OPTIMISTIC, AGILE, ENTREPRENEURIAL, TECHNICAL
Surfacing and prioritizing the right customer problems and generating real opportunities in a Big Picture made of evolving Little Pictures — that's my joy.
And in my experience, quick, reasonable decisions based on user-centered research bring structure to the unstructured, guide and mentor a bias for action, building cross-functional collaborations that navigate shifting demands and resources to insightful and useful outcomes.
I strive to distill the vision across teams while balancing day-to-day tactical tasks with business strategies and OKRs and KPIs (oh my!) in a structured process.
Moving from vision to strategic roadmapping and waypointing to user stories to capabilities, we iterate through backlog grooming to standups, sprints, releases, and feedback — which informs the next cycle of product dev, continually refining market and customer match.
Deeply experienced both in technical development and writing user stories and tickets for creative and thoughtful engineers. Having spent years of my previous life writing python, sql, js, (heck, even php), APIs, ci/cd processes, AI/ML libraries, AWS cloud tools, and more, I understand the critical need for product and tech specs which speak the right language at the right time, balancing clarity of desired outcomes, experiences, and aggregate capabilities without prescribing “recipes” for capable software engineers.
SELECT PROJECT
ROLES & DETAILS OF SOME
When I was hired, Liquibase, a “devops for the database” solution, only offered a popular open-source project and a fairly expensive Enterprise offering. In my tenure and with my leadership, we developed a new Liquibase Pro product, growing from 0 to 200+ customers, including some of the largest Enterprises, generating multiple 7 figures of revenue and approximately 50% of total corporate ARR.
In this time, I have also PM'ed the Enterprise product, the recently sunset Liquibase Hub experiment, and the extensions and testing-focused Interop team.
As combination PM, technical PM, and PO, my efforts include:
• co-create roadmaps, waypoints, personas • Jira, Confluence, Trello, Google suite, Miro, etc • interview & demo with users & prospects • Github, Docker, AWS, Slack, CI/CD and DevOps, etc • translate strategy into actionable work • work closely with Engineering & QA Leads • bring structure to the unstructured • write epics, user stories, requirements and AC • backlog grooming, standups, retros, etc • create docs, sales enablement videos, release notes • initiate and coordinate pre-release UAT • QA the product via terminal/CLI/python • cross-functional stakeholder collaboration with VP of Product, other PMs and POs, customer success, support, engineers, marketing, and sales.Watch select videos: Liquibase Pro Overview; Automated Policy Enforcement; Custom Policy Checks Intro
DDMR was a startup company that thrived on clickstream and behavioral data —and then didn’t. Its products were mostly internal to a highly technical AWS ecosystem ETL (data processing and delivery pipeline), and a smattering of functional web management or admin tools.
As technical product manager, I worked with the CEO to distill and convey the overall company vision and strategy into product specs and tech specs, which I then used to guide a remote software engineering team in a (hybrid) agile process.
Specifically, my duties included creating product roadmaps and waypoints, user personas and stories, and functional capabilities as a foundation for a product spec. The complementary tech spec was detailed into tickets via a collaborative process with an engineering lead. Usually, I dealt with concurrent development threads of the same product, each its own release (guided by a roadmap’s waypoints), with weekly backlog grooming and sprint planning, and daily standups, ticketing, and prioritizations given the shifting client and resource demands.
Usually, I dealt with concurrent development branches of the same product, each its own release, guided by a roadmap’s waypoints balanced to shifting client and resource demands. Development occurred using multiple AWS offerings, Github, CI/CD tools, Docker, react, node, javascript and multiple devops tools, documented and shared using Slack, coda.io, Aha, and Jira.
By connecting people and knowledge, the Trails platform made learning and teaching easier, more joyful, more social — more like what progressive teachers desire for their learning environments. The Trails platform featured simple and engaging resource maps, public and private groups, threaded discussion, questions, digests, and more.
Trails was a modern way to build a collaborative, learner-driven community, providing an innovative platform to visually curate, find, and share resources, and, in the process, build a community around learning and knowledge. Resources include websites, pdfs, google docs, youtube, vimeo, your uploaded files and pictures, Open Education Resources, and much more — pretty much anything that’s viewable in a web browser.
Specifically, as co-founder, I created the core ideas and primary intellectual property, am the named inventor on three granted patents, set the product and feature roadmap, coded a boatload of bundles within a symfony/ ubuntu/ nginx/ php/mysql platform. I also met with prospective and existing clients, did demos and trainings at tradeshows and with customers, wrote marketing copy and more. As product manager, I set the roadmap of competing feature requests and developer resources in an agile workflow, managing priorities and calendaring of Assembla tickets and Github pull requests, including QA from testing to staging to production servers from several developer's VMs.
RoboFlow is a semi-automated TensorFlow image classification explorer in a python command line app. I built RoboFlow to get a better sense for TensorFlow's image classifier by making it easier to gather thousands of similar images by hashtag (such as "#robot" or "#robotart") to serve as the neural networks' re/training data, and to enable easy testing of different TensorFlow hyperparameter settings for creating classifiers.
Specifically, tagged images are downloaded in bulk and then sorted, according to a 'confidencemin' variable, into dynamically created directories, which are periodically 'harvested' to retrain TensorFlow to create new classifiers, allowing easy experimenting with various retraining parameter permutations to increase the accuracy. In this cyclical loop, the classifier gets better and better at identifying and sorting. This results, at some point, in RoboFlow's ability to be a semi-automated self-improving image classifier, depending of course on your ability to bootstrap initial high-quality images and to keep them as such with periodic quality control. Contributions and Pull Requests welcomed!
The users of Trails desired to tag their resources with standards from the Common Core, but there was no API-able mechanism to do so. Therefore, I scraped the open data, built several middleware scripts to restructure it in a new database, built the API endpoints, then documented and made it all available under Creative Commons Attribution license.
Developers can utilize two REST APIs to search the Common Core standards by grade and/or keyword and/or component, with a JSON object result.
There is Query API to search for summary information of matching standards, and the Detail API for extended information on one specific standard. Documentation includes the complete cycle of a query call, result, detail call and detail result.
For the development and launch of Generation TX, I worked as a consultant to Milkshake Media, serving in a variety of roles centered around launching an online and offline movement to create a "Career and College-Ready Culture" in Texas.
Specific duties included initial strategy and development for a state-wide field organization (launching in pilot markets of San Antonio and Fort Worth), development of custom tech tools to manage/classify/view contacts and resources, researching/reviewing/interviewing tech partners/solutions and, for the website itself, both architecture/strategy and extensive hands-on development and coding of GenTX.org in php, mysql, jquery, ajax, css, html, Facebook connect, shell scripting, and custom WordPress / BuddyPress plugins.
FGA Media, Inc was a startup developing a trans-media life-style brand for tween girls, rooted in the Fairy Godmother Academy book series published by Random House and the companion website. FGA was a "hip & wholesome" web property designed to build a perpetual online and offline community of ‘tweens and parents into "a cultural force for good."
My duties was quite varied, including product management, approving, developing and directing the creative, technical, and social media strategies, as well as working with team leads to schedule and budget as a project manager. Besides Product development, highlights include developing, naming, and structuring the ’Wisdom Acts’, guiding toy development, and owning the major transformation of our Series A Investor Deck.
There are many broadly-reaching lessons learned in political campaigning. The short version: I am extremely comfortable leading and balancing in a 'guide and go with the flow' environment. That is, balancing leadership and collaboration, understanding the changing pressures and budgets, the value of trusted collaborators, the static and evolving data-points, the value of clear strategies, and the quick, some would say 'agile', value of doing-then-improving.
As treasurer, I was legally responsible and entrusted with hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and the double-edge of deciding which projects we will pursue, and informing those we will not. At Turn Texas Blue, we balanced our strategies between tried-and-true and more experimental projects.
For the Travis County Democratic Party's Coordinated Campaign, I served as director of technology, covering many roles to convert a 10,000 sq ft warehouse into a working campaign and volunteer HQ.
Tasks ranged from installing and maintaining multiple DSL-powered wifi spots, to developing onlinephonebanking.com tools, creating custom data input and tracking tools for the biggest county convention in the nation, customizing a soap-blox powered community site, enabling a textmarks.com based text-msg system, building a google-map to voter address mashup, and writing custom scripts to convert FILEMAKER to MYSQL to CSV output.
Starting in Nov. 2006, I helped lead Texans For Obama (a 2008 Austin Chronicle Best of Austin winner) from a fledgling book club into the online community and offline grassroots organization that played a critical role in delivering Texas for Obama.
I designed, developed, and coordinated TexansForObama.com, extending a soapblox-based community blog with a volunteer and data system which recruited and organized tens of thousands of Obama supporters statewide.
Some of the Press Coverage:
In These Times: 'Hello I'm a Democrat'
Wired: 'Obama's Surging Net-Roots Campaign'
CSPAN's Washington Journal Interview
Wall Street Journal: 'The Other Campaign Trail'
GridBloc, an original casual, social game developed in the early mobile/wap/j2me days that spanned play between desktop and laptops to mobile devices, scaling presentation to the platform. GridBloc earned two patents and a SXSW/Texas Interactive Media award.
Unfortunately, our offices and the two game servers that backed each other up were destroyed in a fire. As it was conceived literally as "a game you could play in the dirt with a stick," (so that it could be WAP compatible) you can still have fun playing it offline.
Read the instructions at http://gridbloc.com/help
Patent #6659464 'GridBloc Strategy Game'
Patent #6578848 'Game with moveable play space'
Award for 'Technical and Creative innovation'
SAVE YOURSELF SOME GOOGLING
For more than a decade, I have been applying my strengths toward educational, political, cultural, and entrepreneurial missions — all of which revolve around building and organizing communities and cultures. Education and Politics are the most influential systems for affecting change. I am always happy to discuss the role community plays in these missions.
The short-version: authentic community is self-perpetuating, and the single biggest influence on people... and mostly not online.
Github
#Instagram
Twitters
Shapeways (3D prints)
Goodreads
Redditing
Urban Transportation Commission
WORKING TO KEEP AUSTIN AWESOME
Appointed 2015 by Council Member Ann Kitchen (D5, head of Mobility Committee), and elected Chair 2019-Feb2023.
Remember: mobility is about moving people, not just cars.
As a member of Project Connect's Multimodal Advisory Committee, (now called PCAN - Project Connect Ambassador Network) I work to be insightful about data, assimilate varied stakeholder inputs, and to encourage public participation in the planning process which shapes Capital Metro's high-capacity transit system vision and efforts.
Served two terms (Jan2014-Dec2015) as President for the South Lamar Neighborhood Association. Proudly co-organized the support for Foundation Communities' Bluebonnet Studios affordable housing development.
Starting in Nov. 2006, I helped lead Texans For Obama from a fledgling book club into the online community and offline grassroots organization that played a critical role in delivering Texas for Obama.
Served for more than 10 years as both Board member and Board chair, and of course as regularly attending audience member, at one of Austin's most experimental and awarded
theater companies.
Served as president of group of folks committed to engaging citizens in the political process, with a focus on how from school board to city hall to the White House, politics affects your everyday life.
SOME QUOTES AND OPINIONS
DRAW, CAPTURE, 3d PRINT, LEDs & LASERCUTS
