Overview

I am an experienced product leader and solution architect that creates meaningful change through people, process, and product. I am often referred to as a generalist because my breadth of experience and abilities spans an entire organization of teams, but, unlike many generalists, I have quite a bit of depth behind the broad set of capabilities. It is simply my nature to continually dig deeper in a desire to fully understand why something works the way it does and how it works with something else to create a larger system. The outcome is a trusted advisor and team member that can seamlessly transition between business and technical discussions at all levels of the organization.

Progression

I have been enamored with technology since an early age, when I used to build computers with my brother and tinker around on Bulletin Board Services to experience what felt like the early days of the internet. After completing my MBA in 2010, I moved to San Francisco, where I started to really understand the business of technology. I started working on the business side of things, focused on strategy, process, analysis, and product management. From there, I started moving into managing projects and working with development teams to deliver cross-functional projects. Eventually, I decided to teach myself how to code so that could fully understand what was happening inside of the products I was working on.

Focus

For the better part of a decade, my focus was heavily dedicated to CRM and Customer Engagement systems, creating frameworks and mapping sets of capabilities to move organizations through different maturity stages. After working in countless teams across organizations – marketing, customer service, BI, analytics, product management, PMO, real estate, change management, and more – I started to focus on methods for building products collaboratively across teams. I then expanded my focus to understanding how entire organizations work and what capabilities are required to fully automate one.

I am particularly skilled at designing collaborative operating models (an operating system) and designing cross-functional team structures to operate within the system. Over time, I started to focus on values and needs alignment between customers and organizations, which evolved my thinking of the roles both sides play when working collaboratively within such a system. For several years, I have been working on a concept of a web-based operating system that I call an Incentivized Operating Network to scale my model and build capabilities. This operating model/system is extremely beneficial for community or nation-critical products – utilities, education, supply chain, healthcare, and AI – to ensure they are built in alignment with human needs and values.

Leadership Style

I operate at executive levels, but I do not care much about titles. I take a different approach to leadership than many executives. I believe a leader is a servant. I prefer to be actively engaged with and collaborating with the people that I serve as a member of their team, whether they are employees or citizens. I am simply a member of the team, and, to get the best results, I focus on building relationships and understanding people so that I can bring out the best in them and support them in areas where I see gaps. I too, need the same thing. I believe leadership is a high-contact job, which requires active participation, engagement, mentorship, and a passion to continuously learn at all levels of the organization. My desire to scale that type of leadership and to deeply understand the people I am serving is what drives me to build products. In that sense, my ideal organization would not only be a product organization, but also a learning organization.

What Energizes Me

I feel most energized when bringing people together to solve problems and architecting solutions to those problems that include people (or robots), process, and product or technology. I spend a lot of time thinking about the best ways to enable collaboration by first framing the problem and opportunity to gain consensus, and then working to review and discuss viable solutions to gain consensus. Too often, we combine the two, which makes discussion hard, as it creates confusion between the problem and the solution. I enjoy thinking about the user or citizen journey/experience and finding points of interaction to include people as valued participants in the solutions to their own problems. I am enthusiastic about a future where user or citizen engagement is highlighted by collaborative events that create meaningful experiences to unite people, with smaller points of engagement in between those events. In other words, active participation becomes part of the citizen experience.

Areas of Interest

I am extremely interested in technology and nation or city-building. My goal is to become the fist Chief Product Officer (CPO) of America. I have been passionate about government since high school and want to start a new type of political party that operates online in a non-partisan or independent manner. There is an opportunity to create a citizen or community congress, where we start to learn about community needs and values and heavily engage citizens as we build the city as a product with a digital twin. I have recently started to dive into learning about machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning to scale this to city, state, national, or even global levels. I believe that this type of online community can one day create a system of governance around AI, where the AI becomes a servant leader that is creating proposals for the community to vote on and approve or reject. I envision it working as an accelerator, starting by accelerating campaigns of political candidates that agree to work as a united team to solve problems in alignment with the needs, values, and desired outcomes of the online community.