Hello and welcome to our Meet the Team series, in which we aim to give you deeper insight into the minds and personalities of those who make up this eclectic, close-knit group. We are developers, marketers, and technical support engineers, and at work we craft everything from Microsoft reporting APIs to mobile email applications. And outside of work? Let’s just say racing against the machine during hackathons, building architecturally sound beer towers during retros, and paddling down the Charles during the warmer months are simply the beginning.

Say hello to Product Manager Alison – belovedly known as author of the Pitan the Pivot Mage series. When she’s not supplying delicious office treats, you can find her scrumming in Trello, pumping out Pitan posts, or answering your questions on the OfficeWriter Answers site.

1. What do you do?
That depends on which hat I’m wearing. On Monday, I write tutorials. On Tuesday, I shift to designing sales demo or web site content. By Wednesday I’m managing a product backlog. Thursday is all about answering technical support questions and writing sample code. I wrap it up on Friday with some PivotTable blog posts.

2. What are you listening to right now?
I’m oscillating between the action theme from Doctor Who and the opening to an anime, Aquarion Evol.

3. If you could build any app, what would it be and why?
I would definitely want to build a mobile app that could analyze a reference picture of a character and generate a list of color swatches from the images. On top of that, it would allow you to switch between ‘picture colors’ and ‘real life colors’. For example, a bright yellow in a cartoon image would correspond to a golden blonde in real life.

4. When you were 5 what did you want to be and why?
I wanted to be a marine biologist because that was the perquisite for training Orcas at Sea World.

5. If you were a beer what would you be and why?
Apple juice – because I don’t drink and no one would be able to tell the difference visually.

6. What is your favorite tech blog and why?
Contextures has all my answers when PivotTables stump me. Continue reading Meet the Team: Alison →