I came to product through The Spaguetti Path.

Multiple disciplines that turned out to be one.

I came up as both an engineer and a designer. The engineering side runs through industrial, process, and mechanical engineering, and through front-end development. The design side comes inherently and from a BFA in web design and interactive media.

My résumé looks like I lost a bet. Constantly deciding I'd like to be bad at something new for a while. This has worked out better than it sounds, iot's called learning!

Design and engineering are usually treated as opposites. One is supposed to care how a thing feels. The other how it works. I never treated them as a choice between two careers. Both have run through my work ever since and influence my connective thinking every day. Design, to me, has almost nothing to do with taste. It's the discipline of deciding what a thing is before you decide what it looks like. Most bad design isn't ugly. It's undecided, doubtful. Somebody skipped the part where you say out loud what this is for, who it's for, and what it refuses to do, and then they picked a style to cover the silence. The part I love is the deciding. The color is the easy part, and everyone wants to start there, and that is why we are all so tired. Engineering gave me four different ways to see the same thing. Industrial engineering taught me that the bottleneck is never where people say it is. Process engineering taught me that every output has a set of conditions that produced it, so if you don't like the output, arguing with it is a waste of a perfectly good afternoon. Mechanical engineering taught me tolerance: nothing is exact, everything has slop in it, and the good designs stay standing anyway. Front-end development taught me the fastest lesson of the four, which is that you are wrong and the browser will tell you in roughly four seconds, without softening it, in front of everyone.

My path moved from there into data, and later into leading. Data didn't feel like a departure. It felt like finally getting the instrument I'd been missing. I'd spent years building things with no real way to know whether any of it worked, which meant opinions filled the gap, and the loudest opinion won. I have never enjoyed losing an argument to volume. Measurement is just the engineering habit pointed at a product instead of a machine: define the thing, define what "working" means, then go find out. Same discipline. Better tools. Fewer meetings that end in a shrug. Leading turned out to be the strangest of the four, because almost none of it is doing. It's saying the unglamorous sentence in the room where everyone would rather move on. The rest of the job is absorbing ambiguity so the people around you get to do focused work instead of guessing, and nobody claps for that part either.

From the outside, my path looked like spaghetti, and was incredibly misunderstood as being lost. Design, engineering, data, product, all "running" in different directions with no clean line through them. But the strands were not random. They were bending toward the same point. The point is definition. All four disciplines are the same practice wearing different clothes: refusing to move until you know what the thing actually is. Design defines what it's for. Engineering defines what it can survive. Data defines what counts as working. Leadership defines who gets to say. Every expensive failure I've watched, in every one of those rooms, traces back to the same skipped step. Somebody built before they defined. Every strand was bending toward the same point. So I no longer explain the zigzag. It was never four careers with a person stuck between them. It was one practice that took four disciplines to learn. Which means the next thing probably won't look like a straight line either, and at this point I'd be suspicious if it did.