Sparking and Harnessing Innovation
Human-focused experiences, design, and research highlight technology and the people who make it happen.
Celebrating Curiosity
Training & Onboarding Program
FinTech can be confusing, especially for those only familiar with consumer-facing technology. I created and facilitated a 12 week program for our large group of new developers in Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Orlando.
With a balance of fun and learning, the program was a hit!
Human-Focused Navigation
Creating an intuitive user experience starts with navigation. How can you create one navigational workflow when a product has a variety of different users who engage with the content in different ways? You let the user create their own!
My solution leveraged stacked dashboards to provide users with many different pathways.
Product Ownership
Product ownership requires a complete understanding of the product environment, scope, client needs, and market demand.
I met with subject matter experts, product sales representatives, and experienced developers to understand where our product began and how it is evolving.
learn
Coffee Chats
Our company has a wide variety of people, from those celebrating their 30th anniversary to brand new hires out of college. With so much knowledge to share, I’ve started weekly Coffee Chats to celebrate and highlight people across our organization.
give
Giving Back
For the third year in a row, I’ve lead our annual Geek Games event! Remember that episode of The Office? So do we! A fun-filled week of pay-to-play office-themed games every summer allows us to give back to our community and have a little bit of fun, too. All of the proceeds are donated to a different local charity each year.
enjoy
Little Free Library
They say those who read, think! Community libraries are the perfect way to encourage people to take a moment away from their screen. The little free library I created in our break area is open to all employees and facilities members and includes books about everything from art and storytelling to technology. I advertised it to all employees in our building and in one month we collected more than 100 books.
Organizing Events that Inspire
Getting people excited! Volunteers were ready to go, doors opened in 10 minutes!
Energizing Teams
Creating industry-leading technology requires full stack, motivated teams who have the tools and support to take innovative risks.
Creating that culture is a huge part of what I do.
Large-scale events work in tandem with corporate communication and day-to-day positivity to elevate cultural change within an organization. The energy in the space should be contagious - even people who miss the communications will know something exciting has happened.
Celebrating innovation helps it spread. Organizing events that encourage continual learning help all of our teams network, connect, and learn with each other.
Continuous Improvement
Over 5 years, I’ve led and organized 8 major events of this nature; from the ideation to execution to retrospective. The first time around we scrambled, but we got it done. We received some great feedback from attendees that we used to drive change for the next event.
More preparation time gave us more opportunities to generate the hype, create a strategic communication plan, and think through which teams to feature.
We thought of fun ways to communicate highly detailed, sometimes confusing, technical content. We contracted with a graphic recording company to create storyboarded visuals and it became our attendee’s favorite part of the event.
Innovation boards gave attendees an opportunity to interact with the knowledge and make their mark.
Whimsy spread across the pages of the booklet to help foster a fun and casual space open to opportunity. Image intentionally blurred.
Elevating the Experience
Our most recent event welcomed more than 500 people. We tweaked our communication plan with more content variety and distributed branded swag, raffle prizes, and takeaways.
One of my favorite projects for this event was meeting with each featured team to create a detailed booklet about all of the cool initiatives. This year’s booklet featured 11 teams and was packed with interesting specs. Learning about what our people are working on makes me excited for the future of tech.
I’m looking forward to the next time around. We have a long list of things that went well and an even longer list of new ideas to improve the experience for volunteers, participants, and attendees.