Working at the MIT Media Lab showed me the power of engineering creativity. I had never heard of a CNC mill until I saw one carving visitors’ faces into blocks of chocolate in the lobby. I was transfixed to see how a physical technology can surprise, delight, and amuse. When it does all this while also solving a real-world problem: magic! 

For me, it all clicked in the field of product development, where I could bring solutions from idea to material fruition. I spent five years as a mechanical design engineer at Fikst Product Development, helping client companies and researchers transform their brainstorms into prototypes and then products. (And yes, I learned to use a CNC mill.) Some of my favorite projects included designing a portable microfluidic system for testing the quality of malaria pills; a novel water filtration system for use in pharmaceutical applications; and a benchtop device that could produce platelets outside the human body. I also developed a very precise golf-ball squisher. I hold three patents from my time at Fikst.

Over the years, as more of my projects became “smart” or “connected,” I came to appreciate the power of software and its evergreen development process: the ways we can better understand a product’s efficacy through data, and how we can continue to improve a product even after it’s in users’ hands. I learned to code and shifted more focus to software and software-enabled products. 

Since then, I have gone on to lead product management teams at companies large and small: at Google, developing new features to preserve user privacy via machine learning; at Kayak, heading up the monetization platform; and at Paperless Parts, as the first product hire, defining the roadmap through Series A. I’ve built an arsenal of different product management methodologies and I love crafting an approach that works best given the challenges, opportunities, and resources at hand.