Whether it’s a client-initiated project or a self-initiated one, my projects all have one thing in common: I’m telling a story.
Spending energy in this process—finding a story, developing a thesis, pitching it, giving it shape, infusing it with experience and expertise, writing it, editing it, publishing it, promoting it—effectively creating assets that connect the author to the reader, has been such a delight and privilege to work in.
As I’ve tossed my work samples back and forth with prospective clients, I realized this was a good opportunity to publish, not send. Here are a few of the stories I’ve worked on, as well as some of the people and teams I worked with:
2012: A few years after the iPhone introduced apps, I joined Xtreme Labs to help tell stories about mobile apps and product development. When I first signed up, I was still a student at Western, and I clearly remember waking up at 4 or 5am to catch the two-hour morning train from London, Ontario into Toronto. I felt surprised at how many people made this commute.
2013: A prologue takes place at the beginning of a novel, before the first chapter. When I initiated a video interview series with my friends, the questions we explored all took place before our guest artist found success. In hindsight, I was trying to answer the question: How does a person take a leap of faith? I was also looking for permission to take the leap myself. My friends and I filmed the first episode of Prologue with Ryan Lewis at Osheaga. This project would span several years, and we filmed episodes with MC Jin, Casey Veggies, Bishop Nehru, Ty Dolla $ign, and Post Malone. After our episode with Ferg, he said, “That was the best interview I ever did.” A big shout out to the team at Alfredo Films for filming these interviews, which were often arranged at the last minute.
2014: If 97% of all albums sold fewer than 1,000 copies, what could an artist do to make a sustainable living? Ryan Leslie decided to answer this question, starting by building direct relationships with his fans. In order to buy his new album, Black Mozart, you’d need to text him. This infrastructure was supported by Superphone, which was then known as Disruptive Multimedia. This was an apprenticeship where I worked as a marketing strategist, doing publicity, as well as building and writing the first company website. Learning Ryan’s approach would go on to inform how I approached my career as an author. This year, I also joined Gawker Media as a writer in-house for Lifehacker. I found one of my favorite stories near the end of my time there, about how to create your own luck.
2015: Ye was still known as Kanye, and his story had taken on an unbelievable new crescendo; he had just become a dad and husband, and signed a new deal with Adidas that would eventually make him a billionaire. Still, while he was seen as one of the best artists in the world, he was also seen as incredibly polarizing. I’d watched many of his interviews and found his creative insights very useful, so my friends and I published The World According to Kanye. As the years went on, and Ye’s story took twists and tragic turns, I realized he indeed was a teacher—one who practiced the creative process very well, but also showed his students what to avoid in their lives.
2016: I spent a fair part of the previous year and this one working at Connected, then known as Connected Lab, as a fractional marketing leader. The story of mobile app development expanded into the Internet of Things. Amongst many content and publishing initiatives, my team and I organized Canada’s first Amazon Alexa hackathon with over 100 developers (which was covered in The Globe and Mail).
2017: One of the intersections I’d spent a lot of time at was between technology, business, creativity, and entrepreneurship. I joined Shopify as a deputy editor for Shopify Plus, where I helped tell stories involving ecommerce, entrepreneurship, and enterprises. At the time, the Shopify brand was still pigeonholed as a dropshipping brand for small businesses, which competitors were eager to exploit. I got to work with Tommy Walker, who helped articulate what I felt but didn’t know how to say yet: content marketing and stories were intertwined. He made a document called The Code, which conveyed how he wanted to tell stories for Shopify Plus. I edited every article published between November 2016 and July 2018, wrote regularly (including onboarding content like “5 Things to Do the Moment You Upgrade to Shopify Plus“), and edited case studies, industry reports, and customer product emails that helped show enterprise customers how they could use Shopify Plus. Another document made an impact on me, by general manager Loren Padelford, entitled “Burning down the enterprise.” It conveyed the vibe and approach of Shopify Plus.
2018: Shopify was a big place, and I took on a separate, concurrent, project to work with the product team to launch a new publication. Shopify needed to hire a lot of product managers, needed a stronger employer brand, and had a lot of stories to tell. I did a workshop with Shopify’s product team, and worked with them on stories exploring the making of Shopify Pay and Shopify Flow.
2019: Account software was often the backbone of a business’s operations. The thing that caught my attention were the entrepreneurs who were often customers. At QuickBooks, my first real-ish full-time job, I joined as the editor in chief for QuickBooks Enterprise products, where I built and managed a freelance writing program and created product campaign assets including landing pages (example), PPC content, ebooks (#1, #2, #3), and case studies (example). Many years later, I joined a small business that used QuickBooks Enterprise and saw just how integral it was to the finances of the business.
2020: Every year before this, I harbored a quiet ambition to write a New York Times bestselling book. Whatever my approach was, it wasn’t working. I was close to turning 30 without writing any book—let alone one that hit the bestseller list—and I didn’t want to let that happen. So I radically simplified my approach. From March onwards, I spent this year doing absolutely no marketing work, and I wrote and published a book entitled There Is No Right Way to Do This. I wrote about creative blocks because I struggled with it, and because I felt like I had to write it. Of all the copies I sold, many of them were bought by my friends—people who were really fans. This was inspired by Ryan’s approach.
2021: What if a full-time job could support my writing, and ease up the financial pressure? This was a question I was considering when I joined WorkOS, where I helped tell the story of how tech startups could go upmarket. This was a very specific story, one that I was uniquely positioned to discuss from the Shopify Plus and QuickBooks Enterprise experiences. To me, it seemed like a matter of a business’s survival, so it was an important story to tell; it was possible that enterprise customers could make a lot of steady money that supported the business’s riskier product bets. (Independent of this, the story of how meditation app Headspace sold to businesses caught my eye, and I wrote it for Marker.) I researched, produced, and launched WorkOS’s podcast Crossing the Enterprise Chasm. I also worked with many of the tech team members on their stories, including what makes a good changelog.
2022: I spent most of this year living in Hong Kong, where I worked with Holloway to edit the manuscript of There Is No Right Way to Do This and publish a new book, Creative Doing. I sent a digital copy to all my original customers via email. I wrote a lot more about this process here, and here. The only thing I’ll add: I love books as a format, because they can survive without much ongoing maintenance. During the editing phase, I started writing every day as well. I first heard about Seth Godin doing it a few years before; I’d tried this a few times and failed, and I was inspired by Lindsay Jean Thomson and #The100DayProject to try again.
2023: I moved to New York City and joined Figma as a content strategist on the Story Studio team. I wrote several stories, including this piece on designer-developer handoff to accompany the Figma/Jira product launch, which involved interviewing tech leaders at IKEA, Condé Nast, Turo, and others. I also ghostwrote “How AI will influence creative tools: A conversation with Replit’s David Hoang,” exploring AI’s impact on design and creative workflows. One of my favorite pieces was with Ovetta Sampson, who I interviewed about minimum viable data. As part of Figma’s expansion into developer audiences, I worked as the ghostwriter and lead editor on “What codegen is (actually) good for,” authored by an engineering manager and developer advocate, intended to change how technical leaders thought about codegen. This post hit the front page of Hacker News and sparked a discussion. I became the unofficial in-house Hacker News whisperer on the marketing team, and I helped several other technical posts that reached HN’s front page, including this post from Figma’s databases team, and the authoring staff engineer publicly shouted me out.
2024: I joined FGX as the marketing director. I wrote the launch announcement, “Introducing the FGX Platform,” explaining complex enterprise logistics features in a compelling, accessible way that supported their enterprise sales motion, and leading to re-engagement from dormant major clients representing six figures in revenue.
2025: I mostly hunkered down on projects I’ll be sharing very soon.
There are so many other stories—big and small—that I didn’t get to include in this timeline structure, and many people I need to link to. I plan on updating this post and adding them as they bubble up in my mind.