I can do anything. I can do more than I thought.

2004-2007

No, not the firehose analogy. Anything but that.

NOTHING TO DO BUT TO DO.

Sony was like no new job I’d ever had.

We walked into SonyStyle thinking we were there to contribute to an e-commerce project. There were no clear swim lanes. No neatly defined roles. Russ stepped in.

Kyle Laughlin
SVP, Walt Disney Imagineering

Stretch yourself. go beyond the narrow lines of your job.

What can you do in a week?

So one of the the projects I stepped in on - leveraging but also stretching my skills - was to create an online marketing campaign for the latest Sony Walkman debut (2005).

I helped brainstorm the theme, write the content, and assisted with art direction.

With Kyle’s direction, we came up with a marketing campaign in a week, putting all our chips on the one advantage we had over Apple — battery life. Sales were slim compared to Apple, but we actually went well above the forecast.

Continuing with the theme of stretching ourselves…

When we came onboard, customers had to sign in or create an account to check out. We collectively pushed for a guest checkout… that resulted in a 25% bump in customers moving to the next conversion step.

**Andrew Guerrero**
VP, Product at Blizzard Entertainment

so much to do, so much to learn.

The Walkman marketing campaign was certainly a shiny moment at SonyStyle, but as we all know - a good chunk of work is less glamorous, but no less valuable. As a small team, with broad responsibilities, we handled it all in the beginning.

But I didn’t walk in with all these skills. I got help.

Taking over SonyStyle.com was a crash course in collaboration. We were handed a major digital property with minimal client direction and an urgent need for improvement. Individually, we were specialists; together, we became a fully functional digital team capable of reimagining a complex e‑commerce experience from the inside out.

**Michael Bennett**
Sr. Director of Creative, iHeartMedia

Seek out experts. learn from them, don’t lean on them.

Specialization is the path to quality, but rarely are the demands of a job narrowed to your best talent. The key is to get help on your gaps. Michael Bennett had experience with online catalog management, and superior HTML skills.

I wrote copy. I sliced and diced images. I hand coded promotional pages. I entered hundreds of products into the product management system (Intershop Enfinity).

Not only did I build out hundreds of products for the online catalog, I also established a consistent voice and tone across the site. Created promotions. Guided visual design. Even some front end coding.

Art, science, and the unknown

We were able to explore new themes and styles, while doing our best to adhere to the global brand.

At Sony, we were defining what e-commerce could look like. It was 2005, and we had to take a high-end brand and translate it into a compelling web experience that was as much about the look and impact as the function. You had to understand what motivated the customer and deliver work that felt as premium as the products.

**AJ Fitzpatrick**
Sr. Design Manager, Snowflake

Get into the craft.

I was asked to help shape the SonyStyle marketing approach, which included providing some creative direction. I was a bridge - you could say - between product management and design.

I provided guidance on messaging and style. Brainstormed ideas on look and feel.

I learned a lot from the talented designers at Sony. Composition. Hierarchy. Brand adherence. With a site not well supported by the parent company, they were often figuring out workarounds and short cuts to make deadlines. I gained a lot of insights from their craft, but also their resolve.

I remember we had to feature a specific, new laptop on the site, but we hadn't received the official glamour shots for it.

So, we grabbed a somewhat beat-up loaner we somehow had in the office, and staged a shoot on the hood of a teammate’s white Jeep.

**Jesse Mellon**
Head of Creative Services, Quatum-Si

AI recreation of the white jeep photoshoot

Dear Hiring Managers and/or Recruiters,
Witness my Zen mastery of AI. Please form a respectable LinkedIn line.
- Russell Bauder

Productivity comes with a cost.

The Sony job, in many ways, was an assembly line. We had product releases, with a dozen new SKUs, and you just had to build them all out, however long it took. We didn’t think much about time spent on tasks, estimates, etc. That is, until Rebeccas Alvarez showed up.

When I joined the Sapient/Sony creative team in 2004, it was already a tight-knit, fun-loving crew, but their philosophy for getting things done was 'work hard, play hard.' It was my job to operationalize their creativity - to make it measurable, predictable, and efficient.

I worked with Russell to create our first design estimation tool from scratch. Operationalizing is easy on paper but hard in practice because it requires human buy-in.

**Rebecca Alvarez Fitzpatrick**
UX Operations Lead, Google

Open minds move forward.

I have realized that the skills I learned at Sony carried over to my next job at PayPal, where project estimations and tracking were at another level.

Lots of love.

There were so many awesome folks I worked with at Sony, and while I would have loved to include quotes and stories from them all, this section would have become an infinite scroll!