I work with growth teams at people-first tech companies to align their marketing, sales, and product strategies with their goals and customers.

I've worked with dozens of leaders in the business and nonprofit sectors to work through challenges such as:* staffing issues* marketing strategy and execution* personal productivity* developing business processes* navigating difficult conversations * finding product-market fit* becoming more effective leaders* scaling up* succession and exit planningIn short, I align people (and the organizations they lead) with their highest purpose – and support them in staying on track.

I teach self-paced video courses that help entrepreneurs and creative/web professionals build successful careers and businesses. * Planning a Web Design Portfolio: Getting a Job has helped over 110,000 web designers build more effective portfolios for their job searches.* Web Career Clinic Weekly has helped more than 100,000 web professionals build a career they love, making good stuff on the web.* Creative Insights: Lauren Bacon on Web Design has taught 78,000 people the essential things to know before getting into web design.* Planning a Web Design Portfolio: Growing Your Freelance Business has helped 64,000 freelance web designers create portfolios that show off their best angles to prospective clients.* Collaborative Design: Managing a Team has helped 58,000 creative professionals do more effective design work in groups.* Collaborative Design: Vision and Strategy has guided more than 46,000 creatives in developing strategies for group projects.* Collaborative Design: Process and Efficiency has taught over 37,000 people how to run a group project that moves both quickly and inclusively.* Running a Web Design Business: Defining Success has helped more than 38,000 web entrepreneurs define success their way.

• Responsible for building and maintaining relationships with over 200 podcast publishers, including The New York Times, PRX, Radiotopia, The Washington Post, Salon, Panoply, etc. with an eye to expanding adoption of RadioPublic’s tools• Prioritized a large outreach list by calculating potential audience reach, likelihood of adoption, and brand recognition.• Through verbal conversations and written/visual materials, articulated RadioPublic’s value proposition and complex technical concepts to people without a technical background• Performed market research for the product team, to help RadioPublic become integral to podcasters' audience development, marketing, and business goals• Collaborated with a blended local-distributed team of 10 during the company’s start-up, launch, and user acquisition phases to deploy, refine, and promote new features in an agile, lean, rapid-deployment context

Kindara is the best-designed app I've ever seen for charting women's fertility cycles, and empowering women with clarity and insights about the connections between those cycles and their overall health. I advised Kindara's founders on positioning, product design, marketing, and team building; I also provided executive coaching through scaling, fundraising, and exit phases. Key benchmarks during these years were revenues reaching $1 million and becoming the No. 1 fertility app in the world, with more than 100,000 of Kindara's users successfully conceiving. I'm thrilled to have been part of Kindara's stellar team of passionate visionaries, who are putting fertility and health data into women's hands.

I co-founded this boutique digital agency to support organizations working for social good develop meaningful relationships with their communities online. Starting as a two-person partnership, we grew over time to a team of nine staff plus contractors, offering digital strategy, design, and open source CMS development. My proudest achievements at Raised Eyebrow include: • Conceiving, designing, delivering and maintaining hundreds of websites with a specialization in complex, content-rich websites for organizations with a knowledge-sharing mission — including think tanks, libraries, public sector organizations, and member-driven advocacy organizations.• Maintaining long-term client relationships that extended beyond individual projects, with an eye to ongoing analysis, testing, and iteration as critical to successful outcomes.• Facilitating collaborative research and design processes across diverse stakeholder groups including staff, leadership teams, board members, and end users, to gather input from all perspectives; and developing decision-making frameworks that were highly consultative and collaborative while prioritizing strategic objectives and efficient use of time and budget.• Building a sustainable, consistently profitable company at an average annual growth rate of 137%, eventually supporting nine full-time staff while prioritizing reasonable work weeks, achievable goals, lifelong learning, and honest communication• Taking concrete actions to put our values into practice, such as signing on as a Living Wage employer, offering a "no overtime" policy to employees, protecting 10% of staff time to work on projects of their choosing, and celebrating International Women's Day as a statutory holiday.

Co-author of The Boss Ladies blog, which offered perspectives on small business and values-driven leadership.

Coordinated, marketed and facilitated meetups for local entrepreneurs who identified as "grassroots" -- boutique retailers selling handcrafted local stuff, smarty-pants consultants, designers making the world more beautiful, cool restaurateurs, wicked crafters, high-tech visionaries and so on. Our focus was on peer learning, networking, support & real conversation about all things small business related.

As the first hire at Communicopia's predecessor company, Envolve Communications, I wore many hats, including front-end developer, production designer, project manager, and web strategist. After the company's rebrand a few months later, my official title was Project Manager, and I managed our team of 12 along with our clients to coordinate all aspects of website design and development projects. My contributions to the company included developing many internal processes, from our budgeting and scheduling systems to designing and documenting our web design process so that it could be consistently replicated across projects. Communicopia's rapid-growth, startup environment taught me a great deal about the importance of systems and processes, along with the human side of managing teams and projects.(NetChange was known as Communicopia.net during the period I worked there, so I've referred to it as Communicopia here.)