As a key member of the Product Management team at Workspeed, I shared responsibility for the overall product roadmap and the development of new features. My unique area of expertise on the team was user interface design, but each team member was typically tasked with specific functional projects, which we shepherded from the first gathering of requirements through the final release.

My position at Workspeed enabled me to assemble disparate skills acquired throughout my career into a complete product development package:

• With Sanrio and the toy industry, I got my initiation in the development life cycle, from concept sketches for children's products through production art & manufacturing to marketing & sales promotion.
• In the advertising industry I learned additional lessons in advertising and sales.
• Writing the Proceedings of the Council for Continuous Improvement provided me with a virtual MBA in quality management, including a basic understanding of ISO 9000 practices and an abiding advocacy of customer focus.
• As a software consultant, I became familiar with the software development cycle.
• Then at eFORCE I mastered the principles of usability design that helped me organize all this knowledge into a coherent practice.

Successful product management requires the ability to quickly and easily move from a high-level, big-picture view of the product in the marketplace down to the intricate, granular details of design and engineering, while never losing focus on the final customer. It requires the judgement to successfully mediate the conflicts between business and technical requirements, as well as the emotional maturity to manage the varied personalities that typically make up a development team. It requires the discipline and focus to keep the team on task and the project on track. These are qualities I have in abundance.

The bottom line: I like to build things, and I insist on building in quality and customer satisfaction.