I think my career in technology and product management started back actually at the company that many people may not remember any more company called WordPerfect and I started out in their international team helping to create documentation for the products in the Finnish language, actually, which is kind of a crazy story, but I ended up speaking fluent Finnish, and so they used me to do that. Then I just kind of spent a lot of time there learning as much as I could about the technology and the products and the system and the work products acquired by Novell. Then I went off and started an ISP and then came back to Novell and it was really well at Novell that my career started to get fairly technical. Novell is a very technology-driven company. I spent some time there, getting a lot of certifications, and studying as much about networking and computer technologies I could and ended up in a program management role, overseeing these really large software releases and I succeeded well, but I often tell people that was a what I would call a brute force attack as it was just like sheer willpower, discipline, and all-nighters that allowed me to succeed there. Then I had an opportunity after a year and a half or two years of doing that to start in product management. The way I actually stepped into product management was one of the projects I was working on has a program manager. The largest risk to the program was that the product management team wouldn't define the requirements and so to mitigate the risk, I went and wrote the requirements for the software release that we were going to do and then after doing that, I think that people were like, "oh, maybe we could use him as a product manager" and so I started doing product management. This is probably about in 2000 when I started in product management, and it was really interesting because where program management has been really hard, product management was very intuitive to me and was like really, like, delightful and wasn't brute force or high discipline. It was just fun and so like I was like, "Oh, wait a minute, where has this been all my life?" And I kind of was glad to learn that disciplines that I had before that. But when I started in product management, it was a whole different world for me because it was just so much more natural and delightful that I just really excelled really fast through then. So I think, having that deep background in other types of roles in software and having a kind of a highly technical background through a lot of that studying, training, certification set me up really well. But once I discovered product management, it was just fantastic.

At Lucid, I oversee our product management teams, our UX design teams, our strategy teams, and our business development teams, and they are all actually tightly related to each other in what they do and what their functions are. So I have a set of people that are like director, senior directors that are highly competent in their areas. So my interfaces with them, my thoughts are all about how we can increase kind of the capability and capacity and competency of the team so that we can move the ball forward for customers, for the business. To do that, in my typical days, I'm often in the office around 8:00 or 8:30 but it's common that I've been working for a couple of hours before I ever get here. I do a lot of, like, networking or recruiting or career coaching for people over breakfast and so it's common for me to have breakfast at 7:00 or 7:30 and spend an hour or so with them or if I am not doing that I like deep thinking time, it is common for me to hit a nearby restaurant that I don't disclose to people where I could just be by myself and kind of chill out over breakfast and do some email or think about the day so I did start that way. Then I tend to like, wind up the days at 5:30 or 6:00, depending on the day and go home. I will say that probably once or twice a week, I end up doing some work from home. It's not a constant thing, but I do that. I try to be pretty judicious about that. I also would say that my mind rarely stops thinking about work because I like it, like, if there's nothing else going on, that's where my mind is. It is on work and what we're doing and how we're going to get to the next level.

So I work with a broad range of people. I spend time with people who are interns, this is their very first step into the company. I spend time with them mentoring them and I am very intentional about that because it gives me a chance to get to know them, they're the future potential rising stars so I spend time there. I spend time with product managers all the way up to senior product managers, directors of product, UX designers, directors of UX, senior directors of UX, and senior directors and strategy and business development directors so that way I spend a lot of time interfacing with people in product marketing and people in our marketing team generally. So a lot of product marketers and the directors over there, people on our sales team, people on sales enabling. And I spent a lot of time really focused on, like the senior vice presidents and the C level people on our executive team. So I invest a lot of time into relationships with the rest of my executive team and spend time regularly working with them. Then it's really similar, the same type of people outside of Lucid, the same types of roles, I spent a lot of time with executives at other companies whether it's people who want to be our customers or that our customer or people that we are looking to do partnerships with. The way that I do that is I tend to really invest a lot in the relationships and getting to know people so, for example, I have a standing appointment on my calendar every week to me it seems random, I think my executive assistant has some strategy by what happens but I've told her to just randomly get me 2 to 3 people from my teams that I'll take to lunch once a week and then we just go to lunch. We don't really talk business unless they want to. It's just about getting to know them and she works it so at that rate I can about twice a year, take everyone to lunch. I think in small groups better relationships are formed. I do it with my peers like I've been taking everybody on our enterprise sales team one on one to lunch overtime and it's something I actually really underestimated early in my career. Just the value of just knowing people on a more personal level and how that makes it easier to work together and how it makes it more comfortable for people to reach out with questions or thoughts or things like that. So I invest a lot of time in one of one's whether those are like just in somebody's office, sitting down one on one or if it's over lunch or breakfast, something like that. I tend to have a strategy, there's a set of people who I've decided that I'm going to have a one on one with at least every week and then for some set of people it's every other week, and for another set of people that's monthly and then there's set of people that it's quarterly but I also have a strategy, which is I think of, I call it how many hops away from me are these people. So, people that report directly to me or that I report directly to, they tend to be that once a week group but I am constantly thinking, okay, how many hops out can I get? And so I'm building relationships at the second hop so if I lower down in the organization, I would be thinking about, "Okay, how do I have a relationship with my boss's boss? What's the appropriate frequency? And how do I do that? How do I turn them into my mentor?" And then I would broaden from there like, okay, can I go three hops? Can I have a relationship with my boss's boss's boss or can I have a relationship with somebody on the board? and typically the more hops, the harder it is to have that weekly occurrence, But there's a pretty high willingness of people to invest in relationships as long as the frequency isn't too demanding. So that's why I tend to, like focus on approaching the work with them being effective.