I owned the roadmap for Skydio's APIs & Partner Integrations, which means making sure customers can quickly and easily plan and launch missions, manage their fleet, and get deep insights from their collected data.

As drones are becoming critical platforms supporting public safety incidents, infrastructure inspections, and more, pulling insights from terabytes of collected images and media is starting to prevent programs from scaling. To address this I conducted extensive user research across customer verticals to understand key workflows and tools and planned a roadmap for Skydio's integration strategy, ultimately culminating in a combination of APIs, partner-built integrations and first-party integrations called Skydio Extend. I am very proud to have brought this product from 0-1 in my first nine months at Skydio!

In addition to planning, designing, and building APIs, I advised partners on integration design, managed key partner relationships, and design, build, implement, and customized integrations for our customers. I also worked closely with the design, marketing, customer success, and training and documentation teams, was embedded with the Integrations engineering team, and frequently collaborated with and advised other product managers.

As Secure Sync Product Manager, I owned the roadmap for Clever’s most established and successful product, which rosters 50% of all K-12 students in the United States. Additionally, the data pipelines, databases, APIs, dashboards, and related features are the foundation upon which all Clever products are built.

In addition to my core team of engineers and their engineering manager, I collaborated frequently with Clever’s designers, other product managers, product marketing managers, and customer stakeholders to ensure we continued to deliver a best-in-class experience to all of our users.

In 2023, Clever announced a new strategic direction, where two out of five strategic objectives directly relied on Secure Sync investments and another two required Secure Sync expertise and infrastructure. I worked with my partner PM to propose both a long-term roadmap and a tactical list of tradeoffs for H1 to have maximum impact with established time constraints. I also brought the improvements from the highly successful Guided Sharing project from 2022 to our application partners, which saw 16% adoption in the first month. I also researched and planned API v3.1 to address customer requests.

In 2022, Clever dramatically increased investment in my team, adding an additional Product Manager and doubling the number of engineers focused on my product. I onboarded and mentored my fellow Secure Sync Product Manager and ensured that 6 new engineers quickly ramped up on an entirely new product and codebase. I researched, planned, gave design input on, and ultimately shipped a new sharing UI - one of Clever’s core workflows - and rolled it out to customers ahead of our Back to School busy season. Guided Sharing saw 40% adoption in its first year.

In 2020 and 2021, I proposed, designed, and oversaw the release of Clever API v3, one of the most ambitious changes in Clever’s history. In addition to researching and designing a new data model and creating a plan for moving to a new model with minimal customer impact, determining how this data model would be represented in our API, and identifying all cases where this might impact our customers and internal teams, I updated our API versioning policy to provide more clarity for our development partners, worked with our Partner Engineering team to develop guidance on upgrading the new version, and promoted the version during several webinars.

In order to make API v3 possible, I advocated for a shift to a multi-year product roadmap, which allowed me and my team to focus on tackling even more complex and ambitious goals.

As Senior Partner Engineer, I was the primary technical point of contact for Clever's largest and most strategic enterprise customers. I was also an escalation point for any customer-facing issues and trusted stakeholder in product development and advocate for my customers.

In 2018, I also took on the responsibilities of the SIS Partnerships team, managing relationships with more than 75 Student Information Systems. I researched the SIS landscape, identified pain and growth areas, and presented a new SIS Partnerships strategy to our CEO and VP of Product Management.

One of my major projects was developing Clever's Recertification Program, which allows us to engage with our customers' developer teams at least once per year and to surface any potential integration issues before Back to School.

Alongside Recertification, I streamlined our Integration Review process, allowing us to collect the same information in half the time. Additionally, I built a new database for storing integration details, allowing us to quickly search for and report on integration and customer demographics.

I developed and ran the Partner Engineering Technical Skills program, which helps Clever team members learn to read and write Python code, culminating in the creation of a Clever Instant Login integration. 

As a Partner Engineer, I was a technical point of contact for Clever's customers. For 9 months, as the only member of the Partner Engineering team, I was the sole technical point of contact for all of Clever's customers. One of the things I'm proudest of is being involved in hiring an additional member of the Partner Engineering team and working together to shape our team's culture and direction to improve integration quality and our relationships with our customers.

One of my most impactful projects was developing the Integration Certification system, which we use to test integration quality, check for potential issues, and fully document an integration before it goes live on Clever. I personally Certified 100 integrations from January - June 2017, and credit this system with the 35x decrease in major integration issues during Back to School 2017.

When I first joined the team, our developer documentation was managed by a repo on Github that required substantial manual work to release any updates (so we didn't make many), and updating the organization and styling was nigh-impossible. Over four months, I orchestrated and led a comprehensive update to our documentation, which included:

• Testing several documentation platforms against existing tools and a proposed spec from our product team and migrating us to Readme.io, which allowed for instantaneous updates,

• Reviewing every piece of existing documentation,

• Writing 27 brand-new pages,

• Fully rewriting 3 pages,

• Consolidating information across 10 pages into 3 standalone pages,

• Making minor updates to all remaining pages to bring them back up to date,

• Reorganizing articles to make information easier to find, and

• Migrating away from (and eventually deprecating) our custom-built, difficult to maintain API Explorer in favor of Swagger-generated and updated docs via Readme.io.

As the project completed, I was awarded the Clever Cleaver Award, which is given for leading projects that "cleave through work" or dramatically improve a key process or workflow and improve overall Clever productivity.

The release of our new developer documentation coincided with another major initiative at Clever: releasing the second ever version of our API. I acted as consultant to our development team on API design, and rollout. I wrote our engineering blog post discussing API versioning and helped customers migrate to the new version.

As founding member of the new team, I also set our team up for success by:

• Building Zendesk processes leading 20% improvement in SLA achievement

• Adding data collection and analytics to Zendesk, allowing for tracking of customer issues

• Redesigning our enterprise onboarding process to be more collaborative, and focused on good integration design. This dramatically increased developer engagement and our knowledge of the integration and their data models and improved our relationships with our customers

• Making the first template for storing integration details, making it easy for internal stakeholders to understand and troubleshoot integrations

As a Customer Solutions Specialist, I was responsible for resolving escalated customer-facing issues via email and phone support, as well as (briefly) live chat. I was an escalation point for all members of the Clever team for customer-facing issues.

I worked with another member of the team to create a proposal for a redesign of the team structure to move away from a Tier 1/Tier 2 structure to a series of pods specializing in a particular product area. We presented the proposal to Clever's VP of Sales and Customer Success as well as the Customer Solutions team's manager, and received approval to test the structure for 2016. I created a plan for how we would determine how new hires would rotate between and eventually be sorted into pods, complete with a sorting ceremony featuring cupcakes.

As the leader of the Instant Login pod, I became an expert on all things related to Clever's Single Sign On solution for districts. I learned how each one of our connections to district IDP works and how applications supported logins via Instant Login. I trained the Customer Solutions team in understanding the District-Clever-Application interactions that allow a login to work at a high level. For team members who joined the Instant Login pod, I also prepared trainings on SAML, LDAP, and OAuth2 to better support districts and applications. 

I also became the primary liaison between the Product team and Customer Solutions team for Instant Login. I consulted on several initiatives including redesigning our signup flow and adding several supported IDPs to Clever.

I led the Instant Login pod in a complete overhaul of our Instant Login Help Center articles and internal documentation.

As Clever's Zendesk Administrator, I also:

• Maintained our Insights dashboards to ensure we stayed data-driven,

• Set up Zendesk to support the multiple-pod team structure,

• Added Round Robin to Zendesk to automatically triage tickets,

• Implemented Live Chat,

• Rebuilt our Zendesk Policies and Processes, and

• Trained the Customer Solutions team on Zendesk and basic Zendesk Administration

As a School Experience Advocate, I was responsible for resolving customer-facing issues via email and phone support. I was an escalation point for our summer coordinator team during Back to School, Clever's busiest season each year. I also wrote internal and external documentation on Clever for our Help Center.

In addition to my responsibilities as a team member, I also became Clever's primary Zendesk Administrator. My project included:

• Building our first metrics dashboards,

• Developing and training team members on ticket best practices,

• Building macros to more quickly address common questions and issues,

• Adding categories to tickets to allow us to help us prioritize creating macros and pushing for product features,

• Investigating and implementing Ticket Sharing for customers who also use Zendesk as their ticketing system, and

• Working with an engineer during the 2014 Hackathon to automate creation of Zendesk organizations for districts via the Zendesk API, which eventually became part of our core infrastructure

During my first six months at Clever, I uncovered a major issue with one of our sharing tools. As the member of the team that discovered the bug, I became the point person on the School Experience team for both customer-facing communication and helping our internal team plan and roll out the fix over the next year. This included:

• Working with our engineering team to design an internal tool to allow us to handle sharing on districts' behalf,

• Building a system for storing a district's sharing settings so they could be edited and re-run whenever changes were needed,

• Producing "automated" sharing using a system of triggers that created tickets for us to share data for districts,

• Training the School Experience team on our internal tool,

• Advising the product team on the design of the self-service solution we planned to build for districts,

• Planning the customer-facing communications for when the fully self-serve solution would be rolled out,

• Writing help center articles to help internal and external teams understand the new tool, and

• Monitoring the roll-out until it was complete

When a customer was concerned about the value of Clever Support versus handling support issues fully in-house, I was tasked with calculating the amount of time the School Experience team spent working with their districts on support issues. I developed several models for calculating this metric to account for the different data stored on the ticket over time, wrote scripts to pull the data from Zendesk and calculate the values, and ultimately wrote a report for the customer that convinced them of the value of the team.

As the team grew, I helped design and test several new interviews for prospective team members. I was the primary developer of the "WebNav Interview," which we developed to test specific customer support skills.

As Triage Architect, I. was responsible for providing meaningful first responses to all incoming business tickets and keeping our support tools up to date. I averaged 1000+ touches and 200+ ticket solves per week and wrote numerous support articles to decrease ticket volume.

I also trained new hires and developed strategies for expanding triage and support roles on a global scale.

I provided both phone and email support for business and enterprise customers. I also kept our support tools up to date.

I was consistently in the top 5 weekly agents, solving 60-100+ tickets per week.

The Clever Cleaver Award is an extremely rare award at Clever which is given for leading projects that "cleave through work" or dramatically improve a key process or workflow and improve overall Clever productivity.

I earned my first Cleaver Award for completely revamping our developer documentation, making it substantially easier for the Partner Engineering team to keep partners updated on how to work with Clever [See Experience > Partner Engineer @ Clever for more details]

After Clever was acquired by Kahoot! in 2021, I worked with a small team to produce, on extremely short notice, a song celebrating the acquisition that was used to introduce our company to the K!rew. This was extremly well received by our new corporate overlords - at our next event, they requested a live performance. My team was nominated for and won the Cleaver for quickly and successfully establishing us as the cool kid in a group of cool education technology companies.

I may have overcommitted in 2021’s Hackathon [It’s a Hackathon not a Sprint], but I also won in several categories.

My first project, “One Brain Productions,” was named after my frequent collaborators’ joke about being two people with one shared brain. Not only did we write and record a song in three days, but we got our CEO and VP of Product to star in the music video AND, just in case, commissioned a few short deepfakes of our CEO to use in the video as well. For involving so many people in this project, we won the Collaborative Clever Curling award.

A last-minute entry, “mle doing mle things” is a musical advertisement for the Clever App Store, a new selling platform for edtech software. This won the No-Code Cross Country award for best project that involved no coding.

After the success of FlareBoy at the 2019 Hackathon, I thought it would be fun to bring another song to 2020’s Hackathon [On the Basis of Hacks]. Earlier in the year, our engineering team had gone through a tumultuous re-org, so I wrote the lyrics to and recorded a demo of a song to help new engineers understand their team choices. I also managed to get the extremely talented Luther and Neal to provide the vocals. We won! And, shortly thereafter, did another re-org which made this song no longer useful.

I successfully wrote more than 50,000 words in 30 days, most of them within a two-week period! The project, titled ‘Gods in the Balance,’ was inspired by Western Han Dynasty belief that one’s condition in the afterlife was tied to the state of one’s mortal remains. And it will never be published.

During pitch presentations for the 2019 Hackathon [Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Code] an engineer suggested we change our internal outage reporting tool FlareBot, to also accept “FlareBoy,” a common typo. I did not help with that project. However, I did write a song from FlareBot’s perspective complaining about being called the wrong name. I wrote the lyrics and recorded the demo and had Cleverite and actually talented musician Kofi Q to record the official vocals. And won!

For the first time in five years of attempting the National Novel Writing Month challenge, I successfully wrote 50,000 words in 30 days. The project, titled ‘Interfenestration,’ centered on the rise and repercussions of true virtual reality, and will never be published.