For most of my career I was on the operations side — hotels, then vacation rentals — which means I spent years as the person internal tools were built for. Systems like MICROS, Oracle, and Lightspeed were part of my daily reality, and so were their frustrations: flat interfaces with no sense of urgency, disconnected platforms that forced you to juggle a dozen tabs and logins just to get your job done.

I have a BFA in Industrial Design, and looking back, I was always applying design thinking without realizing it — noticing friction, questioning why workflows were built the way they were, working around systems that weren't designed for the people using them. A UX bootcamp made the transition official, and platform and internal tools is where I'm deliberately headed.

What drives me is simple: I want to move from working within systems to helping shape how those systems work. After years on the ops side, I know what it costs people when the tools they depend on aren't built thoughtfully.