I am currently the chief customer experience officer at instructure. I've been in ed-tech or educational technology for the majority of my career, and I sort of fell into it, to be honest in the very early parts of my career. So after I did some master's work in educational policy and then began my MBA, I realized I wanted to focus on education and business and where they intersect. So, shortly after my MBA, I was able to take on a role at a university where I was leading a team a very small team focused on bringing educational technology into the classroom. It was early on, in using online learning, and I sort of got lucky because I was willing to take that risk and found that I loved it and then was able to take that role in transition that into a role on the corporate side. After having industry experience or working specifically for a client I was able to then go work for a platform company called Blackboard that was serving that client and that expanded my experiences. So I had been able to build on the setting experience. Plus now, how do you run the business around that experience and then just did a little bit of both of those throughout the last probably 15 years of my career. I went from institution to corporate, and then I went back into the institution for a little bit, and then I went back into corporate did some start-up work and then continue down this corporate path and was able to join and instructure six years ago and continue to see my career grow from there. I sort of got lucky and fell into Ed-Tech early, but then really loved it and stuck with it in a variety of different capacities.

As the chief customer experience officer, I'm responsible for all of our customer interactions once a sale closes. So that means I have our customer support team, typical help desk, or call desk I have that team in my group. I have account management folks that are responsible for the day to day care and feeding of our customers outside of technical support, I have a renewal team we're the ones that every year we make sure that as new contracts come up with customers, we renew those contracts and continue to grow those contracts. I have our services team that's a group of consultants that do everything from implementing a customer to offering training to a customer to doing change management and other kinds of professional consulting services. I also have a partnerships team that team's responsible for making sure that we partner well with third party organizations, both from a technical perspective and a strategic business perspective. Then finally I have a community and documentation team. They're responsible for all of our customer-facing documentation as well as fostering an online community of our end users so that they help one another as they leverage our software. It's a big group, our company is around 950 folks and my team is 475 of our company. My hours vary because I'm responsible for not only work in the US, but we're a global organization. So I have small teams around the world in three different locations. So generally my work hours are around 50 to 60 hours a week and mostly within normal working hours for where I live in Salt Lake City. Although I do find myself doing some late nights or some early mornings to support the work I'm doing in London or the work that I might be doing with our Sydney teams. I do travel of course not right now but I do travel. I probably travel about 30 to 40% of the time. Most of that travel is to large speaking events where I speak or its to key customer interactions or customer user groups, or even our large customer events that we support.

I face three different types of challenges. One type of challenge will be planning for or see problems before they happen how about that? because part of my work in leading such a large organization is to make sure we're operationally making the right decisions and we're strategically making the right decisions in how we serve our customers. And that requires me to not only address problems in the moment or in the short term but also look at problems over the long term and identify where we may see gaps. For example, when you think about staffing for example a services team you've got a collection consultant, and they need to be billable. You need to make sure that they're producing a good margin on the work that they're doing. How you may staff is going to be dependent on how your customer intake happens. So in the education space, we're very cyclical. We see peaks in the summer and in the fall when customers come on board, it's very slow in the winter, and we'll get some activity in the spring. So one of the things we have to think about is not only staffing for your peak times but how do you make sure your staffing optimally manages that curve over the year and understanding those patterns. So that would lead to a second bucket of challenges. So I need to make sure I'm solving problems in the short term and trying to avoid them in the long term. I need to be able to really use data effectively, and this can be challenging because there's a lot of data that's available. Then sometimes the data that's available doesn't actually help you tell the stories that you need to in order to make your decisions. I tend to face challenges relating to making sure the technology that we have gets us the data we need, making sure the company uses that technology the same way, there's data health, there's data integrity that we need to do is the company, and that can be challenging. Then making sure that I'm able to access and report on that data effectively. Then the third challenge I face is that I have a large group of people that I manage and so Inevitably even in small teams, you have to make sure that you can manage how people work with one another. You're helping people grow their careers and develop themselves while still ensuring that they are accountable for the work and that they're delivering results. So that would be the three buckets of challenges I typically face.