Fall in love with the problem. Ship the solution.

I started as a developer — the kind who adopted Docker before most teams knew what it was, and spent six months after hours proving it mattered. From there I moved into engineering and product execution roles, and have spent the last four years focused on platform product strategy at enterprise scale.

That path matters. I can sit in an architecture review and follow the thread. I can sit in a leadership meeting and translate it back. I've built a career doing both. The progression is the point: from writing the code, to running the infrastructure, to owning the strategy.

Platform work is the stuff that has to work before any product built on top of it can work. At SAS, I've owned that strategy at two different scales. First, the microservices underpinning thousands of products across the existing catalog. Now, the SaaS control plane for SAS's move to SaaS — five new commercial products, with more in the pipeline. Along the way I've deprecated a fulfillment API serving 1,500 external customers with zero complaints. That doesn't happen by accident.

Before that, I spent three years at Cisco taking an internal container platform from inception to scale, then seeing it through end of life.

Most people in this field never see all three at the same company.