My career has been a continuous search for the real problem. It began in sociology, with a desire to understand the hidden systems that shape our world. I was fascinated by theory, but I felt a strong pull toward the messy, unpredictable reality of building things. My early experiences in a scrappy marketing agency and a bureaucratic bank were the perfect introduction to real-world chaos, teaching me that the most elegant theories fall apart when they meet human nature and organizational complexity.

At PhiAcademy, I encountered a challenge that would define my path. The task was to scale an expert's knowledge, which at the time existed as a simple playlist of videos. The obvious solution was to produce more videos. But the real problem wasn't a lack of content; it was the lack of a scalable system for learning. This shifted my perspective entirely. I dove into the mechanics of knowledge transfer, user engagement, and platform design. It became clear that my role wasn't to be another expert, but to help build the platform that allowed expertise to scale. It was my first taste of platform thinking: don't just build a single product, build the system that can produce endless variations of it.

Nothing grounds you in reality like starting your own company. As a founder, you are the entire system. One day you're negotiating with a manufacturer in Germany; the next, you're on live chat with an unhappy customer because the Shopify theme you customized has a bug. The market gives you direct, unfiltered, and often brutal feedback on a daily basis. It doesn't care about your brilliant strategy; it only cares if you solve a real, painful problem. That experience was invaluable, but it also taught me what I didn't want. I was a one-man show, and I realized my passion was in the chaotic, creative phase of building something new from nothing.

This path led me to Inspira Group. My journey here began with one of our most ambitious projects: a grant-funded recommender system. It was a complex initiative that stretched our existing capabilities and highlighted a deeper, strategic challenge affecting the entire organization: our data infrastructure and processes weren't ready for the next generation of AI-powered products. This became a pivotal moment. The conversations with our technology leadership shifted. Instead of just focusing on how to deliver one complex product, we started asking a bigger question: 'What if we built the foundational platform that could power the next ten?' This was the shift from a product challenge to a platform opportunity. That pivotal question—'What if we built the platform to power the next ten products?'—became our new mission. I partnered with our most senior data engineers, and together, we architected the business case for 'Delta,' our new, real-time big data platform. My specific role was to drive the strategic process forward: I led the comprehensive due diligence and vendor selection, authoring the final analysis that armed our C-suite with the clarity needed to make the final call. With their green light, we built the platform that now serves as the backbone for our data-driven ambitions.

My career has taught me one core principle: you cannot build world-class external products without first building world-class internal capabilities. My work lives at the intersection of these two worlds. On the product-facing side, our business PMs are focused on defining the user problems and the 'why' behind each initiative. My role is to partner with them as the AI and technical product specialist. I help them translate their vision into a feasible technical strategy, define and test hypotheses for complex AI features, and guide the team on the 'how'—the best way to build, validate, and ship these intelligent products effectively. On the platform-facing side, we work to build the foundational systems that make that innovation possible. My role here is to act as the catalyst. This means identifying systemic bottlenecks and architecting the business cases for the foundational platforms and process frameworks that increase our entire organization's capability. Ultimately, I see my role as an architect of this system of empowerment. To be effective, I remain deeply hands-on, whether it's building a quick prototype to prove a concept or diving into the data to find the root of a problem. At the same time, I am a perpetual student of the rapidly evolving AI landscape, constantly looking for new technologies and opportunities that can give our teams a competitive edge. It's this blend of high-level strategy and in-the-trenches execution that allows me to help our teams ensure the strength of our internal platforms translates directly into the quality and success of our external products.