I started my career doing education stuff, and I haven’t stopped doing education stuff since. My career in summary: School Technology Specialist → Classroom Teacher → Special Education Team Lead → Instructional Design & Professional Learning Manager at the Colorado Department of Education → Automattic, where for the last 5+ years I’ve been building the learning and development programs that help our Customer Support teams excel at their work, and level up quickly.

I love asking questions and then doing the hard work of finding the answers—especially when it means I get to design something that solves a problem. Design and empathy for the learner have been the cornerstone of every role I’ve had. I take a holistic approach: programs, products, systems, and processes built on a deep understanding of what people actually want and why.

These days, I lead L&D for the “Happiness” (Customer Support) division at Automattic. That entails owning:

• the first-year experience for every new Customer Support Engineer from the trial process that hires them, through the onboarding that ramps them, to the coaching that follows them into year two;
• proactive engagement programs that surface the next most important thing the division should focus on to enable people to do their best work, so a team of 300+ people can move in coordinated ways without bottlenecks; and
• a redesigned hiring and trial process so we get a clear picture of every new hire’s baseline skills before they start, and onboarding can actually meet them where they are.

Earlier at Automattic I led a Trust & Safety team and the design of internal moderation tooling that lifted moderation speed by 22% across Tumblr, WordPress.com, and Jetpack. Earlier still I was a Learning Experience Designer, where I built feedback loops into our training that cut new-hire time-to-independence in half.

Before Automattic, I redesigned and rebuilt Colorado’s statewide Adult Basic Education Authorization into a competency-based online program for adult educators across the state, ran the WIOA Colorado LMS, and built the contractor pipeline and lesson architecture that made module development possible at scale. Before that I led a multi-campus Special Education team in Denver Public Schools, ran whole-staff PD on co-teaching and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, and was a regular at Colorado education conferences (InnEDCO, edcamp Denver, Digital Educator Academy) talking about accessible learning design principles, gamification, and personalized learning.

Things I care about: distributed cultures, accessibility-by-default, treating adult learners like the experts on their own work that they are, and building the boring-but-important systems that make ongoing growth feel inevitable instead of effortful.

When I’m not working, I do web stuff and mechanic stuff for the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library, write stuff, and design stuff for the occasional client.

I’m based in Minneapolis, work fully remote, and I’m open to senior L&D leadership roles—Director, Senior Manager, Head of Learning & Development—especially at distributed/remote-first companies: tech, traditional orgs, and public sector.