My first title working for a corporation was "product manager". In truth, I was a communications lead and served as the face of our small corner of the world. Our team was focues on  as a central support for data governance, working with business stakeholders in pursuit of common goals. The work was critial to business operations, an area under federal scrutiny and subject to regulations. The work was meaningful towards protecting client data as well as ensuring readiness for data for AI. 

After getting acclimated, I set out to solve some of the pain points of the team. 

• Established and managed a front door, catch all mailbox for stakeholder interactions

• Hosted a monthly touchpoint with a planned agenda of educational and practical topics for Data Steward community

• Managed all communications channels and distribution lists

• Automated some parts of the onboarding process to the program

Although we had onboarding resources, they were outdated and took 2.5 hours to complete, which is a huge ask of the stakeholders given what we needed from them was on top of their other work. I created a modular learning pathway that stewards could complete in roughly 30 minutes based on their roles (one of the videos included role specific content). 

Instead of walking them through everything as the training before had done, I synthesized the biggest learning objectives, pointed them to the "source of truth" resources, and emphasized the supportive partnership our team worked hard to maintain. The training I created provided more context of the why, provided on-the-job resources, and was designed to outlast minor shifts and changes to the program.  

There were 11 different service playbooks maintained by my team. These were important tools that documented our processes for both stakeholders and auditors. They needed to be improved in order to better serve those audiences. 

As someone who worked adjacent to these processes, I had to work closely with many different highly-technical SMEs to be sure I captured the steps accurately. This required close collaboration and helped me further grow my communication skills.

I also created templates and a standard look and feel across the playbooks. 

Ultimately, we saw more adoption of the playbooks among stakeholders and were able to more confidently point to where documentation lived when auditors came calling -- we passed the next federal audit examination where data governance was concerned. 

At one point in my role as product manager, our organization failed an audit on a topic which was an abstract idea that hadn't really been addressed up to that point. As part of the need to address this issue, I was asked to create a training within a short 2 week window. Partnering with HR Learning and numerous technical SMEs and stakeholders, I was able to design a PDF, slide training which was not typical for me, but successful within the required constraints. 

All 44,000 personel were required to complete the training with a 96% or better completion rate. We met that window and recieved glowing feedback from stakeholders and trainees. It was recongized for the design and for communicating a lot of complicated information in a small amount of real estate. It is still required for new hires, and has been folded into annual training, an effort I also supported. I am proud of the impact this training had at my company. I learned a lot about working with executives and against high-priority goals and deadlines through this work. 

A new organization was created that I was shuffled into, with the goal of creating training and curriculum for data professionals. Although my title was the same, Digital Product Manager, I was primarily functioning as an Instructional Designer. One of the first trainings we created was an AI Fundamentals course designed to establish a foundation of knowledge and a shared language for our organization of nearly 550 people. This project was a challenge that I am truly grateful for in hindsight.

Because the topic was novel at the time, we didn't have a highly engaged SME and stakeholder priorities were shifting constantly throughout the development process, with stakeholders themselves even changing throughout the project. I learned a lot about the importance of storyboarding and the critical role stakeholders play in the success of a project. 

Ultimately, my co-creator and I were able to navigate the challenges to publish a 45 minute, Rise/ Storyline that recieved an overall satisfaction score of 4.7 out of 5 and with 100% completion in the training window.  It was through this project that I learned how to build custom Storyline interactions and Rise templates for my team to reuse.

I also used CoPilot extensively as a thought partner in the development of this course, and building the course really shaped my thinking around AI -- the benefits and risks of AI and how the can impact an organization.