I am a product manager and technical writer with over 15 years of experience in the software industry, working with open source and open standard technologies. I look for opportunities to define good software with documentation-driven design and work with development teams to deliver great software.
Feb. 2015 - Present
As the Technical Product Manager for Stackato, it's my job to refine the product roadmap into software development stories and tasks, ensure that the overall product roadmap matches the expectations of customers, and represent those customers as the product owner in development team standups.
2006 - Present
As ActiveState's sole technical writer, I was responsible for customer-facing technical content including product documentation, white papers, articles, website copy, and blogs. I also developed and led customer training sessions for Stackato, led product demonstrations, and when needed, assisted with pre-sales engineering.
Prior to working on Stackato, I worked closely with the Komodo team for several years, contributing to development and providing feedback on usability and user experience.
I take an active interest in new authoring technologies and documentation frameworks. I mainly work with the Sphinx documentation framework (Python) but keep an eye on Dexy, Asciidoctor, Gollum, and Daux.io.
2004 - 2006
I led the Enterprise Support team, supporting the PureMessage anti-spam product, then joined the small team of technical writers creating and maintaining documentation for PureMessage, Komodo, and other ActiveState products.
ActiveState
2001 - 2003
I started as the sole Customer Relationship Representative, providing technical support for the full range of ActiveState software. I moved on to lead the Enterprise Support team (six engineers) who helped system administrators install, configure, troubleshoot and customize PureMessage on a variety of Linux and Unix systems.
FaxPC / Image Power Inc.
1999 - 2001
I was hired initially to provide customer support for FaxPC, a "unified messaging" service. I was given numerous other responsibilities as developers and managers left the company. When FaxPC shut down I moved to a sales engineering and support role for the parent company, Image Power.
University of Victoria
1990 - 1993