Familiar Knowledgebases and CRMs: Airtable, Amplitude, Bloomfire, Confluence, Document 360, Google Drive, Guru, HubSpot, KnowledgeOwl, Miro, Notion, Nuclino, Salesforce, SharePoint, Slack, Slite, Zendesk, Zoho
Total Knowledge and Documentation Strategy: VRChat
VRChat is an online virtual reality social platform. Prior to my time there, they had no dedicated knowledge manager or internal trainer, and were using poorly architectured, out-of-date tools that made it impossible to find answers or track projects. As we grew into a larger, entirely remote company, I worked to change this by conducting deep internal user analysis interviews, spending several months deep-diving into knowledge base and project management tracker evaluations, and finally choosing and launching our chosen tools Confluence and Linear. This included the authoring of over a thousand internal help articles in a standard WISYWIG editor, as well as code-based documentation using Docusaurus, Markdown, and GitHub.
Knowledge Strategy and Implementation: STRATIS IoT
After careful research and stakeholder interviews, I chose and setup STRATIS’ Confluence instance with the goal of empowering remote employees to find answers to their questions without needing to depend on real-time responses from coworkers. This instance contained hundreds of deeply technical documents to contain our proprietary employee information, as well as a separate space for HR and People Ops, with a total employee onboarding program targeted at support agents and new developers. With an acquisition by a larger existing company, I also went on to manage shared knowledge bases in SharePoint and Salesforce.
Slack User Guidance: Edgio
Edgio, a company that very lightly used Slack, acquired a much larger company with a strong history of Slack usage. At acquisition, I had concerns that some would continue to store knowledge in Slack, while others would not know how to use a robust channel directory. Working with our People Experience and Legal teams, I created an internal user guide with guidance and rules for both experienced and totally new user groups.
Supplemental Pandemic Knowledge Pivot: NextFab
NextFab’s knowledge was delivered largely in person before COVID-19. We needed to orient and interact with a large number of first time distance learners during the deepest parts of lockdown. When we reopened facilities, we had the need to acquaint our existing customers to the new safety protocols put in place for COVID-19 sanitization asynchronously. I created a series of short videos to meet both of these needs, which were cut in Adobe Premier, hosted on Youtube, and embedded into our members-only content and learning wiki. You can find the series in the NextFab Cribs and NextFab MakeAlongs series on their Youtube channel.
Familiar Tools, Languages, and PM Software: Adobe Acrobat, Confluence, Document360, Docusaurus, GitBook, GitHub, Google Docs, HTML, Jira, Linear, LLMs, Markdown, Miro, MS Office, Notion, Postman, Trello, Slack, Visual Studio, WordPress, Zendesk
Sample Docs Websites
Much of my previous docs work was under NDA… so I made my own GitBook, by spinning up and launching a full instance attached to my personal GitHub. View my documentation on Teddy here.
Technical Product Writing: VRChat
VRChat had little formal documentation when I joined as their internal knowledge manager. I built out documentation around highly proprietary technologies related to the VR space, as well as practical guidance for how employees could use the hundreds of plugins and features that stacked onto our base product.
Half our product was built for open use by ‘creators,’ the customers who wanted to use the API and SDK of VRChat to build their own VR content. Working with our creators and community teams, I helped to ensure that our public-facing release notes and creator docs kept creators up to date on changes, with our most sensitive updates tracked in separate internal digests which were distributed weekly to our team.
https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/202421
Customer Education and Enablement Help Pages: STRATIS IoT
https://help.stratisiot.com/
STRATIS IoT was a software company that made apps to pull in smart device integrations under one seamless platform for multi-family residential properties. When I signed on, they had zero user or customer documentation about their product and planned to roll out five new integrations in the next ten months. Working with product, customer service and web development teams, I helped designed and launched our help site with more than 300 user articles and partner product guides. I regularly updated and maintained the website based on support data and customer feedback.
Each user manual I executed also required detailed partner meetings and research, to ensure that the content shared was industry-relevant and tailored to its niche audience. This below example showcases one of the shorter integration-specific user guides I crafted for property managers. Much more STRATIS work can be found under the Instructional Design & Training tab of my portfolio.
Technical Enablement Documentation: NextFab
Nextfab is an open to the public makerspace that offers the use of heavy manufacturing machinery to paying customers. Over 5 years, I created and streamlined their customer education product, and increased incoming education revenue by 300%. To do so, I wrote detailed technical guides to get customers up and running on their chosen technologies in a way that was both scalable and effective, then launched an internal wiki behind a paywall to create greater value for our customer fees. Working with our marketing team, I charted customer journeys, and identified core milestones and qualifiers for both technical competency and customer lifetime value.
Familiar HRIS and Candidate Systems: BambooHR, Deel, Jazz, Namely, Paycor, Rippling, SuperSaaS, UltiPro/UKGPro, Zenefits
Familiar LMS and Authoring Tools: Adobe Captivate, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premier Pro, Articulate 360, Articulate Rise, Blackboard, Camtasia, Canva, Canvas, Cornerstone, Docebo, Google Classroom, iSpring, iZI LMS, Lessonly LMS, Moodle, Powerpoint, Vyond
L&D Direction: Edgio (Formerly Limelight Technologies)
Cloud services company Edgio had just signed off on a massive acquisition that saw an outside team of hundreds of remote workers entering their existing culture and systems. As the Senior Learning and Development Manager, I crafted and implemented change management training in our LMS (Lessonly) to more smoothly assure the transition, and created in-house user guides for some of our most important tools, to ensure that both groups were on the same page for proper use and productivity tracking.
I researched, tested, budgeted, and presented multiple professional development program pathways to the executive board, with the goal of providing flexible and inclusive learning opportunities for both seasoned and novice employees. This included business English for offshore teams, tech stack upskilling for our newly acquired developer units, and a rotating professional topics book club with material costs covered by the company. I also held live training sessions for how to craft engaging LinkedIn profiles, as Edgio loved referrals and had many open recs to fill, and a decent portion of our employee population had become professionals before the rise in LinkedIn’s popularity.
Training of Trainers: NextFab
Nextfab is an open to the public makerspace that offers the use of heavy manufacturing machinery to paying customers. I trained a fleet of 40 instructors, many who were teaching for the first time, and recruited more on a contract basis via networking and community outreach.
Advanced Manufacturing Readiness Program: NextFab
The Advanced Manufacturing Readiness Program, funded by a grant from the PA Department of Education, was an 18 month program to help provide exposure and basic job skills for those interested in manufacturing careers, with a goal of eventual job placement for candidates who passed my evaluation criteria. This required me to make extensive connections with local manufacturers and complete discovery interviews with their HR teams, to distill cultural and candidate pain points and identify gaps in their hiring strategy. I also conducted 1:1 soft skill coaching sessions for program participants.
Startup Employee Handbook: RJMetrics
RJMetrics was a SaaS company in the data analytics space. As employee number nine, I was integral in building a thriving, lean startup that came close to 200 employees by its eventual acquisition five years later. After experiencing explosive growth, we had a need for onboarding materials and guidebooks that could be distributed to the incoming employees being hired each month. I created documentation that was both friendly and informative, outlining our core values while communicating our most important asset – our company culture. I included photos and videos of company history, and resources for how to find everything a new hire would need.
Familiar LMS and Authoring Tools: Adobe Captivate, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premier Pro, Articulate 360, Articulate Rise, Blackboard, BranchTrack, Camtasia, Canva, Canvas, Colossyan, Cornerstone, Docebo, elb Learning, Google Classroom, iSpring, iZI LMS, Lectora, Lessonly LMS (Seismic), Moodle, Powerpoint, Skilljar, Synthesia, VRChat, Vyond
Onboarding LMS Modules: VRChat
At VRChat, I created ground-up training programs to educate existing employees on proper tool usage, and undertook a massive overhaul to new employee onboarding with custom lessons, which were drafted in Articulate 360 and hosted in our internal LMS Moodle. Each employee had their own personalized checklist, seamlessly launched at the time of their internal Okta account creation. All training was designed to be asynchronous, with touch points for live interaction and competency checks, to better facilitate an international team rapidly growing across multiple time zones and continents.
A portion of the custom training I crafted was filmed in the VRChat app, which offers a variety of avatars and worlds to recreate physical situations in digital space. I scripted and storyboarded my learning objectives into rich VR experiences, edited footage in OSB and Adobe Premiere, and distributed the final product to the team for a personalized, dogfooding-lite activity.
Support Employee Training: STRATIS IoT
All STRATIS employees needed to learn each partnered hardware and software integration from the ground up, to be able to serve as support reps for our customers. I spun up custom LMS solutions in iZI LMS, and created interactive learner activities in Lumi to allow demonstration of applied learned concepts. With each product update, I released new interactive training modules to the team, tracked their progress, and iterated on our base onboarding and training programs based on the data collected from completed coursework and employee feedback.
Change Management Instructional Design: Edgio (Formerly Limelight Technologies)
For more on this experience, click over to the Culture, Ops, & L&D 💼 tab of my portfolio.
Technical Curriculum Catalog: NextFab
Nextfab is an open to the public makerspace that offers the use of heavy manufacturing machinery and software to paying customers. As they opened more locations, I streamlined their education into documented and standardized curriculum which would ensure the same level of competency for all learners, across all locations. I collaborated with technical SMEs to distill complex technical topics, established clear learning objectives, and used my knowledge of adult learning theory to create a catalog of curriculum that would be taught to thousands of customers.
Board Management: Philadelphia STEM Ecosystem
From 2018 to 2021, I served on the board of the Philadelphia STEM Ecosystem, powered by the Philadelphia Education Fund, as the chair of their Workforce Development Workgroup. Together we secured funding and partnership with GSK to form the STEM Equity Collective, providing Philadelphians with equitable access to STEM education, resources, and opportunities. I personally ran workforce development initiatives to allow teachers, students, and regional employers to better communicate and expose each other to their side of the candidate pipeline.
Educational Events: MakerFaire Philadelphia
In 2018 and 2019, I ran free educational workshops for MakerFaire Philadelphia. Over the course of a day, more than 800 participants learned about a variety of technical skills through hands on crafting and making, many of them children and adolescents. Preparation for execution was a months-long affair that involved detailed prototyping, event logistics planning, budgeting, and training of the trainers.
STEM for Parents: NextFab
STEM for Parents was a series of seminars for parents who realized the value of STEM education for their children, but didn’t know how to start at-home enrichment. Crafted to both empower parents and communicate the value of purchasing NextFab’s products, my interactive workshop guided them and created actionable plans for self-paced enrichment.