I am the head of technology leader experiences for accompanying Pluralsight. I lead product management, product design and software engineering for one of the PluralSight's core value streams, which are our technology leaders CIOs, VP's of engineering or some other roles. The path that I've had that's taking me to what I do today, I'll start educationally, with some of my early experiences that move professionally to some of the early career experiences that I had that enabled me to be in the role that I am today. My undergraduate degree is in psychology from Brigham Young University. I subsequently spent five years in a doctoral program studying instructional design and instructional psychology. What I became really passionate about is the intersection of technology, business and education which is what ultimately led me to my current role here at PluralSight. As part of my work towards a doctoral degree. I began working full time eventually, beginning with an early-stage product management role of a fairly junior role within the organization and subsequently being able to gain more expertise within product management within the instructional design space broadly. Five or six years ago I pivoted a little bit and took my product management skills and applied them to the enterprise. Software is the solution space or SAS space, enabling me to be able to fully develop my business and technology skills. There I was the first product hire for a company named GoReact. Which is an Ed-Tech company focused on delivering online video feedback as part of classes, anything from public speaking to teaching American sign language. After being at Go React for two years what I really recognized was the opportunity to strengthen my skill set as a product practitioner in being able to leverage human-centered design practices more deeply in my product management work. Ultimately, I transitioned into a career with PluralSight as a product manager. After being with the organization for two years, we went through a fairly critical reorganization that was intended to more tightly align our product teams to key customer value streams. Now I lead the technology leader value stream, as I mentioned with responsibilities for product management, product design and software engineering. As far as experiences that have been most influential in my career. What I would say would be the recognition that ultimately big value creation for customers that drives and solves problems that they care about as well as organizations ultimately is accomplished cross-functionally. So that experience of working directly on a cross-functional team of product managers, product designers and software engineers for many years has really cemented my viewpoint that the best outcomes are going to be created cross-functionally. In the last year with this new design that we've implemented what I've really come to appreciate is the value of cross-functional leadership, not just cross-functional teams.

On the weekly basis responsibilities and decisions that I make include hiring decisions as we continue to build out teams. It includes budgetary decisions relative to what current headcount budget is relative to where we know we were hoping to be over given checking in milestone points throughout the year, I am ultimately responsible for the product-market fit of our technology leader focused experiences at PluralSight. Which is ultimately going to be the strongest indication of my performance professionally. If we're able to continue evolving our product experiences in a way that continued to delight customer needs, that's going to be a strong driver for our holistic company success, in my role is what I'm ultimately accountable to. Other decisions that I face weekly at work can include a wide variety of tactical decision making regarding how we're going to be supporting various company initiatives as well as all of the traditional people management responsibilities that you would anticipate having a role like mine. At the moment, my team is approximately 40 individuals and so that can consume a lot of time and attention as well from a decision making perspective. As far as weekly hours I spent in the office or for work travel. One of the things that are really critical to me has been to figure out how to support my responsibilities professionally in a way that enables me to be the type of husband and father that I'd like to be in terms of engagement. My wife is currently working on finishing her Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy and she works as a therapist in so blending all of that leads me to work a hybrid work schedule. What I do is I'll typically begin my day somewhere between six and seven in the office and I'll spend my first morning hours before people typically come into the office focused on the types of activities that I need to be strongest at. That can be anything from preparing for critical customer calls. It could be focused on strategic initiatives that I'm responsible for occasionally will be spent just trying to keep up with the slack and email communications that I have to attend then typically spend most days in the office until about 4 p.m. When I come home to be able to support my wife in her job as a therapist or working on her dissertation. Oftentimes it'll happen is most evenings I'll spend some time trying to catch up on communication being slacker. Enabling me to be able to hit the ground, running the next day with a fairly clean inbox so that psychologically I am prepared to be able to tackle my most important initiatives. I do travel periodically for work the bulk of my travel is spent customer-facing supporting ourselves. A team getting out in the field and being able to have strategic conversations with customers right now, given the State of COVID-19 in the United States, I am actually under a mandatory working from home situation. However, typically in my role that's not the case I am typically office-based.

Inside of my organization the nature of my role is highly cross-functional. I work with software engineers, product managers, product designers. I collaborate very closely internally to PluralSight with our product marketing the marketing team's, customer's success and sales support. The only portion of the business that I'm not very closely working with on a continuous basis would probably be our finance team. I do have touchpoints with the financial planning and accounting individual that supports my organization. That's probably the only portion of the company that I'm not very directly and consistently working with. Sales, marketing, customer success, and then obviously within our product organizations. Outside of our product organizations, I interface very consistently with very senior technology leaders ranging from titles such as CEO or CTO down to senior vice presidents or directors of engineering. Also our customer base does have a number of individuals that are part of HR or learning and development organizations. As far as approaches that I find to be most effective and working with them the lesson I continue to learn is the best opportunity for me to communicate comes from my willingness to speak very clearly and plainly to the problems or challenges that I'm trying to solve. Whether that's working with customers directly or with other individuals being able to focus more clearly on the way in which I see specific problems. In the way that I'm trying to solve those problems has a tendency to be able to be more clear and effective than anything else I've been able to discover at this point.