Jen Consalvo on her AOL Career

Jen Consalvo has a BA and MBA from AU and now is the Director of Personalization at AOL. (Enough acronyms for you?) She was kind enough to share a few minutes of her time with me to talk about her career and reflect on her time at American (SOC/BA/'94 and Kogod/MBA/'00). She even endured some pretty hefty audio technical difficulties, for which I cannot apologize enough, though the final product is fortunately quite easy to listen to.

(Click here to listen to the 12 minute interview.)

Consalvo's current job aims to “remove some of the noise” and “bubble up what is most important for people.” This is something that the online industry as a whole is spending more time on, and it starts with concrete steps like giving users explicit choices, but she says “I think we’ll start seeing it happen on a more passive level as well.” For instance, they can customize your experience based on your online behavior rather than requiring you to dial up or down different choices.

Consalvo notes that privacy “has to be a concern,” but she doesn’t see it as an obstacle. She emphasizes transparency and conveying value to the user. “Just make it completely obvious,” she advises. If users don’t see the relevance then they won’t think it is worth it.

During her 12 years at AOL, Consalvo has experienced a lot of changes and saw AOL grow from a smaller company where she would sometimes bump into Steve Case at lunch. As it became part of the Time Warner empire, she has gotten to experience a lot of new things, including now making more regular trips to Silicon Valley to work with startups.

In the beginning, the focus was on chat and Consalvo worked on community aspects of the site. Over the years, she has worked in a variety of different positions, including focusing on digital imaging, search, AOL.com, RSS, and more.

Along the way, she managed to earn her MBA from American while still working at AOL. “I felt like I needed more of a background in business,” she told me. AOL had a program to pay for secondary education, and she took advantage of it. It meant a lot of work, many nights and weekends, and a few extra years to get the MBA, but she feels it was worth it. She felt like she could unify her MBA work at AU with her day job at AOL, and it added value to her experience.

The relationships she developed at AU played an important role in her development, she says, noting that she has “so many friends from different countries.” She has traveled extensively based on these friendships, attending weddings and other events. She also credits the “broad liberal arts” exposure that she got at AU for learning about things like anthropology which “would never have been on my radar” yet it ended up being her minor.

One last summer class on multimedia where she had to build interactive projects sold her on the Internet (“I was obsessed,” she confesses). She ended up interviewing with a company in Georgetown that focused on the interactive media space (ironically hired by someone with an AU connection himself). After her time there, she moved to AOL which she has called home ever since.

(Click here to listen to the 12 minute interview.)

Photo by jough