10 years in…

This April will mark 10 years of living in Colorado, and 10 years of working in the fast-paced world of SaaS enterprise startups. If I consider the length of an entire career, this also marks the first third of my working life. So with that, I would like to reflect on the many lessons I’ve learned along the way and celebrate the lessons I have yet to come across.

I will attempt to write one post per week, highlighting some of the biggest and most important moments early on. A large portion of the stories here will be about my time at Rally Software, as it was my home for 6.5 years. Rally is something special: a perfect intersection of culture and mission. I met and worked with some of the best people I have ever known: Tim Miller, our unassuming, empathetic and brilliant CEO, Steve Demchuk, my mentor and friend, and Jean Tabaka, a true thought leader around empathy and facilitation. Every other place I work will always be compared to my time at Rally.

The stories I share will range from learning automated testing, to productizing hackathon projects, to the dreaded feature sizing meetings that felt like interrogations. I will share my growth from a junior software engineer to a mid-level product manager, and I’ll add some stories about major personal growth. Hopefully through this, you will learn more about me and what it’s like building product in a SaaS world and I hope that through this experience of writing down these stories, I will learn more about myself at the same time.

Before I end today’s introductory post, here’s a little bit about me. I’m a midwestern girl who can’t get enough of mountains. I live at 7300 ft elevation with my husband, cat and dog in our mountain home. I am director of product management at Pendo, a product management platform, and this is the second time that I’ve been lucky enough to build a product for people who do what I do.

Thanks for reading.