Professional Experience
I began working on the web as a doctoral fellow in English & Comparative Literature & Theory at Columbia University in the City of New York in 1994. I left graduate school after completing my M.A. (and an additional year towards my doctorate) to work on the web full-time. My undergraduate degree is in Rhetoric, a wonderfully archaic way of saying “writing”, with a minor in Art History.
After relocating to San Francisco in the summer of 1995, I began employment with Oracle Corporation as a web developer and was part of the first team to work full-time developing Oracle.com and the Oracle Store. The “campus” environment was formative, and I value friendships I made there to this day.
My work at Oracle lead to a greater interest in e-commerce, and I joined VeriSign in late 1996 as webmaster. My role was that of a generalist. During this period, “webmaster” was a catch-all term used to describe a number of responsibilities. Mine included design, editing, programming, system administration and project management.
After VeriSign’s successful IPO, I longed for the exhilaration of another pre-IPO start-up and moved on to Zing Networks, a photo-hosting community, at the end of 1998. I started as webmaster and went on to hold a number of positions in the small company including Director of Product Management. My day-to-day activities consisted primarily of designing and building site features and functionality in a LAMP framework. An early precursor to sites like Flickr, Zing was a web 2.0 company stuck in a web 1.0 world and shut its doors before the new millennium.
I continued to hone my technical skills, and my focus on back-end programming lead me to a position as Director of Engineering at Women.com in 2000. My role was largely managerial, but I was able to put a number of tactical improvements in place, like implementing a revision control system and bug tracker, before Women.com folded in 2001.
I returned to Oracle in the fall of 2001 and held two Director-level positions in the Oracle University group. The first focused on systems integration for the e-commerce and registration applications supporting student enrollment. The second was a business operations management position in support of the sales team and took me far afield from my core areas of interest. However, the role did afford me the opportunity to gain expertise in a new area and necessitated an in-depth understanding of CRM systems.
When Oracle University began downsizing, I jumped ship. I landed at Apple in the online Apple Store team, but again in a sales support role managing business operations for Apple telesales. I worked cross-functionally with an international team to define all business and technical processes, procedures and requirements to support global call centers from pre-sales to tech support. I lead the migration from an EOL CRM system to PeopleSoft and further cemented my belief that I wanted nothing to do with global call centers ever again.
I left Apple in 2005 to change career direction and start a family. I’m now enjoying working as a freelance consultant and spending time with my husband and son.