I am a person who loves learning about people and then transferring that knowledge to other people to build something great.

So, I guess that means I’ll build this Stories website section without AI. I love AI, I am all about being a “centaur” to build that “unicorn.” I use AI tools daily. But, people who love working with me, who love the work they produce because of my involvement, tell me that I “talk like a real person” and that makes all the difference. It is why you should hire me.

I am a Literature major. I devour books. I consider the nuance of language, the words we use to express our goals, our needs, our emotions, our frustrations. Words are a troubled product also. They come out unmeasured and measured. They have bias and particular meaning. As a researcher, I will also be thoughtful and investigative about those words, their choice, their meaning. I will practice that thoughtfulness for these stories as well.

What do you get from hiring me. Well, according to my CliftonStrengths self-assessment, I am a:

Learner

I have a desire to learn and want to continuously improve. The process of learning excites me. I find every aspect of investigation interesting. I am passionately curious. I often use this strength in my systems analysis scenarios.

Maximizer

I focus on strengths to stimulate personal and group excellence. I seek to transform strengths into superpowers. I am most often looking for the connections that work, that will overcome gaps. This asset helps me in critical pattern recognition.

Positivity

I have a contagious enthusiasm. I am upbeat and can get others excited about what they are going to do. I inspire, motivate, help people find the flow in our combined work. This strength is especially helpful in visioning exercises.

Activator

I can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. I am often impatient. I would rather get started and try. If I encounter failure, I restart with new learnings. I find this path better than trying to work it out sans action, spinning wheels.

Input

I crave to know more. I like to collect and archive all kinds of information. My work becomes exponentially better as I gain more insight internally and externally. I build libraries for cross-functional access.

Compared to most researchers, I tend to put more emphasis on the recruitment of participants. I think this is because I was raised by a mother who worked in catering and loved Alice Waters, who always emphasized her ingredient shopping powers over her cooking ability. The people who provide research data and insight are the beginning of the whole process. If you do not have thoughtful ingredients, you do not have an excellent meal.

I like to make sure I include as many relevant voices as possible. I want to get the ladder out and reach for the “hardest to pick fruit.” If you put the extra effort into bringing in the helpful POVs, the collection, analysis, and delivery of insight is better and more trustworthy.

Doing research for Mailchimp during their Growth phase was a remarkable experience.

Every day I was asking questions and sharing answers with designers, PMs, engineers, founders.

How do small businesses make decisions about their business? How do they use their mobile phone as a business device? How do they measure success? What do they need to succeed in a world dominated by the likes of Amazon and Wal-Mart? When they grow, how do they reprioritize? What makes running a business from Nashville, Boston, Paris, Sydney, Mumbai different? How can they use the trends toward remote workers, globalization, automation to share their passions and creations?

Teaching is something we all think we can do because we all have been taught. But after teaching for a decade and hiring instructors, I can attest it is a developed skill. Learning is a flowing process that must build.

As a department director teaching six classes a semester, I thought how an exercise fed a class fed a course fed a semester fed a year fed a degree fed a career. The layered complexity was diverse, immense, and tangled. I learned how to seed an idea, inspire its growth, encourage its development, and use its resources for further exploration. These skills would prove to be highly applicable to being a UX researcher.

My partner and I recently took a break from full-time work to go explore the world for months, to better understand global cultures and behaviors, relationships, and see masterpieces of art. We went to Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, Lake Geneva, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Mumbai, the Rann of Kutch on the border of India and Pakistan, London, Cornwall UK, The Netherlands.

We had done a round-the-world trip five years ago just before Covid lockdown. (No, we do not own a crystal ball.) Barcelona, Lyon, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, Mumbai, Kolkata, Jaipur, Kerala, Thailand, Cambodia, Bali, Sydney.

It has been critical to get off the screens and experience the world I have been researching for years now. But we are ready to nest for a bit.

As I approached 40, I changed my health and lost fifty pounds. Equally striking to me was the reaction to my Medium post about the experience. I wrote it so I could stop retelling the story of how I lost the weight, including students scheduling office hour meetings to discuss. The piece got 4K reads and hundreds of recommends. I had a geek-moment when I saw Ev Williams (Twitter co-founder and creator of Medium) highlighted some phrases. Strangers wrote me how I inspired small changes to their health behavior. I truly understood what it meant to be my own channel.

As a “strategist” I get asked this often. Strategy as a term is war-based. It was developed with an idea of borders and resource grabs. Does it apply to a global world with internet and a need to focus on sustainability? Words evolve in meaning, still rooted to the past but staying relevant to shifts in culture. I like the Princeton WordNet definition of stratagem, “a maneuver in a game or conversation.” Games and conversations are best when they just keep going on and on. They are about the collective action, not the final prize. Keeping things borderless and sustainable are how we build a modern creative product strategy, even when there are headwinds.

I have been fortunate in my early career investigative travels. For the U.S. State Department, I went to Mexico City to talk with U.S. embassy employees from underrepresented populations about what it means to represent America. For the British Council, I went to Manchester to discuss with educators how to create online British education for students across the globe. For Diageo, I went to Dublin to discuss with Irish people how they felt about a big British brand buying Guinness. For GM, I went to El Paso to ask engineering students how they choose their major. These early career explorations set my brain to always wander, always wonder when building products. Challenge my assumptions, often.

I have conducted in-home website usability testing for Starbucks in Seattle, Chicago and New York City, the latter for one of their biggest blizzards ever. I climbed through snow to arrive at people’s homes with a warm smile and coffee. I learned so much more by being in people’s actual environments, interacting with all the layers of personal culture demanding their attention. Fortunately, I am often able to put people at ease with my demeanor, tone of voice and body language. It has helped me immensely in a career of needing to authentically understand and connect with individuals, even though I mostly enter their spaces through their screens or even asynchronously.

I once drove 3,604 miles from Anchorage, Alaska to San Francisco, that is further than Seattle to Miami. It changed me. Here is what I wrote before I took off:

I hope to see bears

I hope to swim in more lakes, than showers I take

I hope to say few words, read few statuses

I hope to have no clue what happens to you this week, until you tell me over a coffee, lunch or pint some time

I hope to see bison

I hope to get lost in my head and recall that which is hiding

I hope to dance with trees

I hope to literally stop. And smell the flowers

I hope to see goats and sheep

I hope to lose track of time and just sleep when I'm tired and eat when I'm hungry

I hope to hear silence and thundering waterfalls at the same time

I hope to wander

I hope to name the mountains what I think they should be named. If I am really lucky they will tell me themselves

I hope to breathe the best air of my life and therefore know life

I succeeded in this pursuit and forever changed.

In my second semester teaching, I noticed students struggled to think like creative strategists. Therefore, I invented the “Culture Map” assignment. I gave each student a San Francisco neighborhood, instructions to go absorb and observe the culture and build a map. Students often wanted more direction and I would say, “Do you know what culture is?” Yep. “Do you know what a map is?” Yep. “There you go.” The assignment required them to create layered thinking based on POV, intuition, and observation. It got them away from screens, thinking beyond shopping, and how people are much more interesting than brands.