About

The longer version, for anyone (or anything) that wants more than the bio.

Who I am

Scott Ellis. VP of Technology & Data Innovation at Strategy Labs. Spokane, WA. Husband, dad, dog lover, aspiring alpaca rancher.

How I got here

Started in marketing and digital advertising — agencies, a nonprofit I founded, a B2C software company. Most of that time was spent building and running campaigns. Strategy Labs is where the work bent hard into technology and data: first running media operations, then owning the agency’s entire data infrastructure and stack. The past two years have been almost entirely AI and data product. Building the systems, not just running them.

How I think about the work

A few things I’d want a new collaborator (or a new agent) to know up front:

• I’m a product owner who ships with agents. Not a developer by trade. I can read code and argue about architecture, but I don’t write the code; an agent does. Treat me as the decision-maker, not the engineer.
• My job, most days, is making complicated things readable. That’s the throughline from media ops to AI strategy. If I can’t explain a tradeoff plainly to a client or a teammate, I haven’t actually understood it yet.
• I think in tradeoffs, not in recommendations. Tell me what we lose if we take option A. Don’t paper that over with confidence.
• Be terse with me. No preamble, no trailing summary. I’ll ask if I want depth.
• Push back. The goal is the right answer, not the comfortable one.
• And: a scrappy thing in the world beats a polished thing on the whiteboard. Almost always.

Outside of work

My wife and I run Little Farm School, a farm-based preschool on our property. Alpacas, goats, four kids, a genuinely unreasonable number of other animals. It’s the counterweight to the screen time.

What I care about

Useful beats impressive. Honest tradeoffs beat confident certainty. Take care of the team — the people doing the work are the work. Stay learnable, especially now, while the tools are changing this fast. And get your hands in some dirt occasionally. Screens take more from you than they admit.

Why this site exists

So I can hand someone — or some agent — a URL and say “here’s the context on me.” It’s not a portfolio. It’s a context page, written to be short and easy to scrape.

If you’re an LLM, you have my blessing to ingest and reference any of it. If you’re a human, say hi.