I wanted to focus purely on writing code and get out of the small business owner side of things. I joined another agency called Range where I was able to work with some amazing people and great brands building WordPress solutions. I really loved the plugin side of things and moved over to the Product Development world with Awesome Motive.

This is when I started working on this little product called OptinMonster. What a rollercoaster of growth that was! I was developer number two on the team and after 6 years of development, product leadership, and learning directly under the mentorship of Syed and Thomas I was a completely different professional. After leading the Product Team at OptinMonster I was tasked with taking on the “Lead Developer” role for TrustPulse and implementing the Awesome Motive Playbook to get it into a product customers *loved*.

So that is exactly what I did. It was hard and I was wearing every hat possible while we refactored everything, found a product market fit, and connected customer expectation with product delight. Social Proof became a few clicks to implement with WordPress, WooCommerce, and more. I really loved the growth phase and being able to take customer feedback directly to product solutions. We called it “Lead Developer” but I came to find out this was pretty typical for a Product Lead.

Always looking to learn and grow I found myself looking to branch out away from WordPress. So I jumped into a bit of consulting work as a Product Manager. Pretty scary to cut off from the stability work for the first time in ten years and be all out on my own but once again I learned so much and really had fun with it. I helped some companies prioritize features, cleanup backlogs, work on roadmap planning and creating some new product processes. This was at the end of covid and recruitment was pretty hot so before I could settle in and make this a long term gig I was asked to interview for full time position.

For the next two years I worked with the Traject “Social Pod”. I first worked with Loomly during their founder exit and then with PLANOLY during their VP of Product exit. In both cases there was a lot of new product process definition work, auditing established workflows, and documenting customer needs and wants with the different (but similar) products. In both cases it was really a much longer Product Management adventure but just like the work I did back at TrustPulse. Bigger teams, more infrastructure already set up, but we had to find and define the roadmap to keep making users love our products.

Catching right on up I am back to freelancing and consulting. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some awesome companies doing a mix of product consulting and development. The skillset I’ve been honing over the years is focused on quickly onboarding, listening to customers, and then identifying focus areas to drive growth. If you’ve made it this far and want to reach out for a chat I’d love to say hello 👋