The journey
I’m Joanne. I’m an explorer, storyteller, and tinkerer.
NXTLVL is the studio I created to give myself room to explore ideas, build useful things, and share what I learn along the way. This page is the honest version of how I got here — less a résumé, more a navigation chart with the detours left in.
Explorer
Curious rather than certain
I like the edge of the map — unfamiliar fields, questions without settled answers, ideas that only make sense once you've connected them across disciplines. I learn through direct experience: enter the territory, get a little lost, draw the map afterwards.
Storyteller
Ideas that people can feel
Complex things stay unused until someone makes them understandable. Storytelling is how I make sense of what I'm building and how I share it — documenting the process honestly, lessons included, so the work carries meaning and not just features.
Tinkerer
Learning by making
I trust prototypes more than plans. Sketch it, build the smallest real version, put it in front of someone, and let the thing itself tell you what it wants to become. Iteration is not a phase of the work; it is the work.
The journey so far
Waypoints, not a straight line
Innovation
It started at university, where I caught the bug for social innovation and entrepreneurship — leading a social enterprise club and being a teaching assistant for a design thinking module. My first taste of building things meant to help people.
Meeting Jane, my design thinking hero, whose business taught me that building starts with listening and identifying the right problem. Learning
Mentoring students, I saw how sharing what I knew could shape the way they thought and acted. That was the spark: I wanted to do it on purpose, and set off toward a career in learning and development.
Buffalo, New York, 2011 — the SAGE World Cup. My first taste of building things meant to help people, and of how far a small team can travel. Knowledge & strategy
In L&D I kept meeting the same truth — people perform when reliable, up-to-date knowledge is there in the moment they need it. Making that knowledge consistent and accessible pulled me upstream: from delivering content to shaping the systems and strategy behind it — how information should flow, and how it ties back to what the organisation is really trying to do.
2019–2020 — 188 pages and 58-plus videos, a JAPAC resource that quietly went global. 7,057 views and 900+ watchers by the time I left; five years on, it’s still where the answers live. Product management
Company hackathons (and a few awards), plus mentoring team after team, made something obvious: I love experimenting and building. So I enrolled in a product management course and started learning to ship on purpose.
AInstein, 2025 — the hackathon where I stopped watching people build and became one of them. AI, hands on
When AI made building accessible to non-engineers, I didn't want to watch from the sidelines. I started tinkering — small tools first, then products with real users in mind.
AI LearnFest, 2026 — from tinkering alone to helping colleagues get unstuck. Teaching is still how I learn. NXTLVL & Sparkline
In 2026 I incorporated NXTLVL as a home for this practice. Sparkline, an AI-powered focus companion, is the studio's first full expedition.
Why NXTLVL exists
A permission structure for the long way around
Most builders need somewhere their experiments can live without each one having to justify itself as the next big company. NXTLVL is that place for me. It creates room to build carefully, learn in public, gather feedback from real people, and develop skills that compound — product, design, engineering, writing.
Some experiments will become products. Some will become essays. Some will just become lessons. The studio treats all three as legitimate outcomes, which is precisely what makes honest work possible.
Operating principles
Signposts along the way
- 01Build thoughtfully
- 02Stay curious
- 03Share generously
- 04Be useful
- 05Learn through making
- 06Prefer substance over hype
- 07Design for people, not metrics alone
- 08Rest is part of the work
What comes next
More building, more writing, more questions. Sparkline is the current expedition; the sea of learning doesn’t end, and I intend to keep sailing. If any of this resonates, the logbook is where the journey continues — and I’d genuinely love to hear from you.