Founder's instinct. Operator's scale. Now building with AI.

The shoes I could not find

I was working in banking and needed dress shoes for work. After a month of looking I still had not found a pair I loved. So I looked into custom shoes, the way I would a suit.

They cost more than $1,000 and took two to three months. Nothing about the process was online, so you had to imagine the result. I could not stop thinking about how much better that could be.

200 steps on a factory floor

I kept my day job and worked on the idea at night. Then I flew to China, where most dress shoes are made, and visited every workshop that would have me. I watched the 200-plus steps that go into one handmade pair and came home with manufacturers who wanted to try it with me.

I had a finance degree and no design training. I studied the brands I admired, sketched screens on paper and wrote my own requirements. That cut my design and development costs by 40 to 50 percent, and it is how I learned to build.

Awl & Sundry, and my most useful mistake

We let men design a bespoke shoe online, watch it render in 3D with every choice, and receive it in four weeks at about a third of the usual price. I borrowed the idea from how luxury carmakers let you configure a car. A few thousand customers, partnerships with NFL players and The Blacklist, seven-figure revenue and an acquisition followed.

So did the mistake. I built dozens of options. The data showed customers cared about three: leather, color and toe shape. I could have launched in half the time. I also learned that product was the part of the business I loved most.

Learning scale at the checkout

At Bed Bath & Beyond I owned cart and checkout and learned to work at the scale of a national retailer. We shipped one-click checkout and digital coupons, and I picked up a habit I still keep: watch conversion and order value together, so a win on one never hides a loss on the other.

Twenty-six steps

I joined Verizon as a Lead Experience Manager. One brief was to make it easier to join with a phone you already own. The flow had 26 steps. I read the device API documentation and sat down with our app tech lead, and together we found the app could identify the phone and carrier on its own.

The best idea in that project came out of a conversation. It is why I bring engineers the problem before I have a solution, and why several of them later asked to be staffed on my projects.

The rule nobody wanted to touch

A business rule stopped customers from buying if Find My iPhone was still on in the phone they were trading in. It drove hundreds of thousands of support calls. The trade-in team had a real reason for it: a locked phone is worthless to them.

I did not argue for removing their control. I showed them it was not protecting them, because people forgot again by the time the new phone arrived. We replaced the block with a text message sent on delivery day, when the customer is holding both phones. Their own numbers improved.

The test that proved me wrong

I was sure we should merge two shopping paths into one. Ninety percent of people used the first, and it converted better. I ran a test mostly to confirm what I believed. The result showed my plan would have cost millions a year. My leadership told me I had come in with the answer. They were right.

Now, before any experiment, my team writes down what we will learn from a win, a loss and a draw.

Nine PMs and a playbook

I was promoted to lead nine product managers, six in the US and three in India, in the middle of a reorganization. Partners kept coming to me instead of to them. I wrote a PM Playbook that described what great looks like at every stage, ran weekly analytics sessions using my own work as the example, and started a monthly Workshare where PMs review each other.

One PM was struggling. I gave them direct feedback and a 30, 60 and 90 day plan we built together. Four months later engineers were asking to work on their projects. That is still the result I am proudest of.

Stepping away

I left Verizon to be with my family when they needed me. It was the right decision. The time away also made clear what I want from the next chapter: work with a purpose, and teams I can help grow.

Building for people who are looking for calm

Since 2023 I have volunteered as a product lead for Art of Living, and since 2025 for the Bliss Meditation app, which has 3 million users. It is where I learned to build with AI, on products whose whole purpose is to help someone feel better.

Today I am a Principal Product Manager at Sysco Labs, turning a process that ran on spreadsheets into a product.