I think a lot of people have a lot of different paths for becoming a product manager or getting in product management. For me, I actually started in the world of construction. I started doing going down the career path of construction management. I found myself a lot more interested in the software that was used in the industry than actually building buildings and roads. So I switched my career path to information systems. That's when I started to really dive deep into software and started trying to learn. To see how it works on the back-end and how it works in the front-end. That obviously lead to graduating in information systems. Along the way, I got a lot of different jobs that gave me experience in those areas. So I did technical support. I started doing the implementation in structure. Then I morphed into a product role at a start-up company. There we developed a sports gaming app. That was my path to where I am now that was really shaped by that first decision to focus on technology.

Right now my responsibilities are really I'm over the entire education product online. So I worked for FranklinCovey and we build a product around a program called The Leader in me that helps children learn life skills. It's my job to build that online product that will not only help our internal teams go out and help schools. But it also helps external principals, teachers and all the different roles within a school. They also get materials and get training materials and trainings that they need to help them be better at their jobs. So right now, I'm over that product we just started building that new product from scratch. We're kind of sunsetting the old product. It's been a really fun time because I get to play a little bit of a startup role within a very established company.

There are a billion tools out there. I've used mostly Ruby as far as coding language goes. I've been really engulfed into the Ruby. I guess there's a lot of Ruby connections here in Utah. I've kind of been engulfing myself in the whole Ruby language and how it works. There are some great advantages to Ruby and there are also some disadvantages, each coding language I've learned over time has both advantages and disadvantages. One thing that I like about Ruby is It's a very quick language. If you're looking for fast prototyping of a product or you need to build something a little bit faster than you might, say PHP or Java or things like that It allows you to build quicker. There are some disadvantages in that too but I'm used to using Ruby. That's what I've used over the last six years or so. Other programs that go along with that is GitHub it is a very valuable tool to learn. It's where most developers will push their code where you can get changes. You can find a lot of really good resources there. Amazon Web service is another one that to really get it and go to it. That's where most companies are hosting their websites or their applications these days. Then just getting a general knowledge of API calls is so important, at least for my job. Just the ability to transfer data from one application to another application and do integration of that data API calls is the key for me in my world.