Kathy Becklin is an optimistic realist, leader, facilitator and veteran of more than 30 years in the computer industry. Kathy has a degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology. During college, Kathy got lots of real experience as a help-center technologist with Honeywell.
Kathy headed for California after graduating to join Lockheed, where she worked on many projects that she can’t tell you about, except that they involved some amazing technologies. One of the highlights of her time at Lockheed was being the Chief Software Engineer for a multi-million dollar proposal and presenting to 300+ government personnel. (They won the contract.) She was also on the corporate Software Task Force and defined a versatile software process that was deployed across big and small projects alike. After 18 years at Lockheed, she decided to explore new horizons.
She headed to Dialog, a small information technology company and the primary source of searches for professionals long before Google existed. Back then, they bragged that they had indexed terabytes of data and search results were given in just seconds, a trifle compared to today’s technology. At Dialog, Kathy led teams that were developing web interfaces to the Dialog search capabilities. Web design was in its infancy and there are much better tools today, she maintains that good design comes from understanding your business strategies and customers.
During the dot-com era, Kathy went to work for SuccessFactors.com, which at the time was a small start-up that built HR software. Her work there involved striking a delicate balance between defining their next great product while trying to keep current paying customers happy. Defining one-off solutions was never the answer unless you wanted to get bought by that customer. Luckily that didn’t happen, and SuccessFactors is still in business today.
Kathy later moved on Adobe Systems as a Project Manager, working with the Server Products Group on their 1.0 release. A key skill of a project manager is to pull tasks and schedules into something that looks real enough to get engineers to give their “real” input. Taking pieces of desktop software from all over Adobe and piecing it together for use in a server environment was a challenge, but a few releases later they knew an amazing business product would emerge. Being at the forefront working with digital signatures, secure forms and embedded barcodes was exciting.
After her move to Maui, Kathy decided to totally change careers and became a Realtor®. Although she loves the indepedence of working for herself, being the boss, administrator, finance guru, marketing specialist, web site designer and developer, customer support AND sales is a pretty huge undertaking.
Kathy’s years in the corporate arena taught her that doing business is about cultivating and maintaining relationships, and social media became an important part of her daily routine. Today, online tools exist to make connection and communication so much easier, and she finds teaching people how to use these tools effectively extremely rewarding.
Kathy can be reached at:
http://kathybecklin.com
http://twitter.com/AlohaKathy
http://facebook.com/kathybecklin
http://linkedin.com/in/kathybecklin
