For 24 years, I lived throughout Northeast Ohio. I was born on the east side of Cleveland, raised in the small rural town of Wooster, and found my way back to the Cleveland for my collegiate studies.
Wooster, Ohio is like a hybrid between Smalltown and Suburb, USA. It’s an economically diverse, albeit culturally deprived, quiet town that saw my maturation from candy-loving, video-gaming paperboy, to a sort of hybrid athlete-nerd and high school President.
Born to a family of high school educated, blue collar working class folk, Wooster is where I found value in midwestern values and authenticity. It’s where my parents talk me the pride in hard work and discipline, but not at the sacrifice of love and happiness.
Fast forward to fall 2007, and I plopped my “super involved-nerdy-almost 4.0-thought-he-was-smart-self” on the bright Cleveland campus of Case Western Reserve University. Class big fish from a small pond gets dropped into the ocean. But it’s here that I learned the purpose of planning and discipline. Long gone were the days of getting by without trying, I quickly found out how much work and prioritization it would take to receive the B.S. in Chemical Engineering degree I eventually walked for. And in order to maintain focus in learning how to lead, I found additional opportunity in leading my peers as fraternity President. I left CWRU a changed person forever. Not just because I had a degree; but because I learned how to balance achieving a strong professional goal I set for myself, at the same time that I juggled a strong personal pursuit of my own, unrelated to my career. CWRU is where I learned how to learn and how to develop myself.
After graduating in August of 2012, I picked up and left NE Ohio for greener pastures in Illinois. After a successful cooperative education program with GE Healthcare, I found an opportunity outside Chicago with Philips Healthcare, supporting the manufacturing of CT and X-ray tubes for the medical device industry. For 4 years, I put my engineering degree to work in optimizing process lines and running projects to decrease expenses; the latter part of which saw my transition from process engineering to technical product management.
I’ve been in product management now for over 3 years, and continue to develop the necessary skills to be the absolute best that I can be in this career. With strong analytical problem solving capabilities and a pension for developing and maintaining relationships with people, I’ve transitioned my career from classic engineering to solving problems with larger scope. I’ve moved away from just a technical understanding of a product, and now focused on collaboration with business in expectation management and driving sustainable solutions through a product strategy.
And in what has been the proudest accomplishment of my career to date, I successfully moved from manufacturing to software development. I spent a year and a half learning the ins and outs of software development in financial tech, pushing myself to handle more projects and responsibilities each day, take on more challenging initiatives, and continue building upon the relationships I have that have helped me achieve all that I have achieved.
Today, I am a product manager in software development, with a passion for user focused front-end solutions. I manage the expectations of stakeholders in business development, marketing, legal, compliance, analytics, creative, and software engineering. I build robust and detailed project plans and roadmaps, manage the biweekly development scrums in JIRA Agile, and drive for user focused, mobile friendly, clear solutions each day.
And the best part is, it’s far from what defines me. Product Management is my career, and I have strong passion in front-end design and value centric innovation. But take a look beyond my professional focus, and you’ll find a traithlon-training, photo-taking, backpack-hiking, ukulele-and-piano-playing, creative-writing, smiling free spirit living each day one at a time.
Take a gander beyond ‘About Me’ to see what I’m really all about.