I've been in this career path from the last 11 years or so. I was kind of getting into my first project management role. That was about 11 years ago at a company called ARUP Laboratories which is a reference laboratory and I got a role in project management there. And it was me in the more process improvement project management where we were looking at how can we improve the speed of getting laboratory tests back to clinicians and different things like that. That's where things got started. After that, I took of that product management background and that kind of parlayed that into another project management role. At this point, I was a technical project manager and one thing that helped to move from the entry-level project management role is about two years in on that, I got a CAPM certification. Let's get some product project management. And that's through P. M. I. The project Management Institute. And then, about two years after that, I got my PMP project management professional. That's also through PMI. Once I had both certifications, then that's when I left ARUP laboratories and went to a company called ClearLink as the senior technical project manager and worked on more technical projects. Kind of around the back end, marketing, tracking and, keeping all the systems and all the websites up and running. Sid that for years and then moved into a hybrid role. I became the Director of IT program management at ClearLink and was doing a little bit of project and product management. So doing both disciplines. I did that for another couple of years. In ClearLink, I was there for about six years. Then I left the last march on came to where I'm at now, which is PluralSite and I am the director of the business technology.

As far as responsibilities and decisions go, I have a group of nine people that report to me right now. It kind of fluctuates between nine. And I think it's got upwards of 11 or 12 over the last year. And so one of my main responsibility is essentially supporting them and helping them and their career development, helping them with what they're working on. The people that are role up to me are a combination of technical product managers as well as Salesforce admins. And so a lot of my day to day is working with them and helping them get through the challenges that they have and also just gonna developing their skill sets as product managers and SalesForce Admins. A lot of the decisions that I work on is some stuff with my direct reports. But then, it's cross-functional across the business. A lot of the systems that my team supports are the ones that help run the business. A lot of the internal systems, Salesforce being at the core of that. A lot of what I do daily is around how can we make salesforce better for marketing, for account development, for sales, for our support teams? How can we essentially improve that experience that they're having and make them more efficient in their job? And then as far as how many hours I spent in the office, It kind of ebbs and flows. It's at least always 40 hours a week and then depending on what's going on, it can spike in the 50 to 60 hour work week if there's something that's pretty busy or pretty important to get finished up. We had a couple of initiatives in January that were pretty high priority and essentially took almost like an entire weekend to finish up. And so definite makes for some long weeks. As far as travel, I don't have to do a ton of travel in my role. Mainly when I do travel, it'll have to be for a conference, or now and again, we'll go on visit Salesforce in San Francisco. We also use Slack heavily so sometimes we will meet with them anytime we go out and chat with Salesforce and those visits are more around the understanding. Like if we're running into a specific challenge within SalesForce, we go chat with SalesForce and say, "Hey, how did you guys overcome this or the same thing with slack, we'll say, "You know what? You guys are similar to us as the SAAS company. Did you encounter this and how did you overcome it?" So a lot of it is just kind of that knowledge sharing since we all use each other's platforms. Kind of internally, how do you make the business run a little bit more effectively. And then as far as working from home or just remote work, we're pretty flexible at Pluralsight. For example, last Friday, work from home? Typically, most of my day is made up of meetings, so I try to be in the office. I also live pretty close to our office here in Farmington. But we're in the process of building out a new campus down in Draper. And since I live up here North when that opens, I'll probably be remote, at least two days a week, And it's normal. I was talking to my boss today about the fact that other than a one on one, I can't remember the last time I had a meeting and somebody wasn't on the video on the zoom with us. And so, it's pretty normal. And my team as well, like they at least do one day a week from home, if not more, but it's pretty flexible.

So the main tool that we use is salesforce. That's the main tool we use and we support, we optimize for the company. Our team's responsible for our instance of Qualtrics. So we use that obviously, as a surveying tool and kind of experience management tool. And then as far as the actual day to day execution, we use Jira for our project management. We use Confluence that integrates. It's also a lasting product that integrates with Jira very nicely. My biggest advice when it comes to tools is don't go out looking specifically for a tool to solve a need. Come up with the process first of like what needs to happen or what needs to change or the steps that need to happen and then find a tool that's gonna support that. I think a lot of times people approach, they think Okay, we've got this problem and their solution is just we'll just go by this software. The software isn't gonna fix your problem. And so it's something you've gotta figure out the process first and then find a tool to help you support that. It's always good where you can start with the less complexity is you kind of get into a new tool. That's one thing that I had they recommend especially like around Jira and some of those other tools that are extremely flexible. But, just start simple and kind of work your way through it.