Resume & Work History
(Read some of my thoughts from over the years on Marketing, Product Marketing, Business Data, Data-Driven Strategy, or Performance Metrics & OKRs.)
I’m resisting the urge to write 80,000 words about my long, bizarre professional journey. Instead, this is a quick and dirty list of deliverables and things to watch that exist primarily to prove I can actually get things done that are useful and kind of cool. Basically, my response to “pictures or GTFO”.
(For what it’s worth, I’ve made probably hundreds of one pagers, sales enablement decks, competitive analysis documents, and things like that — but those are all obviously proprietary and I can’t just throw them up on my site.)
Apologies if any videos/links go away, as a number of them are owned/controlled by former employers.
Career Progression
Tech Writing & Customer Support
My First Jobs
First Product Mgmt. & Marketing Roles
Hello, Product Marketing
First Player/Coach Role
Startups
First Team Management Role
"I'm Mr. Manager!"
First Department Head Roles
Board Meetings
Building My Own Products
I just really like software.
Samples & Accomplishments
Resolution (2022-present)
Resolution Overview (2022)
Resolution is my baby — a passion business/project I came up with during years of leading teams, working with other departments, and trying to hit goals and make tough decisions in high growth environments. I left Botify in early 2022 to try building this, but without taking investment or creating some huge burn rate I couldn’t support by simply getting a job. You should try it!
Since I’m the entire staff of Resolution, it’s safe to say I did all of the work here (although Resolution’s extremely cool visual design came from the fine folks at Viget.)
CEO Boot Camp (2022)
This was something I found myself doing all the time — unofficially — for people who were interested in startups, but had never actually worked at one. My career dovetails nicely with the slow, unstoppable growth of software as a service, so I’m pretty comfortable with a lot of the topics.
My idea here was to build a series of short videos and articles that explained the most important concepts and included Resolution models to help people validate their logic. It was fun to work on, and I might finish the rest someday.
3rd Street Store (2022)
Before Resolution launched, my B2B brain decided I needed a case study. The only problem was that my only actual user was my six-year-old daughter. Fortunately, she was thrilled to go on camera and answer a bunch of very typical corporate case study questions more articulately than most of the adults I’ve interviewed. She’s hilarious.
I shot this in my basement, and I even wrote this song. Plus, this really is the model she used for her very real store, which people actually go to against all odds. Come by my house this summer to get some tomatoes.
Botify (2020-2022)
Botify 101 (2021)
Botify is an enterprise SEO system specifically designed to tackle the problems of large, modern sites. If you want to learn more, this is the perfect video for that. I joined Botify in 2020, literally days before the office shut down for the next year or so. I trekked in to film the in-person portions of this with my own cool/crappy equipment and it was literally my first time in the office.
This video was featured in our remote annual customer event, and was a ton of work — I did literally everything myself. Fortunately, we got a lot of mileage from it, particularly in training new team members (there were a lot of them).
Botify Training (2020-22)
Since I spent the vast majority of my time at Botify in the lockdown era, a lot of things I used to do in person started to get done remotely. In some ways, this was a good thing, as it made me start building things like competitive or strategic training in formats that people could not just use remotely, but asynchronously. I got pretty good at working around the design limitations of Google Slides, and built a bunch of good ones for various parts of our discovery & proposal decks, alongside competitive and reference material. I obviously can’t include full decks here, but here are a few public and company-neutral ones I like the most.
Gooten (2018-2020)
Gooten Etsy Launch (2019)
Gooten is an automated manufacturing and fulfillment system for online stores — basically when you get orders from customers, Gooten automatically gets the product made and shipped directly to its destination.
In 2019 (shortly after I started), we launched a new Etsy integration, so people could sell on Etsy and have orders fulfilled by us, automatically. This is a video I made to show how it works, and why it’s cool.
I did everything here myself; animations in Keynote, voiceovers and music in Logic, and final editing in Final Cut.
FiscalNote (2015-2019)
FiscalNote Issues Management Launch (2018)
In 2018, FiscalNote went through a pretty major positioning shift lead largely by me and the Marketing team I ran at the time, and our Product group. Basically, the idea was to break out of a very narrow legislative tracking space (aka, “what laws might be passed”), and into a broader “what is going on in the world that can affect me” space that’s both more useful, and more valuable.
This was a very cool full-team project, with a lot of assets. This video is another all-me thing, although I used static assets from our awesome designers.
FiscalNote Site/Brand (2018)
FiscalNote also went through a whole brand overhaul, with an all new visual brand to go with our new CMS and the product pivot mentioned above. Oh yeah, we also bought CQ Roll Call. It was a busy year.
Anyways, we worked with one of my favorite firms, Viget, and they did this great case study video on us. I’m in here a couple times in the background, probably worrying about the budget.
I wrote a bunch of copy for the site, but for the most part I spent my time running around making lots of feedback documents and getting stuff out of the way for our team. Fun project, though.
FiscalNote Mobile (2018)
We released a nice mobile app early in my time at FiscalNote. One of the cool things about it was that we really tried to build it for the physical world of our audience — why would you want legislative information on your phone? Where would you be when you used it? We steered into that in this demo/promo, and actually went to the Hill and filmed our employees living the idealized life of our customers.
I think these mobile overlays look great; took me a while to get them right, but showing actual UI/UX in real world context was pretty next-level for early-stage enterprise B2B SaaS. The tone’s a little light-hearted (on purpose) but overall, this was a great project.
FiscalNote GRM (2017)
Prior to all of that, and before I was running the entire marketing team, my biggest contribution was straight up product marketing. I worked with a local, DC-based video production firm to build some extremely nice looking promotional videos about what our software was, and what it did.
This is the flashiest public-facing “GRM” work I did (cool concept, right??), but there was tons of behind the scenes enablement work. My favorite part was being in the room for all the employee interviews (these are some of my favorite coworkers ever) and coaching/leading everyone into answering questions the right way.
Dexter Industries (one-off, 2016)
Dexter Industries (2016)
For the extreme opposite, and clear proof I’m willing to debase myself on camera for the benefit of others, here’s a ridiculous project I did for my wife when she was working for a very small educational robotics company.
She did most of the editing on this, although I think I stepped in for some of the truly critical absurdist sections (like Brian the Donkey). The best thing by far is that all of the “interview” sections are totally improvised (you can tell I am not an improv class person or anything), and we had to stop a million times because we had both completely lost it.
Contactually (2014-2015)
Contactually Introduction (2014)
I started at Contactually (now owned by Compass) as a content marketing lead in 2014, but once everyone realized what product marketing was, I switched to doing that full-time.
Contactually was the first company I worked at that had a really large number of users, and had a traditional try-before-you-buy, “convert to paid” kind of funnel. That meant in-app stuff and onboarding was huge, because we basically sold through the user experience.
This was my attempt to get people excited after they created an account. It’s another giant Keynote adventure, 100% done by me.
One Million Emails (2014)
I had only been at Contactually for a couple weeks when we (there were less than 20 of us at the time) realized someone was about to send the one millionth email with our service. Someone had the great promotional idea to give away a lifetime subscription to whoever did it, and when it actually happened and we realized the winner lived about an hour away, we decided to present the award in person.
It was fun, silly, awkward, and I was tasked with capturing the whole thing. I then cut it together and we threw it on the site. This is not the most impactful business activity I’ve worked on, but this was a good group and is a window into an earlier, more earnest era of B2B tech startups.
Efficiency Exchange (2012-2014)
Efficiency Exchange Pitch (2013)
Efficiency Exchange was a company started by my wife that I helped out with in my spare time (we had spare time before kids) before we raised enough money for me to join full-time. This is an animated “pitch deck” when we made our last big crack at raising serious capital.
We couldn’t pull it off, but the EEx adventure in general was pretty amazing and very rewarding — but to this day we’re all a little disappointed we weren’t really able to build what we thought (still think?) was so promising.
I did all this magic in Keynote, with some amazing static assets from a freelance designer.
Bamboo Solutions (2008-2012)
Bamboo Exhibit (2009)
I cut my teeth on product marketing at the now defunct Bamboo Solutions, an amazing little software company I joined at 25 back in 2008. I got a little pigeonholed as “the AV guy” because I could do multimedia work and a little bit of development. Eventually people figured out I wasn’t just building stuff, but was actually coming up with a lot of the ideas that stuff represented, and I had a great run working with a lot of crazy little enterprise software widgets.
This touchscreen was for a trade show; it was kind of nuts and I honestly can’t believe, almost 15 years later, that I learned how to do all of this in Flash in a couple weeks (while extremely sick!).
(For more, here’s my resume, or you can peruse these obligatory social media accounts.)