Design strategy, user experience design, service design, workshop and meeting facilitation, information architecture and taxonomy, data visualization, client relationship management, process and workflow improvement, team management, communications, earnestly trying to be a kind and empathetic person who becomes more and more so with each passing day, etc.
Digital Public Ventures is a private-sector 501(c)3 digital public infrastructure incubator. Our goal is to help made civic infrastructure more resilient to political and corporate capture. We're using what we've learned from our time in civil service—as well as the tech, venture, and non-profit sectors—to collaborate with our community to find and nurture new intervention points for systemic change.
First: I promise you I'm at least as skeptical as you are about the self-optimization/LinkedIn productivity-hacking aspects of the wildly unregulated field of professional coaching. That said, I've seen coaching accomplish some really powerful things for people when it's practiced with care, thoughtfulness, and self-awareness. I'm a certfied professional coach; I graduated from the Treasury Executive Institute’s federal training program and have an ACC-certification from the International Coaching Federation. I work with people to help them more deeply understand themselves and make meaningful progress towards their goals. I've provided professional coaching and mentorship for dozens of people, ranging from technologists to civil servants, from early-career folks to executives with decades of experience.
10x was an idea incubator within the Technology Transformation Services in the General Service Administration. United States federal employees submitted ideas about how to improve government using technology to 10x; 10x investigated these ideas and assessed their viability. I worked on small multi-disciplinary research and prototyping project teams, ushering projects through a gated funding process if they showed promise for creating improved outcomes and better service delivery to the public (and shutting them down if they didn't).
18F is a strategy/design/development consultancy within the United States federal government that works to improve the user experience of US federal services by making them more user-centered, humane, understandable, and effective. 18F's approach involves helping agencies build their own capabilities and skills by partnering with agency staff on digital projects and working collaboratively, while modeling modern practices in web development, human-centered design, and ethical, direct user research.
After leaving Velir, I freelanced as a strategy and UX design consultant, helping with governance issues and complex IA and interaction-based product design challenges.
I led a team of UX designers, visual designers, and strategists. In addition to overseeing all design and content strategy related work at Velir and the professional development of my own team, I collaborated directly with clients as an executive sponsor and still performed UX design on several of our most critical accounts. I also worked extensively in business development and client relationship management, and on teams guiding a variety of internal initiatives (e.g. overall company direction, process improvement, performance management, and culture.)
In my first role as a team manager, I set the group's direction and built Velir's UX and design practice from three people (including me) to nine. I continued to do UX design on projects while using my work to help define processes and workflows for Velir overall. Also, I began to play a very large role in writing proposals and pitching for new business.
I wireframed websites, built information architectures and taxonomies, conducted user and stakeholder research, wrote personas, helped design data visualizations, etc. I was the only UX designer at Velir and drove many of our first "full-service" (i.e. not purely implementation) projects in close collaboration with a senior visual designer.
I managed the day-to-day operations and overall client relationship for what was, at the time, our largest account (the Brookings Institution). I guided over a dozen projects, including data visualizations, iOS applications, and primarily Brookings' complete 2012 website redesign, from start to successful launch.
I constructed a resource management and time-tracking system out of several loosely-connected software products and used it to plan and maintain H&G's project calendars and personnel allocations. I also did some account management and light UX strategy.
I helped public broadcasting clients and large non-profits manage their fundraising campaigns via a suite of proprietary software, including Team Approach. I worked a lot via the command line, wrote SQL and PL/SQL code, and also developed my client-management skills.