I think everybody's story is going to be deeply complex, but I actually started with strong math and science, out of high school. I had to make a decision if I wanted to pursue engineering or get into the business. So a lot of my advisors told me to do the hard work first. So I actually went to Texas and majored in intellectual engineering and fought my way through that program and was fortunate enough to get a bachelor's degree, which started my journey. I got my first job at a company called AT&T Wireless, which was a stand-alone mobile network operator, back in 2001. And after about three years, I really enjoyed the industry, but I wanted to do more, I wanted to do something else. So I ended up doing part-time, I actually applied to Southern Methodist University into their business school to start working on my MBA, and I did that in the evenings on the weekends. So to really just focus on how I started, it was really driven by education. It was an education that was pointed towards an outcome and it really helped to work for a few years in the industry to really help refine kind of where I wanted to be and I was able to bring some experiences into those classrooms to really kick start my career early on and just to sort of close off the topic but beyond just investing in myself, I was just looking back at relationships that are important, too, because I met a lot of good folks at my first tour at AT&T wireless and even going to night school, working in groups and bringing my perspectives into case studies and projects. I also met a lot of folks outside of AT&T that I still keep in touch with today, and over the time those folks courted me into opportunities and jobs and I can tell you that I've never really been successful in going out through social media, applying for jobs with no resumes but what has worked is people who connect to opportunities, they want to work with you and they've seen your work. So from an advice perspective, I would definitely say to get out from behind the computer, try to find opportunities to be out in organizations, working outside of your comfort zone and letting things play out from there.

My responsibilities are to lead a team that focuses on new product development. It's more of a long view and looking at the market, understanding how our technologies contrive incremental value for business customers and then putting a plan together to go execute on that. So we really got to wear a lot of hats beyond just being technologists there are financial considerations, business cases and then working through all the operational aspects of delivery. We take very much an agile approach and look at how to take this whole process and break it into small pieces so that the business can see the value over time as you are extending those investments. It's mostly an office job so most of the time I would say 90% of the time, I am here with the team and working through all the strategic negotiations and so forth internally and externally. We do have the ability to work from home so we try to communicate to employees that, Hey, once a week if you don't have a ton of meetings, in-person meetings and you need a different work environment, just let the team know where you're working that day, and we do support virtual work environments as well. We feel like we have a really good balance, sometimes you need to get away to be creative, sometimes going to the same office every day with the hustle of meetings doesn't really sit well with deep thoughts. So definitely encourage folks to do what works best for them.

We definitely work with strategic pricing teams so think of them as finance. We work with our technology organizations, labs, engineering teams. We work with marketing, who would be more so about positioning who handles sort of our distributions, our collateral messaging on our web pages. We work with partners as well, so AT&T is very much an integrator, we work across infrastructure providers, software providers to ultimately make the world go and then finally our customers. So one thing that's very important is thinking about the objectives of those partners and going into those meetings, discussions to make sure that we're translating whatever our goals are into something that's meaningful for them. So if I'm talking to my lab's team, they're very technology focus so they want to understand not only why we're doing things, what the market is but they want to understand the requirements like what do we consider to be the minimum viable product? Why are these 10 or 15 features important to delivery because they want to be in the boat with us, they want to engage with us, be our partners, and then be able to have those conversations about trade-offs because that always happens. You drop a planet looks perfect but then there are bumps in the road where you have to step back and say something changed, what do we do so we can move more rapidly if we are a team and we understand each other at a basic level to be able to make the business successful.