TL;DR I'm hiring a Director, Experience Design.
I've been a Director in some form since graduating from art school over 20 years ago. At that time my friend Marty was moving to Texas and asked if I wanted his job as an Art Director for a small agency called Youthography. I had to call my older brother, a much more capable designer, to ask what an Art Director even was. He said – you'll figure it out. I told Marty yes, and a few months later work for my first client Nike resulted in a large and violent protest and national news headlines. In these early moments I learned being a Director was HARD and DANGEROUS!
So I rushed back to art school to pursue my MFA. On my way out I handed the job to a kind and polite upstart who walked in off the street asking how to get into the Toronto agency scene. That man was Sean Claessen, who built Youthography into one of the fastest growing creative agencies in the country.
When I graduated from my MFA 3 years later he introduced me to a childhood friend Casey McKinnon who had just returned from Seattle to become the first product director at a startup called FreshBooks. He asked me if I could help as an Art Director to unify their product and marketing experiences. Again, I had no experience, but of course I said YES!
This time I stuck with it and 11 years and loads of HARD and DANGEROUS lessons later I left FreshBooks to join Clearco as a Design Director at Canada's fastest growing e-commerce lender. My tenure was cut short by layoffs amidst interest rate hikes, but I was grateful to learn yet again that Directing is HARD and DANGEROUS! So I joined Thinkific to try again, this time with a fancier VP title.
HARD and DANGEROUS. These are not safe words, and yet I find myself running back into the fire again and again. Why? I've come to believe it's because the HARD and DANGEROUS things are what make life worthwhile. A leap of faith into the unknown, a job never done, a team never led, a problem never solved, an experience never built is HARD and DANGEROUS – but the rewards can be sublime.
At Thinkific we're doing something HARD and DANGEROUS – combining business and education. We truly believe this will create an unstoppable force for positive change – unfortunately, as of today, despite the claims of our competitors, the majority of creators fail to make a living in pursuit of this shared objective.
Improving creator educator outcomes will require some HARD and DANGEROUS leaps in experience. That's why we're hiring an Experience Design Director to join us at Thinkific. You might know what to do but you probably don't. You just need to be willing take a leap – into the unknown, into something HARD and DANGEROUS – you'll figure it out.
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