Welcome to Brazen Careerist!

About Me

I often get asked "what is it you do?" My Answer? I am one of the lucky ones. I get to help businesses move from the analog to the digital and I have been doing it for longer than I can even remember. I don't design websites, I create strategies for customer acquisition and more. ADD is my superpower and I can use it to help you.

I was born in Springfield, Missouri and raised in small town North Dakota, I decided early on that I wanted to be where the people were. That combined with a love of technology brought me to Seattle, WA. The last few years have been incredibly important and exciting for me and Seattle is a rich play ground for my various preoccupations.

I am a technologist at heart, but you can ask anyone who knows me, technology has been a gateway drug that led me to lots of other interests. I am a storyteller, marketer and student. I love the possibilities that come by delighting customers and converting them from passive observers to community and customers.

Specialties
I have spent my career planning and creating cool products. My core specialties include:
- user research
- content strategy
- experience planning

Over the years I have also been responsible for:
Marketing, Evangelism, Usability, Spec Writing, Intranet design & development, content management, web analytics, conversion optimization; user analysis, usability, requirements gathering, technical writing, project management and sometimes I write code (C#, Java, PHP and Ruby).

Work History

• Logitech
• Online Customer Acquisition Manager
• June 2009 to Present

• Responsible for creating the Digital Strategy for Organic and Paid Search efforts as well as driving Social Commerce and other Social Media endeavors at Logitech.com and UltimateEars.com.

  I create and analyze sites to provide well-defined strategies to improve site conversion and ROI. Provide detailed documentation on performance KPIs and educate team on industry trends and best practices.

• Microsoft - Bing
• Program Manager II
• September 2007 to April 2009

• As the Program Manager for Microsoft Bing Webmaster Center. My focus was on community marketing, technical evangelism, social media measurement and customer engagement as well as working on the design and implementation of features to the webmaster center.

• Microsoft - MSDN
• Program Manager II
• April 2005 to September 2009

• As a Program Manager at Microsoft I was responsible for the design and implementation of search related features for the MSDN publishing system. This included integration with SQL and Visual Studio help systems as well as the ensuring the crawlablity of content for external systems. Additionally I worked on MSDN labs related research projects for code search.

Education

• Missouri State University
• Bachelor of Science - Communication Theory, Communication Theory, Mass Media, Philosophy
• 1999 - 2001