The professional new kid
I grew up moving a lot—ten towns across four countries and never stayed more than three years in any of them.
Being the new kid that often makes you pretty comfortable not knowing things. You ask the obvious question without embarrassment. You find the person who actually knows how things work. You notice what locals stopped seeing years ago, like the confusing sign or the unwritten rule.
Turns out, that’s a solid foundation for product work.
Chasing daylight
I started freelancing as a web designer in Anchorage, Alaska. Building for small business owners gave me my first taste of turning someone else’s idea into something real, and made me curious about what happened behind the page. I wanted to build the tools people run their businesses on.
I also wanted considerably more daylight.
So I found myself studying Applied Computing and Communications at Arizona State University. That combination works so well together because I learned to explain technical ideas as well as how to build them.
Ask the right questions
Early in my career, someone would hand me a solution to build, and I’d want to know how we’d decided it was the right one.
Now I start with the new-kid questions: What problem are you actually trying to solve? What keeps getting in your way? Why does it work like this?
I like getting something clickable in front of people early. Five minutes with a prototype can overturn a week’s worth of assumptions. Sometimes it confirms the idea. Sometimes I learn why the old process existed.
Starting over so often taught me to get comfortable changing course. I bring options instead of conclusions. If a teammate says, “Or we could just...” and they’re right, I’d rather switch than defend my first answer.
Making people feel at home
I’ve been the new person enough times to remember what it feels like. I try to make that first step easier for other people.
It’s what inspired me to lead intern programs and teach kids to code. When I led a frontend team, I wanted everyone comfortable exploring beyond their usual corner of the codebase. We worked through backend concepts and traced requests through the system until unfamiliar code stopped feeling off-limits.
It follows me home, too. Give me any excuse to host friends and it’ll probably become a recurring event with a theme, like our Souptember potluck.
When I’m AFK
After a few years in Arizona, I learned there is such a thing as too much daylight. Colorado brought me back to the mountains, where my husband and I hike, ski, and climb.
We also love spending time in our garden, drinking tea and playing chess or cribbage.
After a lifetime of moving around, I’ve loved putting down roots in Colorado, and I don’t plan on packing up anytime soon. But I’m ready to be the new kid again, this time on a new team. New people to learn from, unfamiliar problems to explore, and plenty of fresh questions to ask.
