while Big question toe unpack for sure. Um so yeah, So I I started, um I started my career coming out of undergrad, not really knowing what I wanted to do. I think like a lot of, um, you know, people in their early twenties, I knew I wanted a job that was fulfilling, you know, that I would get to use my brain power, be engaged, and then also, you know, hopefully be ableto make a little bit of money, right? I think that's also important. And unfortunately, graduated in 2007 right in the middle of the credit crisis. So it was very difficult to find a job at all. Um, but, you know, luckily, you know, I had an idea of what I wanted to do, and so no was focusing on doing something within sort of sales and marketing. However, I think when you try to do that, and it's in the middle of oven economic crisis and you have an under undergrad degree, which is, you know, at this point, you know, just having a degree all right, is it doesn't really do a lot, right. And I think I kind of thought that you know? Hey, I have a degree and I would be able tow, you know, rule the world. And that just wasn't the case. So, you know, I spent a while during my career trying to figure out what what I wanted to do, right? So I unfortunately jumped Ah few times from a number of different jobs across the number of different industries and never really got a foothold into anything I, I thought was tangible. Announced was very frustrated in my mid twenties with my career progress. Uh, and so, you know, not really figuring it out was was tough. But then, you know, I think I started to realize that I can't keep jumping around right from thing to thing. I need to pick something, and I need to stick with it. So that was what I Yeah, and and and that was what I started to try to do in the context of working in sort of sales, marketing, business development with in the financial services industry. I had, you know, my brother was working at JP Morgan, and I had my own number of friends that worked in financial services, so I sort of started their right and the challenges again. I had to start at ah, at entry level, right? And I don't think anyone wants to start entry level jobs over and over and over again, right? Yeah. And so, you know, unfortunately, I didn't have a great experience when I started because I was sort of stuck in entry level role. Uh, it was just tough to get out of again in the middle of a financial crisis. But luckily, you know, that was the first time that I got exposed to digital product management, and it really put the bug in me that Hey, you know, I'm sort of, Ah, a nerd. Early adopter, if you will. Uh, so it it was kind of my first exposure to what I think I've sort of built my career around, um, which was great, right? And so I moved into sort of successive, more senior roles within financial services, specifically within asset management. So mutual funds beat Jeffs, went in tow, essentially selling private equity and hedge funds. And then, unfortunately, the company I was working for which, um, you know, it was fairly small was acquired. And then that necessitated me making right at a decision. And so at that point, I made the decision to go back to school, go get an MBA. Ah, and try to re factor my career around not only business development, but really something more strategic and not front office. So I was sort of don't with dealing with clients. I wanted to be more in a strategic role, so sort of was able to reset during business school and then, you know, Internet Marriott and product management during business school and then pivot back to financial services. But in right, a new, uh, you know, sort of a new of I don't know what the best thing you would call it, right? A new type of role not got me to where also sort of, you know, rear professional, who's pivoted between a lot of different role, but now sort of my sweet spot at, say, the intersection of marketing and digital product management. So I really love what I do now and definitely anticipate staying in it for for some time. But I think those are some of the incidents and experiences that shape my curb half and you know, one of the things I didn't call out super explicitly was that during that I actually experienced beyond the one time that company acquired I experience three acquisitions and going through acquisitions. Eyes generally, not a lot of fun. Eso has sort of shaped. Part of it is is now, right? I am at, ah, bigger company that you generally wouldn't get acquired. It would do the acquisition, and that wasn't by design, but But I actually I think that that's something that, um, I like because of just of the prior scars. So, you know, we have a lot of people that are going and start ups really small companies, you know, I've done that and it hasn't ended well for me. So that's not to say I wouldn't do it in the future. I'm definitely a very entrepreneurial person. I love ownership and and driving things to completion. But, you know, my experience has just not been that great. So for the time being, I'm happy being at a nice company. Sure,

great question. Fellow star with the work travel and working from home. So before Covad, right? I think it was a totally different world, you know? Now I'm not traveling. I'm working from home 100% just like everybody else is. And we're sort of anticipating working from home 100% through the end of the year. Um, and then I think everyone's gonna go back to a different model, right? I think we're all seeing that not only is working from home effective were actually more efficient, so my team was already really fairly distributed was set up to work. Ah, work remotely as it was. But, you know, we were going into the office some. But now, honestly, I think when we have the opportunity to go back, I'm gonna only go back on core days. You know, potentially. The team is going to be in the office. Call it Tuesday through Wednesday, and so we may go into the office those days. The other piece to that is MNT headquarters is in Buffalo, New York. I'm Baltimore based. So I do travel quite a bit to buffalo. I would say twice a month. Ah, and you know, my boss travels there almost every week. So it is an interesting thing I never really fully appreciated. No working for a company where right? The mothership is in a different location. Luckily, it's only a one hour flight, so pretty easy to do. But it does. You know, it's it's quite a bit to travel on, and then you layer on top. Some travel to conferences on vendors, and so it's a It's a decent amount of travel, but it's nothing like a consultant, right? I'm not gone Monday through Thursday, every week s so I think it's a really good balance. So I would say, you know, a balanced of going to the office, working from home. Ah, and then work travel. I do think it's really important for people to realize how important relationships are, right? I think it's important to understand things, especially in more technical roles. But when you own the business side, especially in something like marketing, it's really important to have a good relationship with partners. Making the most out of relationships is absolutely critical, and then the other piece, I think, is really important for roles like Digital is is going to conferences, meeting people who are really interesting things and can help you, right? And you can build your network that way. And so, you know, while it may be more work travel, um, then I'd like sometimes I think it's really important to be going to some of these conferences just to make sure that you're staying sharpened, bringing, you know, all of that to bear for, you know, for our our internal stakeholders, as well as nor and customers and being able Teoh No state. I wouldn't say cutting edge. But, you know, to stay at least, uh, up to date on, you know what? What's going on within the environment, In terms of responsibilities and decisions, they're kind of wide ranging. I mean, I think one of the most important parts of my job is giving giving direction to the teams as to what we're going to build, right? So I think over the past, let's call it year. I sort of pivoted from Ah, and I read a lot about This is really the pivot from a product manager to a product leader, and I sort of operate like a product leader now, and it's very different. It's a it's a different ball game and a lot of it is right directing the strategy, directing the work, providing the overall vision and roadmap for what we're trying to achieve. So I spend a ton of time working with stakeholders toe, understand what their needs are and what they think their needs will be. Because part of the job is how do we build, um, what I like to call sort of architectural runway for the business strategy, right? So if if we were waiting for pay Mr Business, what's your strategy on? And then we built for that? It takes us right, quite a bit of lead time, great technology data. It doesn't come overnight. So one of the challenges that I was facing a lot of times is right. By the time someone had a fully fleshed out business strategy, we were right having to build technology on Call it a six month lead time, right? And by that point, that person may be the business strategy change. So what I try to do now is to really, really understand where sort of digital marketing and go to market strategies are going right like not not where are they today? But where they going and how can we apply that to the business strategy it? And And this is sort of even more difficult task because we're in enterprise team. So you know, we have retail banking, but then we also have wealth management on and so you know all those b two b and B two c Business strategies are very different in terms of how they go to market. However, you know a lot of the technology and the data that underpins it. It's applicable in extensible for all of them. So right, while there is a little bit of a challenge because you want to stay ahead of the game, it's actually, you know, one of the best things about this is the technologies kind of well known. There are some new things. There are, you know, everything is constantly evolving, but it's not like we are. It's not like we're leading the way right that a lot of these things are because other people have gone through these challenges before tech companies ask. Companies have made right thes solutions for us to be able to leverage. So that is, is incredibly helpful, right? Having having sort of, you know, technology that works, that's well known. It's more about, Hey, let's make sure that, you know we're selecting the right technology is selecting the right vendor partners and then, you know, being really, really thoughtful about right how everything could be flexible, extensible and making sure that we get really good at integration and implementation because it's it's constantly going to be a cycle where we're gonna be cycling in and out new technologies. Um, but, you know, ultimately that's a really big piece of my job.

Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges is just the I talk a lot about how a lot of my job is translation. So the difficulty right of going sort of end to end so right, technology can get very technical very quick, right? And so I can't necessarily be able to be, uh I would say super, super deep in the tack, but then also super super deep in business strategy because they're kind of other ends of the spectrum. But, like, how can I be be wide ranging enough or t shaped to write a T shaped in a sort of marketer so that I can understand a really wide breath of things, but then go deep in a certain number of things, right? So I'm definitely will admit that I'm not the most technical person I didn't, you know, grow up into this world as a developer or anything like that, right? I'm not by nature, a technical person, but you know, I know where I can improve, right? So it's it's about sort of getting the skill sets where you're lacking. But then I think what's more important is finding the things that you're really good at and then getting even better at those. Because we can drive ourselves crazy trying to get experience in every little thing. I think we sort of over-index on improving our weaknesses rather than improving our strengths. I'm really interested in how can I improve my strength and leverage my strengths? But then how can I also get right a little bit more white, wide raging and the types of things I could do so that I can do this type of translation? Um, and then the second piece to the being good at that translation is a difficult part. Is the people I say this all the time? The technology is it's not rocket science, right? I'm not doing rocket science. I'm, you know, we're not building electric cars were not saving the world, right? We're doing digital marketing on and you know, again, a lot of this technology is well known that the key is in the difficult part is the people. So there's a couple of challenges to that, right? It it can get really messy organizing people when you're trying to get everyone to go in the same direction, so I talked a little bit about that earlier is important to provide right strategic direction and vision. And to say that over and over and over again, right, because we know that if you don't say something for more times, people don't ever understand it, right. So it's really important to find creative ways to translate right what we need to do into each different persons context. Because the vision and strategy, if you say it one way to write executive, they're going to hear something different than if you say that same thing to someone who's actually building the technology. So it's important to write se and direct the work in the context that the person that you're talking to understands, right? And this goes back to sort of the old adage of know your audience, right? And so then the extension to that is, how can I do that and bring people along right? You don't want to surprise people. I don't want to go to, you know, a stakeholder and surprise them with something that I need to do now, right? I want to be talking about these things for six months until something actually happening and I see this all the time, even though we do that, you'll still find people that sort of need to be on board but are surprised by something happening, right? And so there's a little bit of call it stakeholder amnesia. But I like to see you know, that's feedback for me That says, Oh, well, I need to do a better job engaging that stakeholder earlier on, or maybe in a different way than I did this time, right? Because ultimately, if my goal, you know, is to right drive growth and be able to move the organization forward, you know I need to get good at doing that type of stakeholder engagement along the way so that we can move faster because right, if it becomes a roadblock, you know, I potentially could have done a better job along the way. So those were just a few of the challenges that that I have on a daily basis,