Auth0 provided me with an opportunity to distill my vision of trusted advisory into a bona fide practice.

SaaS providers need to take enablement seriously ... otherwise they're just one poor customer experience away from shelf-ware; and no one is immune to churn. At Auth0 I learned that if you approach customers with empathy, genuine concern, and transparency that they're more likely to succeed in their adoption; and more likely to call you first when they find their next gap.

At Auth0 I also learned how to curate a product feature set. Customers need all sorts of additions, subtractions and divisions and not all of them fit into the ethos of the platform. At Auth0 I learned how to developed an influential, and trusted voice that helped shape the way the platform advanced to meet customer need.

At Travelers I learned to be a better leader, and how to be an agent of change. Challenging status quo is hard, and it's easier to go along to get along. But that doesn't produce results.

This is where I learned to approach organizational change incrementally, but with just enough discomfort to ensure growth and expansion of new ideas.

At Travelers I learned how to influence detractors, focus enthusiastic developers and teach modern cloud principles and philosophies to an audience ranging from novice to veteran.

At AWS I learned to drink from the firehose. Seriously, there's a lot going on over there, and that can be intimidating. The first thing I needed to do was get real comfortable with specializing. This simple point was a huge moment of growth for me. This is when I genuinely embraced my imposter syndrome and just got on with it.

AWS also taught me to navigate an ambiguous role. The definition of a TAM's role was (is) wide enough to drive a truck through ... and honestly, there was just too much work to get done by any one person. This meant that I had to learn to trust my judgement and pick and choose what was going to have the most positive impact on customers, the business, and of course, me.

At Leidos I learned the nuance of cloud migrations at scale. With more than 400,000 active users, and more than 250 systems to modernize and migrate, I helped the USAF change the way they design, develop and deliver.

During this time I also developed a new level of professional confidence. At Leidos I worked daily with senior officials with all sorts of commandeering, demanding personalities ... skeptical, approaching unreasonable. I learned to dive deep, pay close attention to details, and just teach.

At Lockheed Martin I learned the nuance of quality assurance at massive scale and complexity, with the added fun of an extremely demanding mission of consequence.

Lockheed is the place where I really started to develop a mind for architecture. I realized that I was looking at our objective through a pinhole, and that wasn't good for quality. In order to understand what "quality" really meant, I needed to understand the architecture of what we were testing.

This allowed me to contribute in entirely new ways, specifically during customer meetings when complex technical topics needed to be explained to non-technical audiences (something I'm now very good at).

At Parsons I learned infrastructure the old way, and then the new way.

When I joined Parsons they were delivering product to government customers using CDs, Laptops and ISOs. This was extremely inefficient and error prone.

After a few cycles I decided that I couldn't take it anymore, and I started to push for change. Cloud and hybrid-cloud were unheard of in Government circles (particularly in these Government circles), but I decided to roll the dice anyway. After months of research, testing and explaining I learned to deploy hybrid and native cloud resources quickly, efficiently and reliably.

At Paychex I learned how to build a city-wide network.

Paychex issues more than $4 billion in payroll every week ... that's nearly 1 in 12 U.S. private sector employees. If Paychex experiences a service interruption, the U.S. economy stalls. That's a pretty big deal.

At Paychex I worked with economic contributors throughout the region (from Buffalo NY, to Rochester NY, to Syracuse NY) to create a like-minded community of BC/DR professionals, cooperating in-kind to ensure the resilience of our local, state and national economies.

This community still collaborates today, and includes local police, fire departments, public works departments, the FBI; and private sector contributors ranging from financial services, food and consumer goods, suppliers and utilities and universities (including my own Alma Mater, RIT).

During my time at Ponte I was immersed in the open source & hacker communities.

At Ponte we did a lot of computer-sciency things like maximizing performance across hundreds of thousands of lines of code; and searching vast open source libraries for evidence of malicious actors and general Tom-Hackery. Good times.

Ponte also provided me with my first government contracting experience, which shaped my unique approach to writing RFP responses, estimating costs and timelines, and developing skill maps to deliver on a vision.