When I think about my story, my education and what got me to my career today: I'm a digital marketing professional at Progrexion with about 3 thousand employees. It's not something that I ever planned to become actually! When I was going to school, I was going to get a finance degree. So I went to various schools across Utah, I went to BYU, University of Utah, Salt Lake Community College. I was a just little bit more explorative about what I was looking for so I went to see what the finance industry had for me! After taking a couple of accounting classes, I realized that was not something I wanted to pursue for my full time career. I started exploring a little bit more _ school at a part-time job at a company called '1-800 Contacts', it's a company down in Draper, Utah. I started there in a call centre, but a position actually opened up in marketing and I took a risk, and spending an entire night studying and reading an entire book about Excel, how to use Excel because I was tipped off that Excel was a critical part of the marketing job! I guess I was able to do a good Seller's job with them and I got a job in marketing while working out here on (1-800) Contacts. And while here on Contacts, I became passionate about digital marketing! They certainly put a lot of trust in me, they wanted me to continue to grow my experiences with them and to grow my responsibilities with them. So when I started there as I mentioned on the phone (call centre), when I left I was actually over the entire digital marketing program which is a pretty cool opportunity! So I definitely count it to a little bit of grit and determination to figure things out but also a little bit of luck that allowed me to find that position.

I'll start with responsibilities and decisions part of the question. I'd say ultimately my responsibility is clearly defined as: I get a certain amount of budget that I have to work with and with that budget I have to deliver a certain amount of ROI (return on investment) for that budget. So ultimately I'm responsible to figure out a plan and what resources and other things that I need to accomplish that plan. The company gives me a lot of lattitude to accomplish that plan. So I really get a lot of freedom to determine who I hire, what my team looks like, how I engage with existing resources on the team and ultimately achieve that goal. There's a lot of data responsibilties that go into that. But usually what we do is we come up with a quarterly plan. We'll say, 'okay for this quarter we've been given this much budget, we believe that we can deliver this much ROI (return on investment) on that budget.' Once we come to that conclusion, then we come up with the makeup of what the plan is to get us there and how're we actually gonna achieve hitting that delivery with the budget we've been alloted. It's just a matter of executing the plan: making sure we have all the resources and we're hitting all the initiatives that we've agreed to hit. That becomes a daily, weekly, monthly exercise in making sure that we achieve those things. Working hours: I work in an environment pretty flexible. Most weeks I'm probably working 40- 45 hours in the office but then I'm probably putting 5- 10 hours into work outside of the office, that'll probably add to 50- 55 hours workload. That's certainly as not consistent. Some weeks I work 40 hours and that's it, some weeks it goes upto 45-50. It really is depending on how we're tracking on the plans that we've set up. We're very much a plan-based organization. It's to the point where we actually print our plans in a magazine type publication that we hand out to all the team members to make sure they are all very clear about what we've agreed to do. And it is very easy to find when our plan is published, definitely doesn't need to be a secret!

Certainly the standard answer that I use a lot of is Microsoft products; definitely using a lot of Word, all communication via email so Outlook, I use the Macs so equivalent to those, I definitely use a lot of Excel! Even though I'm in kind of the Vice President type role, you think maybe he just manages and works with people but actually its been very important for me to build and know how to use Excel daily, multiple- multiple times a day for just some surface level analytics. Often times the business would communicate the needs that we have for recording with like the finance team for example, they all send Excel spreadsheets. Its very important that I know how to interpret those and read those, open those! And even to make small adjustments to those to make sure I'm getting the information that they're trying to communicate to me. There is a lot of work in-depth: maybe next level type programs that we use as well, the tools. We actually work a lot with Adobe, so Adobe is a tool that we use quite extensively in a couple of different ways! We use it for analytics tool, so when people come to our websites we use an Adobe product like Adobe Analytics to determine what people are doing on the website, to determine how many business we're getting to any website, to any brand and just to figure out how long people are spending on the website, pages and things like that. So we spend a lot of time with the Adobe Analytics. We also use Adobe AMO; what that tool's for is actually making our media buys. We're buying media on Google or Bing, Yahoo... those properties. We're using Adobe product to actually manage that spend. And that allows us to leverage some kind of machine learning type applications to make sure we're spending that money most efficiently. I'd say the other big tool that we use from Adobe is AEM. What that does is that tool allows us to manage our websites: the actual content, the layout, things like that without having to have a lot of deep technical skills like coding! So we definitely work with the development team that helps get the tools setup and gets all the pages setup to be able to function with AEM. Then is the business team literally with no coding experience, that can actually setup pages and modify pages, and make sure that we have all the technical things we need to manage our jobs! Beyond that we work with an Analytics team, like the Data Science team. I don't personally but they employ a lot of Python and languages like that to provide us very detailed analytics and insights that we then go and use on our media- buying side of things. The tools that I prefer the most: that's a good question! I would say tools that help me communicate more effectively are probably I'd make my most prefered tools. We use a lot of tools (things I haven't even mentioned) like slack, email, video chats, anything from like Uber Meetings and so on! A very critical piece of our being successful as a team is we have team members in San Francisco, we have team members in India, we have team members here in Salt Lake City and many other States. And if you're not able to communicate effectively then you can find yourself in a disastrous situation pretty quickly! So we definitely prefer to use whatever tool there is that we need to communicate most effectively whether that's in person or on video, like face-to-face over video chat tools or just having to pick up a phone call.