Passionate About Outcomes

DISCOVERING DATA

I started in product, process, and system design in 2011 the same way as many others, through finding myself spending hours getting lost in creating tools and resources, then websites and apps, then services and not-very-good businesses, and finally systems, to solve problems in my personal or work environment, slowly realising it was a ‘thing’, and maybe it was my ‘thing’. I’d been vaguely fascinated with how the information environment influences decisions and results since the beginning of a career in human services, studying business, where I was frequently struck by its impact on client outcomes. This led me to study psychology, particularly enjoying cognitive, social, and learning theory, before working in vocational training in 2011 on the cusp of psych honors and realising that, while psychology is about responding to experiences, those who work with data, knowledge,  information, and intelligence, create experiences - and I wanted to be one of those people.

Being a late starter is a running theme in my life and this career pivot at 35 (sooo old in 2011) was no exception. However, being overlooked by employers gave me the freedom to indulge in what I loved most behind the scenes, and while unnoticed, I completed over 25 small projects, three TAFE Diplomas, graduate IT studies, professional certifications, and hundreds of hours of informal analytics learning, until working at an architectural practice in 2023 where I first attempted whole-of-system design, saw the parallels between architecture of the physical environment and architecture of the digital environment, and realised it was not only what I’d been doing all this time at a basic level, but it was what I wanted to do all the time, indefinitely, on a larger level, and that life is too short to wait any longer.

From 2011 to the present, I’ve carried three core learnings gained from human services that have played an unexpectedly important role in and brought significant value to everything I do now, which I couldn’t have learnt on a more conventional career path: how to empathise with people, step into their experience, and work collaboratively with them to achieve the best outcomes; that seemingly meaningless data can be as valuable as diamonds when prepared, processed, and presented the right way in the right situation;  and that every small component is part of something larger, may hold smaller things within it, and interacts with other moving components around it in some way, so accurately assessing the potential impact of every decision to be made or action to be taken requires zooming out to the big picture and adopting a systems view, with the most intriguing insights and unique value often found in the overlaps between seemingly disparate domains. 

The last defining feature of my career has been change: every organisation I’ve worked with since 2011 has been undertaking some form of significant change, whether a major restructure, digitalisation, developing a new service, adapting to the pandemic, commencing or retiring a major contract, among others, and I have observed each of these transformations through the lens of my studies in business management, psychology, organisational behaviour, training, HR, and later IT. From the commercialisation of the Internet in 1994 to the broadscale application of gen AI in 2024, change has become a constant and innovation has become an integral part of business operations, and I want to use my ability in digital design to help small business create its own change to take advantage of technology and fulfil its potential.

So, that’s my story, and I’d love to work with you to help create the next exciting chapter in the story of your business.