about me

Hi! I'm Keith, and I live in Eagle Mountain, Utah with my wife and 4 kids. My weekends and evenings are mostly spent hanging out with the kids and spouse, playing guitar (poorly!), listening to records, mountain biking (even more poorly!), and skateboarding.

beginnings

I was always a techie kid, but I would probably say that when I should have realized I'd have a future in technology was during my collegiate years at BYU. I didn't have a ton of money to scrape together to buy a 2008-era MacBook Air or whatever, so I sprung for a Dell Mini 10v, brand-new for I think under $300:

This was a fascinating, hilariously under-powered little thing, and it came with Windows XP "Starter" edition, which really only let you run a limited set of apps, and only so many at a time. So, to make this thing work at all as a note-taking machine, I figured out how to install Linux distributions on it, by the dozen.

Even more than now, the Linux desktop situation was pretty dire from a design and user-experience standpoint in 2008 – the whole vibe, what with wild 3D animations and wobbly windows, was very "your scientists were so pre-occupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think about whether they should."

That was probably when I first became aware of the discipline of software design and user experience. Danielle Fore's efforts with Elementary's icon packs and later, a full-fledged OS, were particularly formative for me.

My tinkerings with Linux continue to this day – by choice, my primary compute is a 2015 MacBook Pro with Ubuntu aboard – but the experience sort of made me start to take a deeper look at all the software experiences I was being served. Who was making the choices that drove the apps we used? And not just the color choices, but the user flows and patterns and priorities?

After a brief, failed foray into law school (don't ask), I decided that what I really wanted to do was take part in those sorts of decisions and discussions, and some deeper exploration told me that the discipline that led and guided that process was a thing called product management. Further reading exposed me to the Agile Manifesto, and to the writings and work of some of that pioneers in the space, and I was off to the races.