I started out pointed at the most concrete career I could find: marine engineering. Ships, engines, systems built to keep working in conditions that would prefer they didn't. It taught me how complex systems actually fail — rarely all at once, usually quietly, at the seam between two parts that each assumed the other was handling it.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that the systems I kept being drawn to weren't mechanical. The interesting failures, and the interesting successes, were about people — what they wanted, what they told themselves they wanted, and the gap between the two. So I turned the same engineering question on a much messier object and went to study psychology.

That became a PhD in social psychology, on how people pursue goals — which is a polite way of saying I spent years studying motivation while being only intermittently motivated to finish a dissertation about it. The irony was not lost on me. It was, in fact, extremely useful data.

For the last eight years I've been in product, running the same inquiry with a commercial budget: figure out what people are really trying to do, then build the shortest honest path to it. Today I lead the Product function at Dataro. The job is mostly the original question wearing a roadmap.

These days I run the experiment from San Francisco, where the sample of one continues to misbehave on schedule. The rest of the findings are filed under understanding people and understanding myself — the same curiosity, pointed two ways.