About Me

I didn't plan to end up in SaaS implementation. For 15 years I was a classroom teacher, Reading Specialist, Special Education Teacher, and instructional coach in public school districts across Illinois and Missouri — which is its own kind of high-stakes, high-complexity, multi-stakeholder environment, even if no one outside education tends to think of it that way.

What people don't see from the outside: teaching is implementation work. Every school year I was either rolling out new curricula, new assessment systems, or new ed-tech platforms to staff who had not asked for them and were not always thrilled to get them. I was often times the person translating district mandates into something a room full of skeptical adults — and an even more skeptical room of eight-year-olds — would actually use. At one point, I led professional development for 75+ educators a year, which is essentially change management with a bell schedule.

Somewhere around 2014, I started doing freelance design, data analysis, and technical consulting on the side — building out automations, dashboards, and websites for businesses and nonprofit clients who needed things done that their existing tools couldn't handle. For over a decade I was doing both: teaching by day, building spreadsheets and building tools by night, without really thinking of it as a “pivot” in progress. It was just two halves of the same instinct — see a broken process, go fix it.

In 2023 that side work became the main job. I moved into implementation and customer success full-time, eventually taking ownership of one of the largest and most complex accounts in EdTech. The skills transferred almost entirely intact: reading a room, building a playbook from nothing, staying calm when a process goes sideways, and explaining a confusing system clearly enough that a busy, skeptical adult will actually adopt it.

These days I spend my time owning the full implementation lifecycle for complex accounts, building automations that quietly save people hours of manual work, and using AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot as actual daily working partners rather than novelties. I'm still the person who would rather build the fix than complain about the problem — I just have better tools for it now.