Most people who build products learned about users in a research lab. I learned about them in a resettlement office, a security operations center, and a sales demo call where a customer said something nobody on the product team had thought to ask.

I've spent my career at the intersection of systems and the people those systems were never quite built for. At AWS, I worked inside infrastructure that served millions, and spent most of my time thinking about the engineers who had to use it every day. The friction nobody had filed a ticket for. The workflows that worked on paper and failed at 2am. At Overlap AI, I build tools that go from problem to working prototype in days, automating the manual work that slows teams down, because the distance between "someone needs this" and "this exists" should never be as long as it usually is.

I came to UX and product the long way. Security engineering taught me how systems fail. UX research taught me how people absorb that failure quietly, adapt around it, and stop expecting better. Product management taught me that the most important skill isn't prioritization or roadmapping or stakeholder alignment. It's knowing which problems are worth solving in the first place.

I'm a first-generation graduate. I grew up without a map for most of the systems I eventually learned to navigate. That background doesn't make me a better designer in theory. It means I know what it feels like to be the user nobody designed for. I know where the invisible barriers live because I've stood in front of them.

What I build tends to be quieter than it looks. Less about the feature, more about the moment a user stops having to think about the tool and starts being able to think about their work.

That's the job.