Jessie Yorke
Role: Yext Administrator
Previous Roles: Platform Manager, Implementation Manager
Role: Yext Administrator
Previous Roles: Platform Manager, Implementation Manager
I started after Thanksgiving, so about 8 months!
Where do I begin!! Most of the projects I work on are dedicated Answers Implementations for our paid clients, with a few Free Trial clients sprinkled in the mix. A couple examples of the paid clients I work on include:
Outside of my client work, the other projects I work on are centered around either the launch of our Hitchhikers program or the Answers Free Trial offering we recently rolled out. I've written and edited a lot of the content for the Hitchhikers modules (shout out to everyone who has graciously helped review and fact check my writing). Our whole team also worked pretty tirelessly at the onset of the Answers Free Trial offering to help define the offer and the necessary implementation materials. We also are consistently training and supporting our new Hitchhikers - there are over 20 of them! This consists of but is not limited to putting together training resources, shadowing kickoff calls, and generally making sure they are equipped with the skills they need to be successful!
It's been a busy 7 months - but a lot of these projects will have a lasting impact on the company, so it's all very exciting.
I think my proudest accomplishment is the Answers Hitchhiker training track that our team put together within the span of about 1 week. With the help of product teams and subject matter experts, we collectively wrote, proofread, fact-checked, and digitized a 200-page document to the Hitchhiker site in 5 business days. All of this was done while simultaneously managing large client implementations, onboarding our first class of 6 new Hitchhikers, and kicking off many of the AFT projects that flooded our team at this time.
My future proudest accomplishment will probably be the launch of the Verizon Answers site. This has been a very large project with requirements that are moving targets. Assuming everything goes according to plan (this is the thrice revised plan so I hope it does), this experience should be live in the middle of July and fully integrated with the unified Verizon website. This is part of an A/B test where we are being pitted against a competitor, so my future future proudest moment will be when we win the A/B test!!
I'll need everyone's family, friends, and loose acquaintances on deck to click as many entities in the Verizon answers experience as possible.
This experience has challenged and built up my technical skills in ways I could have never imagined.
In general, I just have a much better understanding of websites. The Hitchhikers training and the work I do on Answers has given me the tools I need to inspect everything that is under the hood of a website. We're constantly looking at site HTML, targeting different elements with CSS, reviewing API responses and analytics events to develop Answers experiences and troubleshoot when things don't go as expected. A really fun manifestation of these skills was when I was able to sit down with my Dad, who is a small business owner and 1-man team, and help him style some of the new elements on his own website. That was an aha moment for me when I realized how much I had learned.
The administrator role is a really interesting blend of technical work, project management, and communication skills. The Answers product specifically moves really fast - so there is also a degree of somewhat neverending education and product branding that we have to be on top of. We have to learn a lot of things, be very adaptable and be ready to do it all very quickly!
The toughest challenge I had to overcome on a project was probably when I had to re-build the entire Verizon answers site in a new platform (JAMBO) very close to what was originally their target launch date. Their Answers experience had a lot of custom styling that needed to be replicated and new styling that needed to be added. Luckily, we have awesome Hitchhiker modules that covered how to use JAMBO, so I was able to train and practice using these resources. We also have an AWESOME and supportive team around us and I was able to make all these updates directly in the platform with their help - shout out to Ben McGinnis who walked me through advanced CSS updates and Adobe Analytics tagging over the course of at least 3 hours of zoom calls.
