I attended a Masterclass, facilitated by Teresa Torres, who pioneered an approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. This course covered defining clear outcomes, continuous interviewing, opportunity mapping, effective ideation techniques, how to identify hidden assumptions, and how to validate and test ideas to discover which will be successful. This was a 6-week intensive course with homework, and I was lucky to get to participate in it alongside my Product, UX, and Engineering teams at Hireology.

​In the past several years, I have taken 16 courses through NN/g in order to keep my UX skills fresh and current. Some of the courses were attended in-person in Vancouver, BC, but most of them have been facilitated virtually. I've focused primarily on management and research courses, but have also included courses that went deep on interaction design skills. The most recent course I've taken addressed Analytics, and how to leverage them for UX and Product teams. I have found NN/g's full-day workshops to be invaluable, and especially enjoyed Service Blueprinting, Facilitating UX Workshops, and Design Tradeoffs​. Look me up (certification ID: 1031654) to see the credential. 

While at Moz, I had the opportunity to join with my UX, Product, Engineering, and Marketing colleagues to become certified in three branches of the Pragmatic Institute's Product Management and Marketing focus: Foundations (the Pragmatic Framework, gap analysis, understanding market problems), Focus (opportunity scoring, business planning, product roadmapping), and Price (pricing strategy, segmentation and packaging.) These were facilitated remotely over a period of two months, and included collaboration time with my colleagues outside of our coursework to hone the skills we were developing by putting them into practice in our daily work.

When I worked as a recruiter for Aquent, I was introduced to the Situational Leadership framework. This framework enables leaders to tailor their approach to the needs of their team or individual members. Developed by Paul Hersey in 1969, this model provides a repeatable process for matching leadership behaviors to the performance needs of colleagues and professional contacts. Unlike other leadership models, Situational Leadership recognizes that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, allowing leaders to adapt their behaviors to suit the unique needs of each situation to positively influence situations to the benefit of all involved.

My "official" base in design kicked off at the Seattle Central Creative Academy, back in the late 90s. Despite being "just" a community college, Seattle Central's design program was—and remains—a highly-respected program for developing the ability to communicate in a visual language. During the time I attended, the coursework focused primarily on print design, typography, and illustration, but in 2009 I had the opportunity to consult with the program leaders and evolve their offerings into a UX and interaction-design focus. I still think that I was probably in the bottom quarter of my class in terms of raw graphic design skills, because I was primarily focused on user-centered, digital experiences, but I appreciate the base this program gave me to continue to learn and develop my visual skills over time.