Early Career at Colgate-Palmolive
While pursuing her MBA at Washburn University, Jamie began her career as an IT Knowledge Management and Communications intern at Colgate-Palmolive’s Hills Pet Nutrition headquarters in Topeka, Kansas. She maintained the knowledge database and managed change communications for the global IT service center, supporting employees in 100+ countries. After relocating to California, Jamie held roles in field sales, product marketing, and small business management, gaining a comprehensive understanding of the business and customer lifecycle.
Foundations of Excellence at SAP
Working at Colgate gave Jamie the unique experience to land roles in technical marketing and communications at SAP, where she spent nearly seven years deeply engaged with a community of over 3 million members. She led the SAP Support Portal migration for over 1.5 million admins and managed communications for key technical projects before shifting to community programs. Jamie pioneered SAP’s blogging program, shaping policies, training authors, and overseeing platform UX. She later spearheaded the SAP Community platform launch, leading platform development, marketing, and public engagement. Her final project involved bringing the SAP Community into GDPR compliance before moving on to build from the ground up at MongoDB’s Developer Relations team.
Zero to 10,000 at MongoDB
Jamie was the first community hire on MongoDB’s Developer Relations team, where she was tasked with revitalizing its open-source community after a shift to enterprise sales. Under her leadership, the community grew to over 10,000 members in her first year. To fuel this growth, she developed a new digital home on the Discourse platform, implemented the Bevy management platform and revamped the meetups program, managed the technical migration of over 60,000 MongoDB University users, and launched a $50,000 DEIB grant for underrepresented speakers. After nearly two years, it was time for a break and a change.
Mastering Chaos in Startup Land
Jamie’s growing passion for startups led her to join Contentstack, where she enjoyed the autonomy of working with a small team. However, when leadership paused the project, she found herself seeking another new adventure. Jamie joined Unusual Ventures to lead community programs, helping early-stage founders integrate community into their businesses. She boosted founder engagement from 2% to 50% and restructured the firm’s content marketing strategy. As the VC industry faced uncertainty, Unusual Ventures dissolved its platform team, prompting Jamie to transition into strategic consulting.
Living the Chaotic Good Life
In partnership with executive leaders, Jamie helps companies to define and implement strategies to accelerate growth, convert customers into advocates, and achieve operational excellence. She is an expert at facilitating collaboration between stakeholders from around the organization and throughout the customer ecosystem to produce tangible results and achieve shared goals. Jamie delivers value through a variety of projects, including:
- market and user research
- strategies for customer marketing, advocacy, community growth, and developer relations
- onboarding, training, and enablement programs and content for customers and employees
- strategies for organizational change, product launches, and startup go-to-market
Professionally, In addition to working with her consulting clients, Jamie enjoys attending and speaking at industry events where she can connect with her wonderful colleagues in the community builder profession. She also hosts a podcast and blog (communityunlocked.com) where, with her guests, she explores the interactions between community and other functional areas of the business to help people understand the role of community in their seemingly non-community work.
Jamie is energized by building from the ground up, having a big impact, and growing businesses to scale. She appreciates working with bright and thoughtful people who are working on impactful things and prioritize doing what’s right over doing what’s easy. She’s passionate about helping others to grow and achieve their personal and professional goals. Jamie considers her strong opinions loosely held, always looking for the latest data, new information, and creative ideas to shape her perspectives.
