Vice President Client Services at Xcentium ; Sitecore MVP
Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started?
I was born and raised in the suburb where I currently live on the Northwest side of Chicago.
I have my BA in the Teaching of English and an MA in English Composition and actually started my career as a high school English teacher. I still consider myself an educator at heart, but after taking time off from full-time work to focus on raising our two daughters, I re-entered the full-time work force as a Project Manager for a website development company about 12 years ago.
That re-entry into full-time work was really stressful. Honestly, I had no idea what I was getting into when I took on a Project Manager role. I was eager to get some experience in consulting and was hoping to use my writing skills but felt like I was in over my head at the beginning. I spent the first six months in that job with an out of control case of imposter syndrome. I figured that, at any moment, someone would realize that I didn’t know what I was doing. One day, about six months in, I realized that good Project Management was all about great communication and organizational skills—things that a parent and teacher has in spades. After that, I was more able to lean in to the work and grew my career pretty quickly.
Through dialing in to my natural curiosity and critical thinking skills, I expanded my work into Digital Strategy, working closely with marketers and serving as the connection between marketing needs and the technical solutions needed to bring good digital strategy to life.
What is your role and where do you work?
I am a VP of Client Services, focusing on Digital Strategy for XCentium. My work runs the gamut from evangelizing Sitecore in the marketplace, to heading up delivery of enterprise website development projects, to ongoing relationship and account management with our clients.
My job keeps me on my toes because there’s a different challenge to solve every day as my work spans all aspects of our client relationships. I am involved in new business development as well as the day to day of project delivery.
A lot of what I do is focused on collaborating with our clients and XC technical architects to constantly be looking to the future and helping clients determine what to prioritize on their digital roadmap.
What would you say is key to excelling in your industry?
Because tech evolves so quickly, the trait that I think makes the biggest impact on an individual’s success is to really know how to learn—which is vastly different from knowing a lot. When I am recruiting, I look for people who have a strong sense of self-knowledge: they know how to approach a task that they’ve never attempted before but can figure it out because they have excellent critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
In this industry, we have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and navigating through failure. I have never learned something by having it go completely right the first time—my learnings and growth have all come from working through a tough project or through unexpected obstacles.
I am still learning this one as a recovering perfectionist but I am embracing the mantra “Done is better than perfect.” If you don’t keep moving forward, this industry will quickly leave you behind.
In your academic or work career, was there ever a time that you wanted to give up? How did you overcome this and continue working towards your goal?
In what we do, it’s really easy to feel like you don’t know enough. Imposter syndrome seems almost cliché these days, but it’s very real and has been a struggle throughout my career. I have found that the most intelligent people I know fall into this way of thinking because they have a high bar and high standards for themselves.
Frankly, I got through these struggles because I had to—because the work and project deadlines required it. Sometimes the only way out is through. And I’ve learned that while it can be very rough, you will get through the tough spots and then have tools to take forward.
When I have wanted to give up, it’s when challenges have seemed insurmountable—where we hit a roadblock and the solution wasn’t apparent. But what I’ve learned is that there is always a solution. I am also the mom of two young adult daughters so I always consider how my approach to difficulty is an example to them.
Do you have any advice or tips for women looking to start their careers in tech? What do you wish you had known?
There is so much that I wish I would have known at the start of my tech consulting career! I was a little intimidated by tech when I started and have had a lifelong uneasiness with not knowing/having the answer.
I wish that at the start of my career, I had really understood that the key to success in tech revolves around tenacity, curiosity and organized thinking. It’s not about having the answer or knowing the direct path to a solution at the
beginning. A lot of what we do relies on the scientific method of having a hypothesis and then working towards that by making adjustments along the way.
As women, many of us grew up feeling that we needed to have the right answer all the time and are, therefore, uncomfortable not knowing. This is what can cause us to be afraid of asking questions (especially if we think it’s a “dumb” question). It’s taken me a long time, but I have learned to embrace the not knowing and now I am proud of my ability to ask good questions to lead my teams to the solutions.