I want to start with a heartfelt thank you to all of the community members both inside and outside Sitecore who have been on this journey with me. It was just over 7 years ago that I left the Sitecore partner agency life and joined Sitecore with the goal of driving forward Sitecore's engagement with technical audiences around the world. At the time, I was already a huge fan of the community and over my tenure at Sitecore this wonderful community has become an extension of my chosen family. Every day I was was given the chance to see these amazing people connect with each other and help each other out. I have so many memories that I will get to cherish for the years to come, whether it was on #SitecoreLunch getting the latest news on Eurovision and Windows95man, or meeting up at events for the hallway chatter and taking 45 minutes to make it down the hall, or those wonderful user groups in Montreal for Sitecore trivia night, or the virtual developer days we got to join together for, or the discussions on forums and Slack about pretty much everything, or trying to beat Nick Allen at a dunking contest in Orlando (SPOILER: I didn't! 🤣). I put of lot of myself into this role... it was much more than just a job that paid the bills.
It's also not often that you find yourself as part of an amazing team of people with an aligned vision to do what's right and help as many people as possible. I am so very proud of the great work that our team accomplished during my years at Sitecore. We all had different ideas and passions, but we had each other's backs and we drove each other to be better. It was with this group that I learned how to build and connect a remote team that was distributed across the globe. I learned about listening more, and sometimes, I actually talked less. Those folks who had the pleasure of regular calls with me know that was a tremendous challenge! 😄
Some of the work I was most proud of was the long-term initiative with our YouTube channel that grew to almost 9,000 subscribers! We released new content weekly for over 6 years, and really used that as a way to reach our community and help folks get excited about what was happening. The massive Developer Portal project that we undertook was probably one of the most visible impacts we made, eventually creating a great landing place for our audience that improved the developer experience and became a central place for developers to land and find what they needed, including the new SaaS Changelog that we delivered via that portal. There were so many other accomplishments over the years, too many to name, but I'm very proud of how my team took charge and jumped into whatever was most important.
Last week, I emailed my team with the news that I had been impacted as part of a larger restructuring. I was filled with a lot of raw emotions, as I wasn't just losing team members, these were my friends. My team will forever have a special place in my heart. I want to give a special shout out to Pieter Brinkman who had a vision and hired the people who could make that vision a reality. I hope we did you proud!
Side note: Two amazing people from my team, Dylan Young and Thomas Desmond, are great communicators and engineers who are also now looking for their next role. They would be great additions to your team!
Last week I also shared the news with a few folks in the community and I was blown away by the reaction! So many people reached out to me privately with messages of support and thanks. It has been a privilege and an honour to have been able to be a part of this community and connect with so many of you. No matter what happens as I look for my next opportunity, you are a part of who I am now and I will always be cheering on this community. Thank you for all these years together!
One thing I know is that my time spent with the community was never spent unwisely. I have always believed that for us all to succeed we need to connect at a very human level by being helpful, kind, and honest. Working to build those connections with you all, at scale, around the world, has been one of the most rewarding accomplishments of my life. Was there some self-serving nature to it? Absolutely! I believe that Sitecore's success is strongly tied to the experience with not just the product, but also the experience around the company itself. Whether that meant tutorial videos, written articles, webinars, events, newsletters, real-world examples running in production... we found many ways to try to find where there was a friction point and make it smoother. I know there is always more that could have been done, but we fought every day to work on what was the most important way to help at that moment.
I'm not sure what lies ahead on the road, whether it will be in the Sitecore space or something altogether new. So rather than say goodbye, I'll quote the famed children's entertainer, Mister Rogers, who once sang:
And when you wake up, ready to say
I think I'll make a snappy new day.It's such a good feeling, a very good feeling
The feeling you know that I'll be back
When the day is new.
And I'll have more ideas for you.And you'll have things you'll want to talk about
I. Will. Too.
Until next time, neighbours!
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