The enduring story of this pandemic will be that it was a life-changing event for so many of us. For my family, the difficulties we faced triggered a move to the Chicago area—where I grew up.
Being back ‘home’ has been great for reflection—understanding where I started and adding context to the path I’ve walked. Professionally, I’ve been looking at all the hats I’ve worn and how those would be labeled in a 2020 context. It occurs to me that I’ve always been in product roles — I just never had the title for it.
That’s always been the catch with working at smaller organizations. My supervisors often didn’t have the industry vocabulary to understand the work I did. I’ve had to seek mentorship, learning and growth from outside my organizations.
As such, it’s always been hard to label my role, when I was doing so much. “Digital” was a great catch-all that described nothing, while “web developer” was the most basic and easily understood path.
In truth, product has been at the center of my career all along, even without the title. It’s not the whole story — just one significant thread in a career built on a lot of different capabilities — but it’s one I’m only now learning to name.
Product Highlights in My Career
2006-2010
Morris Daily Herald
Right out of college, I landed in a small newsroom and as a photographer. As the only person in the room with HTML knowledge, I quickly found I could contribute in many ways.
- Led a website redesign
- Led a print redesign
- On team that launched a magazine
- Launched a blogging program and a video platform
2010-2012
Northwest Herald
Editor & Publisher: Best website in size group
As the digital lead for a group of newspapers I often added new features to the sites and managed a “roadmap” before I even knew what a roadmap was.
- Implementing a mobile-friendly video player
- Creating new home page layouts for breaking news
- Myriad special projects
2012
Election Central
Innovator of the Year, Illinois APME
This groundbreaking tool was a platform for our newsrooms to collaborate on coverage of local elections and for our readers to easily explore the candidates and follow election results.
2013
PlanIt! Northwest
Innovation of the Year, Illinois APME
When the Boston Globe relaunched their website using responsive design, I quickly learned the technique that are now an industry standard. We were in the midst of designing a new entertainment website, and the implementation was a first in Illinois news.
2012
SimpleElection
Inspired by my newsroom work, I created a website with free embeddable election widgets. Small newsrooms could use maps and counters to enhance their coverage. Read more.
2012-2015
Pew Research Center
I was hired to lead the implementation of a new responsive-based website design. While there I also built:
- A reusable quiz infrastructure with a score-comparison component.
- A WordPress plugin for easy data visualization creation.
2015
FiscalNote state regulation MVP
The sales team wanted to test the market for state regulatory watchlists; the engineering team had a long backlog. I volunteered to build the MVP on WordPress so our product managers could test theories. The tool was so needed by clients, it generated revenue even as an MVP – and it gave the team a head-start for further build-out.
2016
FiscalNote Whipboard
Our CEO wanted to explore what we could do with data-driven content, so we hired an intern team to experiment. The platform was great and we did some really nice work, but it was sunset. Less than two years later, FiscalNote finalized their purchase of CQ Roll Call. Read more.
2015
ONA Build Your Own Ethics Code
I constructed this grant-funded project that helped newsroom leaders think provide guidance to their teams. It found an unexpected audience and continued to be useful journalism educator tool for years. See the project.
- Blog post coming
2017
Online Journalism Awards
What started as a handful of long text-based pages became a useful tool and archive of exemplary journalism. The scope of this program continues to grow from the innovation of this website. Read more.
2020
ONA Virtual Event Platform
Using this platform, the ONA team hosted two large and three small virtual conferences to help get us through the COVID pandemic. Read more.
All of this work —the ideation, research, user testing, development — was done under the job titles of “web developer” or “digital manager.”
You can expect to wear a lot of hats when you’re on a small team — but it’s important to fight for a title that respects the breadth of those hats.
