Ian Hamilton

Collaborated with several of this startup’s most prominent clients to develop revisions to the roadmap: a wide variety of new data-science features to gather knowledge assets from across the internet and personalize them to the user; an enhanced UX optimized for mobile use and amenable to ready client-specific customization; admin functionality commensurate with the complex organizational relationships of large global companies; core registration and content assignment functionality; and interactive video features for users to record video of themselves and share asynchronously with a coach who can embed text and audio feedback at specific timestamps in the video.

Decker Communications is a B2B workshop training company for business communication and presentation skills. They hired me to create a high-end eLearning solution (courseware, video practice, LMS, eCommerce, subscription service) that mirrored their two-day workshop experience.

I did so, and in the process, I had the opportunity to interact with many Decker customers. Based on their input, I conceived a new online Decker product, this time an e-coaching product that would follow up with learners who had previously completed the workshop training or the e-learning.

I sold the idea as an experiment to the Decker executive team and worked with the head of sales to identify a 1st (pilot) customer for the new product. I served as a product manager, project manager, and account manager and used an external development team to build V1 of the product.

Learners record videos of themselves on their phone, tablet, or laptop, make a 1- to 3-minute presentation emphasizing key presentation skills, and send the video to a coach. The coach inserts text/audio feedback at specific timestamps in the video and returns it to the learner. This back-and-forth cycle occurs many times over a 1- to 3-month period of practice and reinforcement.

NASA engaged me to evaluate how to create an internal learning content system that would enable subject-matter experts across the organization to capture their expertise and have it transformed by an internal training team into online learning for others across NASA to learn from.

I acquired a 3rd-party CMS and built a new content/e-learning/video authoring system inside it to enable this process and allow rapid development of high-end learning, from articles to videos to interactive exercises to Q&A assessments to games to simulations. I also created a front-end learning experience platform (LXP) for NASA users to interact with the content and discover it in a personalized fashion via AI-based algorithms.

Note: Lockheed Martin soon hired me to conduct essentially the same engagement, creating a similar system for them.

Led a team of data scientists and engineers to bring the project, which had been in the talking stage for years and was dubbed Child Lifecycle Intelligence, to fruition, working closely with marketing and merchandising leadership and the technology team. The idea was to analyze user data to infer the sex, age, characteristics, lifestyle, and behaviors of each child being shopped for; build a profile of the parents, relatives, and family friends buying for each child; create an online community for each family’s buyers to foster collaborative shopping, and build and use a one-of-a-kind model of child development and growth from birth to age 14 to predict buying needs and preferences for each child and recommend to the shopper.