For this installment of our People of Atypon series, we sat down with Doreen Hall, Senior Director of Program and Client Management.
Fast facts: Doreen joined Atypon 9 years ago and works remotely from Long Island, out of the Hoboken, NJ, office. She’s a fan of coffee, American football, kayaking, and anything chocolate (“if it’s not chocolate, it’s not dessert!”) and she makes a mean homemade pizza.
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Doreen Hall is a cultivator of both plants and people. Away from work, she’s an avid gardener, spending the winter scoping out new landscape design projects and the growing season carrying out those plans—and growing vegetables on her plot at a local organic farm. At work, she leads the Program Management team, where she fosters the skills and attitudes program managers need to deliver great service to Atypon’s customers.
How do you grow great program managers?
A program manager’s job is to help customers and engineers understand each other—approaching each customer–Atypon relationship as a partnership, and fully investing in every customer’s success. Their work is all about relationships: keeping in touch with customers through online meetings, in-person visits, and impromptu calls; keeping track of what customers need and making sure our engineering team delivers it; and offering consulting and guidance in both directions. They also handle customer invoicing and report on their accounts to leadership. How are customers feeling? What problems can we help them solve? What does the big picture look like?
Like a lot of publishing people, Doreen got into the industry by chance—although looking back, she can see how the threads of her interests started to come together in her switch from a premed program to a double major in chemistry and marketing at university. That combination of technical and people skills is key to the program manager role. Now, as the leader of Atypon’s program management team, she focuses on growing good program managers so they can focus on their customers’ success.
“When people enjoy their work and feel appreciated, that’s when they work to their fullest potential.”
“Being a program manager requires good judgment,” Doreen says, “and the most challenging part of leading the team is that good judgment can be hard to define, explain, and teach.” She encourages her team to learn by doing, and enjoys guiding them through the growth of learning that skill, as well as developing into good leaders. Since Atypon’s program managers don’t have traditional direct reports, you might not think of leadership as a core competency—but to best serve our customers, they need to build morale and cohesion among the multidisciplinary teams of engineers, project managers, account managers, solution architects, and quality assurance staff they lead.
Learning is everywhere you look
Doreen says she takes care to foster a fun, appreciative working environment, and encourages her program managers to do the same. “When people enjoy their work and feel appreciated,” she says, “that’s when they work to their fullest potential.”
Throughout her career, she’s made a point of appreciating and building relationships with colleagues at all levels. With colleagues and customers all over the world, Atypon offers big opportunities to learn and grow. “Everyone is so smart,” Doreen says. “I’m always learning something new and gaining new perspectives.”
“When we satisfy our customers, it’s an achievement, because they have high expectations.”
She’s most proud of the role she and her team have played in making Atypon the #1 platform provider in scholarly publishing. “When we satisfy our customers,” she says, “it’s an achievement, because they have high expectations.” The journey continues with Atypon’s integration into Wiley Partner Solutions, which Doreen expects to open up exciting new opportunities for Atypon—and for our customers, too!
Reading between the lines
When she’s not in work mode, Doreen still has a lot on her plate—sometimes literally. She loves to cook, and her house is the place to be for Thanksgiving: she introduces new dishes every year and goes all out on the planning, cooking, and decorating.
She also reads a lot, especially in the winter when there’s no gardening to do. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a perennial favorite, as are the Narnia books, which she enjoyed as a kid and enjoyed all over again when she read them aloud to her two sons. Recently she read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot), which she describes as “an amazing story on so many levels—medical ethics, race, education, and how it all played into a compelling true story of groundbreaking discovery.”
The beach is Doreen’s happy place in all seasons of the year. Otherwise, though, she says there are too many new places to see to ever repeat a travel destination! She’s never been disappointed by a National Park, and hopes to visit them all one day. She and her family love to kayak, and each year they try to plan one hiking trip and one sightseeing trip, then settle down for the summer to enjoy the season around home with their two dogs, Callie (an 8-year-old Husky Lab mix) and Lucy (a 3-year-old Border Collie).
While making Atypon customers happy is an invaluable superpower, there’s also something to be said for teleporting! “There are so many places I’d like to explore,” Doreen says, “and not enough time to do it.” Teleporting would also allow her to pop over to Australia whenever she wants to give her son a hug.
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Thank you, Doreen, for sharing your insights with us!
Meet more People of Atypon!
Dina Abulfailat (Product Manager, Digital Objects) § Polivios Roussis (Program Manager) § Rob Posadas (VP, Solution Architecture) § Dino Paravandis (VP of User Experience) § Hannah Smith (Director of Account Management and Development)