My story

In August 2024 the company pivoted. Our parent, Chronicle Heritage, folded Codifi in, and the mission became digital transformation: moving a national firm off a patchwork of ArcGIS Online, Field Maps, Survey123 and legacy FileMaker databases, and onto one workflow.

I became Head of Product, reporting to the CEO, and the job grew from shipping features to changing how a whole company works. That meant training, rollout, listening to skeptics, and earning trust one office at a time. I kept writing most of the frontend the whole way through.

I joined Codifi in May 2023, just after it spun out of an archaeology firm’s technology team to become its own company. I was employee number seven and the only product designer, so I owned what the product did and how it felt.

Then the to-do list kept growing. I started writing the frontend because waiting on handoffs was too slow. I wrote the docs and release notes, configured customer data models, field-tested GPS receivers, and sat with crews in the field. The company grew to 55 people while I took the product from an early contractor’s design through MVP.

For about a year, overlapping my last months as a pastor, I took UX work on contract. For Connect7 I interviewed chief executives and buyers, and helped move a consumer product toward selling to organizations. Through Moment Studio I led client projects with a design team of six.

Before software I was a pastor in Florida for nine years. It turned out to be a lot of customer experience and change management in disguise: working out how a nervous first-time visitor becomes part of a community, and helping teams through change they did not ask for. I still lean on that every time I ask people to give up a tool they are comfortable with.

I also made whatever the work needed. Web and mobile tools for local, national and global projects. A check-in kiosk. A covered trailer converted into a food service trailer for SALT, a homeless care organization whose first satellite branch I founded. A rolling production rig for a church that set up and tore down every week. And a lot of film.

It started with Objective-C. Between 2009 and 2014 I designed, built and published twelve native iOS apps and a 2D game, back when the App Store was new. Every screen, sprite and icon was mine, which is probably where the habit of doing both jobs comes from.

For part of that time I also worked at Erhard Furniture and Flooring in Michigan: on the sales floor, and on their website, their ads, and an iPhone app that worked out how much flooring a room needs and what to charge for it.