Josh Butler

I've been on the team since early December 2019, so just under 7 months.

On the client side, I've built experiences for Northfield Bank, Borrego Health, TMC, Intoxalock, and Family Resource Home Care which are now live, Entenmann's, Little Bites, and Junk King (in QA) and Mercy Health and First Citizens Bank (in progress). I manage the live experiences for SAFE Credit Union, GECU, Advance Financial, Byte Federal, and soon Dignity Funerals (currently transitioning). I also built and manage the Answers Free Trial Solution Template and am building verticalized Solution Templates which allow Hitchhikers to efficiently create new experiences by applying a predefined set of resources to a new or existing account.

I'm most proud of my work on Solution Templates and helping to enable the team to use the Admin Console. The Answers Free Trial process was spun up rather quickly during the initial onset of COVID, so we needed to be reactive. I created the first AFT template for the team's use in a few days and the second/current template in one night (shoutout to all the teams that worked to build Jambo as it's hyper efficient relative to our previous frontend). I'm very excited to roll out the verticalized Solution Templates soon, so that the team can be even further optimized for efficiency and successfully handle the volume of builds required.

I've learned an incredible amount since joining the team and continue to learn more everyday, which is what I enjoy most about the role. From building an Answers-ready Knowledge Graph to structuring a backend search configuration file to molding the frontend build to match the client's needs, I feel like I'm always challenged to keep learning and keep improving. Examples of important skills refined through this role are data management (Excel), technical understanding (HTML, CSS, basic Javascript), and project management.

Though we manage the implementation for clients from start to finish for Answers, we don't roll off the account once they're live. The post-launch optimization phase for Answers is as important (if not more important) than the build phase because we can monitor search quality and query data to improve content in the Knowledge Graph and the experience.

The Mercy Health project has been the toughest challenge I've encountered at Yext. While we have not overcome it yet (still in progress), we've had so much work done across teams including Product, Consulting, and Hitchhikers that will benefit all Answers experiences moving forward (new Answers features added to the library and items identified to resolve/improve, among other things). The context here is that Mercy's experience is very customized and has required significant effort from the Product team to build support in the SDK library and the Consulting team to meet Mercy's expectations on the frontend (huge shoutout to Ben McGinnis, Ben Haines, and Rose Grant for all their continued help here). On the backend, Mercy has 1650 Facilities, 11000 Professionals, and 510 Services with a range of associated data points that we're working through from a search quality perspective. Along with all of those complexities, we're building an integration to handle mapping Wait Time data to Facility results cards, while they're building data integrations to manage Facilities, Professionals, Services, and Insurances Accepted data in the Knowledge Graph. We still have a ways to go, but have made great progress and I'm excited to see the end result of this project that has truly been a team effort at Yext.