Invoke connection between products and people by starting with an empathetic understanding of the customer experience
Innovation Leadership is woven into the fabric of every opportunity that I have had to drive content and product development. The same values I use to connect with customers I incorporate into team building, mentorship, and collaboration. Centered in my wide-ranging experience crossing through design, engineering, and business development, I am able to work through diverse perspectives to push development to high metrics of success. As a leader, I strive to find and develop peers who are equally driven to push boundaries because the stronger the team around me, the more we can do together to push the possible.
Storytelling is the heart of how we communicate with each other and experience the world
Narrative
Starting from a screenplay, my job was to find new imaginative ways to build a believable reality that inspires, immerses, and can convey the story in an intuitive, beautiful, and broad context. This process honed my skills to put myself into the perspective of the audience and the on-screen characters. The work necessitated inventing solutions and finding innovative shortcuts and optimizations to provide incredible results on rapid timescales.
From advocating for the customer to supporting your team to push a little further, innovation is found in collaboration
People
Expanded the customer vision beyond the scope of the original contract for creating VR academic training material. We built trust by over-delivering with an intuitive platform for content interaction utilizing procedural processing that efficiently generated visual guidance overlaid on the training materials. This platform was designed to incorporate user-centric data analytics to create a feedback loop at the student level, while providing valuable insight to leadership.
My process of learning and deeply immersing myself in the challenges facing pilots (“I read a lot of manuals!”) was instrumental in connecting with their needs beyond a “follow our instruction” vendor model.
Experience
The HOW is as important as the WHAT and digital accessibility is achieved through intuitive human-centric design
My team was tasked with ideation, technology development, and rapid prototyping to elevate the kinect interface to parity with controller input. Solutions included the development of a voice priority model augmented by gesture, controller, and second screen inputs.
Additionally, provided demonstrations of new experience models at the OS level to provide enhanced engagement models leveraging these inputs to provide playful opportunities to engage individually and socially with content from diverse customer focused perspectives.
From its inception, my work was designed for scalability and to add immediate value at each stage, while demonstrating the potential of a holistic solution. Through the multi-contract process I pitched, developed and validated results converting the customer from an undergraduate training subcontract to a direct contract on a major weapon system. The contracts were strategically designed to both grow the direct customer relationship and to strengthen the company’s core product and platform capabilities.
Ownership
Wear multiple hats and be your own biggest critic, leading by example to inspire excellence
Delivered multimodal experiences to a non-technical global customer, taking full ownership of an end-to-end solution to reimagine how technology can add value to the out-of-home (“OOH”) retail experience. This resulted in deployment in American, European, and Asian markets. In addition to the development of the experiences and content production, my team developed custom hardware and software to provide interactive connected experiences on a network of screens and mobile devices with a 24/7 remotely managed 100% uptime.
Jumping off the edge of innovation is a great motivator to build fast and be right
Explore
Leading the way in VR film production meant not being afraid to fail and having the confidence in my experience and instinct to drive time sensitive and limited resource productions on unproven technologies and pipelines. Through this experience, using careful planning and coordinated testing I developed new workflows, designed custom capture hardware and techniques, and coded plugins and optimizations in industry software to deliver successful projects.