At 3M I moved from traditional product marketing into a digital group at the very center of the company called the Center for Digital Marketing Excellence, or eHUB. The broader digital team was working on a number of projects but initally I was tasked with just one: figure out how to launch best-in-class mobile websites for every brand and division of the company--the first mobile websites at 3M--and convince the VPs, marketers, and ebusiness leaders within those divisions to support doing it.

At the time I had been building microsites and social media pages for customers independently, and in complete anonymity, but this project brought together a deeply talented and complex team and required a lot of intraprenurial salesmanship, patience, and tenacity to pull off. It also took four or five times longer than I expected, and seemed DOA at multiple points. Thanks to some savvy mentors and a lot of 1:1's, project cheerleading, and some timely champions, my team was able to get it done.

In the process of replicating our first success with 3M Defense, my small and scrappy team achieved a number of other important digital firsts: first mobile search, first heros and splash pages, the first full Endeca product catalog of over 30,000 categorized products, the very first ecommerce implementation and mobile where-to-buy across our thousands of retailers, the first app integrations and first HTML-5 promotion, and many others as you can see below.

Importantly, our mobile success with these sites was not only replicated internationally and across other areas of the company, but laid the groundwork for our team tackling the first responsive site at the company, 3M Automotive, later on.