Great Expectations now has our first-ever community product manager: Mollie Pettit!
As senior community product manager, Mollie will be working to foster GX’s community spaces long-term, which means building a community management strategy from the ground up. She’s excited to tackle the challenge of creating the structures that will best serve the needs of the community and the company alike.
“There’s a wonderful community of folks using GX,” she said. “And there’s a ton of potential here to grow the community spaces into something even better! I’m particularly excited to work on a feedback cycle process between GX and the community. I really enjoy building things up from scratch and figuring out how to tackle needs.”
Mollie has a long-standing passion for building communities. After cofounding the Data Visualization Society, she was also its event director for two years. During this time, she created and planned the first two editions of the global Outlier conference.
On top of that community-building background, Mollie has extensive experience on the technical side of the data world. She was a data scientist at Datascope Analytics and has worked as a data visualization engineer at Netflix, Observable, and on a freelance basis.
At Observable, Mollie discovered the field of developer relations (devrel), and knew that was the direction she wanted to take her career. After stints in devrel at Observable and Elementl, she struck out as a consultant in developer relations and community.
GX hired Mollie to consult in March 2023—so while she just joined full-time, she’s been engaging with the GX community for several months. And though she enjoyed the flexibility and freedom of consulting, one of the main things that convinced her to join GX as an employee was the people.
“I was initially pretty set on remaining a consultant, and even turned down GX’s first [full-time role] offer,” she said. “The thing that convinced me to leave consulting for a full-time role was the people! I had a wonderful time working with Josh [Zheng, GX’s head of developer relations], the devrel team, and other people at the company. The thought of working with these folks every day is what made me excited to join the team.”
Mollie is currently based in San Francisco, where she changes her computer settings between dark mode and light mode to suit current conditions. This is her third stint in the Bay Area: she’s also spent time in Chicago, Abu Dhabi (UAE), Palo Alto, and Cupertino, after living in four different states while growing up.
When not working, Mollie enjoys partner dancing, especially fusion, blues, and swing dancing. She bikes as her main form of transportation, and took it to the next level last week by completing RAGBRAI, a 500-mile weeklong bike trek across Iowa.
Recently, Mollie has been listening to the podcasts You’re Wrong About and Maintenance Phase. She’s also extremely committed to the philosophy of effective altruism, and is always thinking about ways she can act to help reduce suffering in the world.
You can reach Mollie on the GX Slack @Mollie Pettit and on Discourse as @mollzmp.
