Cover letter

I’ve spent ten years learning that almost every product problem is really a systems problem — and that the job is to find the system underneath an outcome and rebuild it. That instinct is the thread through everything I do: building a product from nothing, rescuing one that’s failing, designing for a question nobody has answered yet, or helping a whole organization work better.

My path here wasn’t a straight line. I started in technical support, spent four years teaching and training — in classrooms, bootcamps, and an online course taken by thousands — and only then came fully back to product. I used to think of the teaching years as a detour. They turned out to be the opposite. They’re why I can take something ambiguous and complex and make it clear and actionable for a team, and why I’m comfortable leading through influence rather than authority. Most of the work I’m proudest of, I didn’t have the org chart to command — I had to earn it.

Building is where I’m happiest. Helping take a payments platform from an idea to a licensed gateway serving tens of thousands of merchants is the kind of arc most people never get to live. The part I remember most isn’t a number, though — it’s standing at a kiosk during the COVID lockdown, masked, running the first live cash transactions myself because that flow simply couldn’t be tested from a laptop, with the whole team on a call watching the money move. That’s the ownership I bring to launches that matter. The same stretch taught me that constraints can be generative: leading a top-tier payment-security certification in-house, with no outside consultants, didn’t just satisfy an auditor — the discipline it forced made the entire engineering team faster.

I’m also drawn to messes. When I joined a car-rental product that was hemorrhaging customers, the easy read was “fix the bugs.” The real problem was that the systems producing the bugs — and the trust those failures had destroyed — were both broken, and you had to rebuild both at once. Doing that without managing the team directly is some of the work I’m proudest of. Later, standardizing how dozens of newly acquired companies worked taught me the most useful lesson of all: the best version of fixing something is making yourself unnecessary — turning what you do into templates and people who can run it without you.

And I like problems with no obvious answer. Designing a credit-scoring model for a market with almost no formal credit history meant scoring people we knew nothing about, safely, while we learned — a puzzle I found genuinely fun to solve. It’s also why the AI side of product pulls at me: I’m comfortable building for uncertainty and letting a system get smarter as the evidence arrives.

What I’m looking for is more of exactly this — product work with real stakes, teams worth earning the trust of, and problems where systems thinking and a teacher’s instinct for clarity actually matter. If that sounds like someone you’d want in the room, I’d love to talk.