At AVA, we create home tech products that are a joy to use, for both homeowners and the professionals who install them. I am a founder, the Chief Customer Officer and AVA’s head of US operations. I am inspired and driven by the pros in the Custom Install industry, and always working improve how AVA serves them with our support and sales teams.Before co-founding AVA, I was a VP at Control4, leading the worldwide Education and Support organization. During my tenure, Control4 Support won CE Pro’s “Quest for Quality” award three years in a row and Control4 Education won multiple awards for its training innovations.Homeowners: learn about AVA at http://www.ava.com and from your local AVA Authorized Pro. Pro installers: join AVA by signing up at: http://www.ava.com/becomeapro

I helped the people at great companies, like Crestron and MindTouch, develop a more effective, customer-obsessed voice for their products, marketing, customer service, and sales approach. I developed and lead this "Leveling Up" session as a highly-interactive workshop for 6 - 8 influencers in each session. My clients report that after the workshops, their participants immediately changed the wording of contracts, statements of work, web pages, standard scripts for chat and phone support, and various other parts of their business.

In this role lead the 8-person product leadership team responsible for hundreds of millions of annual revenue. Our main brands were Control4, Triad & Episode speakers, Binary MoIP video distribution, and SunBrite Outdoor TVs.Some leadership highlights of my time in this role: - Led the merger of Control4 and SnapAV and defined plan for integrating my Education & Support organization with my SnapAV counterpart’s, after which I change to this role. - Launched $45M in new home automation hardware products; drove for $165M in new initiatives. Lead the company initiative to define tenets and a security model that makes a customer (rather than a service provider) the authoritative owner of a smart home, overturning an ambiguous channel model that was hostile to end customers. - Created CTO’s “Five Levels of Smart Home” vision framework that became a repeat subject of industry press and analyst coverage.

- Won CE Pro Quest for Quality service award 3 years in a row while containing costs to 5% growth relative to company’s 15+% growth during same period by implementing knowledge centric support, chat and better self-service resources. - Increased dealer satisfaction by 15% and increased agent retention by 18 months by transforming support from a confederacy of sites to a consistent global organization (US, UK, DE, CN, IN, AU, NZ). - Lead creation of award-winning blended learning certification that gained 25% channel adoption within a year, increased sales of networking hardware by 30%, and (according to support agents) addressed a major cause of inbound cases.

Achievementso Transformed support from a confederacy of sites into a global organization with consistent policies worldwide (US, UK, DE, CN, IN, AU, NZ); this enabled follow-the-sun support, increased dealer satisfaction by 15%, and increased agent retention by 18 months.o Overhauled training department to become a professional curriculum development team, allowing us to create an award-winning blended learning certification ("Professional Certified Network Administrator" or PCNA) that gained 25% channel adoption within a year, increased sales of networking hardware by 30%, and (according to support agents) addressed a major cause of inbound cases.Additional DetailsIn this role, I lead two global organizations for Control4: Support and Education. The combined team consisted of about 90 people operating out of centers in the US, UK, Germany, India, China, Australia and New Zealand.I built Control4's Instructional Design team from the ground up, with the help of Rus Rasmussen (Sr. Director of Education). This team created an amazing, innovative new certification on TCP/IP networking for the Custom Installer (CEDIA) industry. It combines hands-on activities using Pakedge networking gear with a fast-paced, often humorous online curriculum. We released it in Sept. 2017. Since then it has won the Residential Systems' platinum-level "Stellar Service Award" in the Training Programs category, the Consumer Technology Association's TechHome Mark of Excellence Award for Best New Education Program (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180111005570/en) and CEPro's Top New Technology award (https://www.cepro.com/article/2018_tnt_award_winners_announced).In 2016, Control4 Support won platinum in the CE Pro "Quest for Quality Award" for the first time.

[EMC transferred Mozy on Jan 1, 2013]As Senior Product Manager for Mozy, I was the principle driver of Mozy's product strategy, spearheading web, mobile and file synchronization features.With our excellent R&D team, I drove Mozy's transformation from a simple online backup SaaS offering to a complete personal data storage and protection service. I defined and drove “Mozy Stash” which gave customers a file-sync complement to backup, which reduced RMR churn by 24%. Competitors like Carbonite, Crashplan and SpiderOak responded by scrambling to duplicate our mobile apps, web access and file sync.

[EMC transferred Mozy to VMware in 2011]My time at VMware is summarized above in the description of my current position. There are many fits and starts (and consequent battle scars) related to the politics of this transition, but let's leave that for discussion over a beer sometime.

I am helping to build a personal information platform.

I lead the developer relations effort for touchatag, an Alcatel Lucent venture.

I designed, lead and implemented Bungee Connect Developer Network (BCDN), the online community program for Bungee Connect.Bungee Connect is a cloud computing platform for developing and hosting AJAX web applications, offered to developers as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).This role was half customer recruitment, and half customer retention.Recruitment involved press management, public speaking, podcasting, and blogging on technical topics, as well as creating the learning curriculum for the platform.Customer retention involved establishing regular communication channels between BCDN members and Bungee Labs, as well as identifying and implementing BCDN's online infrastructure to promote peer support among developers.

I lead a community marketing effort to transition Novell's loyal userbase to a new product portfolio focused on Linux and open source. Through efforts that included applying social Web tech, public speaking, and working cross-organizationally to create transparency between Novell and its customers, I helped to improve how Novell was perceived by customers and the open source community.Highlights: - I launched the company's technical blog, Cool Blogs. (www.novell.com/coolblogs) - I built extensive readership of my own blog, with over 70,000 readers of its most popular Novell-related post. - I launched and hosted the podcast "Novell Open Audio," which has many thousand listeners. - I overhauled Novell Users Intn'l and reversed a 5-year trend of losing chapters. - From speaking at various events, from small open source conferences to hosting a keynote session at Novell BrainShare, I still get invited to worldwide events based on the power of the presentations I delivered.

I lead marketing efforts for two major product lines, Novell Linux Desktop (now SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and the collaboration suite Novell GroupWise.My duties included: aligning field and channel go-to-market efforts, briefing press and analysts, and overseeing content delivery to multiple media from software evaluation kits to website content to webcast presentations.I took on this role just six weeks before the debut of Novell Linux Desktop, starting with no launch plan nor positioning document, and a vacant senior marketing manager position. By the day of launch, my team was fully staffed, and we had aligned all of Novell's various go-to-market teams for the launch. Novell generated record single-day web page views, unprecedented press coverage, and industry analysts commended Novell's positioning and go-to-market approach.

My previous success in building and leading a strong team, and effectively managing a complex product line gained recognition with key company executives. Midway through my term as Director of Product Management, Novell management added marketing for the product line to my position, with accompanying new headcount.With this new responsibility, I quickly re-oriented the product line positioning to better address the many market changes that were underway, and managed to rebuild excitement in the marketing for a product line that had seen almost no marketing efforts for nearly two years. The results that my single marketing employee and I acheived in this effort drove yet another position change for me, this time from product management into a role that was specifically marketing.

Because of my demonstrated leadership on other products, Novell advanced me into a director's role over Novell eDirectory and several related products. Novell eDirectory is the foundation for the world's largest identity management deployments, including many deployments that store millions of identities.In this role, I built a star team, and managed a complex product line that required handling of diverse customer demands, coordinating with a global sales force and other product teams, and analyzing market directions to set product technical direction accordingly.Within a short period, my team was recognized as the star product management team in the company. (In fact, members of the team that I assembled were often recruited by other teams. However, my rapport with my employees fostered job satisfaction and strong loyalty to me and the rest of our team. Many of the people who I have managed have stated that they would love to work for me again.)

In order to add direct experience in product management to my skillset, I changed roles into a more tradional product manager. In this role, I defined functional specifications for a product that required me to work with multiple internal stakeholders, including engineers, other product teams, and a worldwide sales organization, ISV partners, and customers.My previous experience working with a product management team lead me to quick success in this role, and an immediate advancement to become Director of Product Management over Novell eDirectory product line, which included the product I had been working on.

Recognized for my skill at presenting, I was brought into a newly formed product management team chartered to rapidly grow an emerging product line, Novell ZENworks.My role on the team was to work at the intersection of business value and technical advocacy, helping to define marketing messages for the overall product line, as well as to articulate business value of several of the product line's components.The team I was on achieved excellent results, growing the product line from under $20M to almost $120M within an eighteen month span.In this role, I gained repeated recognition, both for being able to make strong messaging for a complex product line, as well as for my ability to excite customers and partners about buying and implementing the products I advocated.

During my term as a Novell systems engineer, I covered various territories throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.Besides regularly exceeding sales quotas, I became renowned throughout the Bay Area as the must-see technical presenter for Novell.My success in this position, as well as my skills and innovation in working with the corporate product teams, earned me recognition within the Novell corporate offices, and ultimately to a poistion in product management as an evangelist for Novell ZENworks.

I delivered technical training for Microsoft and Novell network operating systems. Because I kept students attention and could clearly explain the often very complex materials, I quickly became the company's top instructor. Many of Evernet's students would not take a class unless they were assured that I was the instructor.