Hitchhiker Spotlight: Alyssa Hubbard

How long have you been on the Hitchhikers team?

I have been on the team officially for ~6 months (I also supported Hitchhiker research starting last August while on Corporate Strategy)

What projects have you worked on since joining the Hitchhikers team?

I have loved working on many aspects of the HH program itself, from researching other SaaS company training programs to writing training modules. I have also been excited to be a part of the Answers Free trial initiative by partnering with our Sales team to simultaneously implement and convert these prospects such as Interim Healthcare. In addition to free trials, I enjoy supporting a wide variety of paid clients, such as CenterState (FINS), Pizza Ranch (Food), UC San Diego Health (HC), and many more. Lastly, I support multiple internal team projects to create and enhance operational processes for Free Trials and the Hitchhiker team.

A particularly interesting project was working on South Bend Government implementation to support hiring needs in Indiana during this historically unprecedented decline in employment:

South Bend Hiring

What is your proudest accomplishment since joining the Hitchhikers team?

I am proud of the work you see on this site — from the training, to the gamification, to the community. In particular, working to develop and QA training content has been incredibly rewarding — I feel I understand the products on a new level due to the challenging work of writing clear and comprehensive training and quizzes.

Behind the scenes of how we start a training module

How has becoming an administrator/Hitchhiker affected your career?

On top of enhancing my client communication skills, it has been exciting to continue to grow my technical skills through the Hitchhiker training. This role has revealed specific technical areas that I can learn more about, such as configuration as code or JAMStack, and how those skills can serve my overall success at Yext. My technical and product understanding has also enhanced my knowledge of how our products fit within the broader industry landscape.

The Frontend of Pizza Ranch’s Account (Kindergarten for some but kinda exciting to me!)

What is one thing people might not know about being an administrator?

Being a Hitchhiker is dynamic — there is much more variety to your work than you might think, from facilitating detailed technical components in the weeds with our product team to creating comprehensive and overarching solutions for our clients. To meet the needs of their clients, Hitchhikers are agile with the ability to pivot from speaking about details to speaking at a high level.

What is the toughest challenge you have had to overcome on a project?

It can always be a challenge to know how long debugging a technical problem will take or or how complicated it will be. It can be hard to plan for. That said, working on bugs has enhanced my technical knowledge; in particular, as we scale, I have started to recognize patterns across bugs, which is gratifying and efficient. We also support each other as a team on all debugging requests from small syntax errors to larger integration problems.