How I got here

Food + Beverage

How people behave when they're hungry, far from home, or finally somewhere beautiful.

My first job was at a theme park you have absolutely heard of. Four months in, I was a lead, one of the youngest in my location, running people three times my age, including the longest-tenured active cast member in the company's history. Not because of the title. Because I showed up with agency and warmth at the same time, and that combination is rarer than it should be. They called me "mini chief." I earned it.

The better part of a decade. Six restaurant locations. Every role front-of-house and a couple in the back. Busser, server, trainer, lead. I knew every menu item, every allergen, every system. I wrote SOPs that got adopted across the Food and Beverage department. I trained the trainers and leads. I moved between roles because I wanted to know how the whole thing fit together. I was a tiny, voracious, feral little monster, starving to learn and probably making a fool of myself doing it.

Alongside that, I worked at places that taught me something else entirely. A natural wine shop, pouring small-production local bottles for people who wanted the story behind the glass. A world-renowned aquarium, keeping critters fed and their habitats right. An afternoon tea house, where the whole point was slowness and ritual and making someone feel like a guest in the best sense of that word. Different registers, one discipline: read the person in front of you, give them exactly what the moment calls for.

What I changed. The park runs on standards. I didn't invent new ones. I made the existing ones feel human. The cast members on my shifts knew what was expected and why it mattered, which is a different kind of training than handing someone a manual.

What I learned. Excellence and warmth are not opposites. Most companies act like seriousness requires coldness. I watched executives in mouse ears run logistics that would humble most operations teams, and I've been chasing that combination ever since.

I learned people. The job was radically multicultural in both directions. I learned to serve halal meals, to read a table that didn't share my language, to talk with hearing-impaired colleagues (the sign for ordering beignets is genuinely delightful), to hold safety and show at once. I could spot a kosher family across the room and have a plan before I said hello. When I read it right, the meal opened with quiet confidence on both sides. When I read it wrong, I handled it with enough humility that it didn't cost anyone anything.

I worked some of the most important days of people's lives. Birthdays, anniversaries, first vacations, proposals, last vacations before something changed. Holidays. Infamous days, when people needed a few hours of ordinary joy and couldn't quite get there on their own. The work was never about food. It became a game in the best sense: how much joy could I create without anyone being able to point at exactly what I did.

I did all of it in a company-issued costume. High-waisted ankle-length skirt, stockings, slip-resistant granny shoes, an embroidered grandma-esque blouse with white applique trim, and a nametag that put my every move on the record. Themed vocabulary only. A dropped smile cost you. We weren't allowed to drink water in a place where a guest could see us. That is a genuinely strange amount of surveillance and choreography to hide behind ordinary friendliness, and it taught me to perform total ease while every input around me was being managed in real time. Useful. Also dystopian. Both true, no contradiction.

What it built. Radical attentiveness inside a rigid system. Everyone who sat at my table arrived emotional: hungry, overstimulated, far from home, with a family dynamic already hot, and I was the longest continuous human contact of their entire day. Holding structure while making it invisible is the skill I use most. Most of the working world forgot it exists.

Geospatial

Systems that route 911 calls, map power lines, and serve the people who depend on both.

I found geography in school, and it handed me a vocabulary for things I'd been circling my whole life. I earned a degree, a GIS certificate, and a remote sensing certificate, and went to work.

While I was still finishing, I worked in local government in two Southern California cities. Solid teams, real data, actual infrastructure. That's where I learned that the gap between a map and a decision is almost always a people problem wearing a data problem's clothes.

Before I was ever a product manager, I used GIS software in the most literal sense possible. For nearly a year, I worked as a utility forester. They handed me a brand-new Chevy Colorado with 19 miles on the odometer and a tablet mapping every power line and vegetation corridor in my territory. I'd wake up, get in, open the map, and drive parallel to power lines through suburban hellscapes and rural hills. Tumbleweeds, long stretches of nothing, the occasional backyard I had legal right to walk into unannounced.

The work was reading the landscape and making the call. An oak grazing the comm lines might hold for years, slow growers, patient things. Eucalyptus a foot above the same line needed attention soon. A vine actively burning on a power line needed a crew that day. I prescribed the trim. Contractors executed it. I plotted it back into the system and kept moving.

I bought a machete for that job.

One afternoon in the hills, visibility near zero from blowing sand, the dirt gave out under my truck on the approach to a dip, and I got stuck. No service. Nothing working. I GPS-called my lead to come tow me out, which was humbling and also exactly what the moment required. I had a machete, a tablet, and no business being out there. I went anyway.

Every assumption I later challenged as a product manager came from knowing what that software felt like alone on a dirt road in the heat with a decision to make and nobody coming.

What I changed. In the tech sector, I inherited a support platform that had sat collecting dust for years, most of its capability untouched. I built on what was there and kept building until there was nothing left to build. When the vendor finally sat down with us to explore getting more out of the tool, I demoed how I was leveraging their product, and they went quiet. We were past anything they'd seen a client do with it. They came to teach. They left taking notes.

Support to product specialist to product owner to product manager. Four titles inside an organization that restructured like it was a hobby. I ran the support team. I wrote the specs. I ran high-stakes demos for multimillion-dollar contracts with state agencies and public safety jurisdictions across the country. The customer base was as wide as it gets: GIS engineers who wanted to talk data schema at nine in the morning, rural county clerks who needed to trust me before they could trust the software, dispatchers with zero patience for anything that didn't work, state stakeholders who needed a deck and a handshake. I read the room before I opened my mouth, the same way I read a table. Then I did the work.

I took ideas and turned them into a vision. That work shaped the roadmap for the final years of the product under my ownership, and the product was better for it.

What I learned. Here's how I actually think, and it took me too long to name it: not in a line. I see the whole system at once, the way you see a flock turn, not bird by bird but as one, shape-shifting. The answer arrives assembled, before I have words for any single piece of it. Then I build the staircase down to it so someone else can climb.

For years I thought the leaps were the problem. They weren't. The problem was that I hadn't built the staircase yet, so what I was doing felt like intuition and vibes rather than method. Now I build it first.

Being right and being heard are different skills. I'm good at both now and constantly sharpening those skills.

I also learned what a rigid, corporate-shaped life does to a body over enough years. I forgot I was creative. I forgot I liked making things. I got very good at surviving a structure that was never built for the person living inside it. That's a transferable skill and a form of erosion at the same time. I caught it. I rebuilt.

What it built. A clear picture of the distance between the people who build systems and the people who depend on them. I saw it in the field with no service. In demos with dispatchers whose county's safety rode on trusting a stranger's software. In brainstorm rooms where the right answer got waved off because it arrived early, from the wrong chair. Every broken system has the same wound at its center: the people who built it stopped seeing the people living inside it. Everything I do now points at closing that distance.