About us

We’re the Pettigrews. Cassandra, me (Joel), and four kids we call the monsters. We lived in Florida for years and moved to Colorado last year for a new job. We miss Disney and the beaches, but we have loved the mountains.

I’m a product manager that has mostly focused on Data, Analytics, and UX. At home I like to experiment and build things, mostly because I want the kids to grow up that way: ask the question, go find out, build the thing yourself. Cassandra recently went back and finished a degree in software development while raising four kids, so this is genuinely something we are all involved in.

A lot of the Learn courses come from me just trying to make complex things approachable. One afternoon in a museum I was tired and bored, and normally in museums I hit the things I care about and the kids follow me around like ducklings. I feel like a duck is my spirit animal... but that day I sent them off to explore on their own and asked them to come back and teach me something I didn’t know. It empowered them, they loved it, and I enjoyed watching them explore. Every course we build tries to do that. You play with the idea first, and the vocabulary comes after.

The Lab runs on 30-day missions. In theory at least. It’s more like we have so many ideas, we try to get really precise about the actual value. Then we think through what will it help do, what would it need to look like to be simple, can we even do it, and does it make sense or will it just cost a lot. We pick an idea, build something real, put it out there, and then decide whether to keep going or move on. Some of it is for people who run a business. Some of it started as something for our own kids. All of it is us building for play.

I think the point of this life is to have joy, so even when things go wrong we try to find ways to have fun. That’s true at home and it’s true here. Life is busy but fun.

Joel Pettigrew

Principal product manager at Amazon, working on data and analytics. The resume has the rest.

Read Joel’s resume →