Emmy Panken

Since March 30 (class 1)

Girl Scouts, Wendy's, Wimpy's, Creams Cafe (AutoZone, PGA - haven't gone live yet)

I had two accomplishments I am extremely proud of:

Delivering insights about what people are searching for on their site to the Girl Scouts team. We showed them the data about people's searches for social justice related queries like racism, diversity, and transgender and helped them curate content to answer those kinds of queries. We helped to motivate them to create their Stand With Us Against Racism pledge.

Launching Wendy's - it's so cool to see our logo on such a world renowned brand's website and know that I helped us put it there.

• I have grown to become much more detail oriented as a result of needing to be detail oriented for this role when setting up Answers experiences. Any tiny and seemingly insignificant error can completely break an experience and lead to hours of debugging.
• Honed skills like time management (balancing SE work and admin work has had its challenges)
• I've gotten to stretch my developer skills which I haven't had a chance to practice in a few years (did a full stack coding bootcamp a few years ago)
• I've loved working closely with product and engineering throughout this process, it's had me thinking a lot about if I'd like to move closer to a product role in the future.

A lot of client communications are required. It's not just about the build but it's A LOT of hand holding with customers to try to understand what they're looking for and make them feel comfortable and going live.

Trying to help customers understand that this is an iterative process - the experience doesn't have to be perfect for launch. It's about launching with a good foundation, and pivoting/optimizing with data driven decisions after seeing the queries come in.