Tech

Somehow, I've always managed to end up living or working five years in the future when it comes to technology.

My current tech work focus is Program Management, helping organizations scale out or fix broken operational systems that span functional groups. With my infrastructure operations, software and content experience program management, and business management experience at startup and global-scale companies, I can step in almost anywhere and quickly be effective.

If you're interested in retaining me to help your organization, please contact me on LinkedIn.

The PC revolution - late 1980s

Desk side and phone technical support taught me the ins and outs of operating systems and applications, and how to communicate with differing levels of knowledge. Local area networking troubleshooting and build-out fit well with my systematizing brain and sensitized me to emergent system behavior.

The Internet - early 1990s-mid 2010s

TCP/IP networking (AS11739), SMTP servers and gateways, DNS, USENET discussion groups, and setting up one of the thousand or so web severs in the world gave me the skills to found my own tech company: digital.forest. digital.forest provided data center server colocation and web hosting to thousands of companies from around the world.

Besides being top tier technical support, I led two angel funding rounds, recruited an executive team, and after an 18(!) year journey, the company was sold through acquisition.

After digital.forest, I spent a decade at Microsoft working on web properties for audiences up to tens of millions per month, where I gained skills in information architecture, CX and UX analysis, and technical and developer documentation publishing.

After Microsoft, I went to IMDb, where I was the product manager for the iOS and Android mobile apps and the core web experience. IMDb's traffic was in the hundreds of millions of visitors per month. Here, I learned and led Agile standups with the development, prioritized and drove feature development, led a redesign of the Android app, and oversaw a SEO audit and issue remediation that helped stem search-referred traffic drains. On my last day, one of the mobile developers gave me high praise by saying, "You're the first product manager that's actually gotten stuff done in years."

Mobile computing - late 2000s-early 2010s

While still at Microsoft, I was part of the large team of people that brought Windows Phone to the world. I was my team's representative to shiproom, where high-level readiness issues were addressed and blocked bugs were unblocked. I was in the room for the meeting to approve the final software payload for release. I learned and watched how software at scale was developed and the trade-offs inherent in design, features, and issue severity to address before release. Don't tell anyone I brought my iPhone 4 to the ship party to take photos with, ok?

AI - early-mid 2020s

As large language model transformers, er, transformed the AI field, I worked in Microsoft's Office of the CTO supporting internal AI startups with marketing and executive communications. These startups were small teams of AI engineers working on a variety of AI-driven technology solutions.

With my background in entrepreneurship and technology engineering, I helped them communicate their technical solutions and transform them into market-ready business decision maker materials and executive communications about the status of their businesses. I learned first-hand about synthetic data for training, training data sets and labeling, and other nuances of how AI does what it does.

Microsoft also has a robust speaker series, and I sat in on many internal AI talks. Today, I support SAP Business AI marketing.

Quantum computing - mid 2020s

Richard Feynman proposed using quantum physics for computing in the 1980s and there was a hot minute where I wanted to be a quantum chemist, but calculus and I didn't get along well. Lucky for me, I worked for Azure Quantum at Microsoft where I supported executive and public communications about the program, which had two main focus areas: building topological qubit chips and AI-driven quantum calculations for chemistry.

I ghostwrote articles and scripts, and was lucky enough to chat with and hear the quantum physicists working to build the topological qubits and quantum software explain this mind-bending technology. With my science and sales background, I also led executive briefings about the program and technology with Microsoft's customers.

This field is moving fast, and I expect we'll see some amazing breakthroughs in the rest of the decade.