I learned this job in a newsroom.

In television newsrooms the work ran as a loop: understand the audience, tell the story so it lands with them, build the digital product so they will use it and enjoy using it, then read the analytics to find out whether any of that was true and go again. Twenty years later that loop is still how I work. The curiosity under it hasn’t changed either. I ask questions until I understand something well enough to relay it to someone else, and I dig when the answer isn’t sitting there.

The writing carried over, and so did the composure. Leading digital coverage through breaking news, including being first to report the Fort Hood shooting, taught me to decide quickly and keep a team steady under pressure.

A manufacturer in aerospace and defense hired me in 2018 as a digital experience guy, and the first job was understanding our customers well enough to design self-service commerce for them. What came after was less planned. The newsroom instincts surfaced, along with the writing, and I was pulled into marketing, then into the more technical work. Today I am Digital Director for product development and manufacturing and operations applications, a role that fuses digital and business where that bridge hadn’t existed before.

Part of why that works is that I can hold up both ends of the conversation. I pick up a business process quickly, and I understand the systems and data underneath it, so the business and IT can be represented by the same person in the same room.

Alongside that I do the same work at the opposite end of the scale: a small-town clothier, congregations, clubs. No budget, no IT department, no mandate. Just someone who needs the thing to work and has nobody to call. I am not sure which end I like better. I am fairly sure doing both is why I am good at either.

Sometimes I am in the scrum. Sometimes I coach from the sidelines.

Early on I am building next to you, hands on the keyboard, getting a quick win on the board so people can see it working. Then I back off and let you drive, because the goal is a team that owns its own wins. The measure of a good project is that you do not need me afterward.

I am a marketer, a writer, a leader, an IT guy, and a builder, and I do my best work in roles that use all five.

I live outside Austin. I coach youth softball. I am building an N scale model railroad of Central Texas in my spare time and an app for railfans in the spare time I do not have. That last one is either a hobby or a second business, depending on the week.