I can’t walk past something broken.

My first real job was running asset protection at a Target in Los Angeles that did about $65 million a year. Asset protection is a formal way of saying I was responsible for everything that went missing. We cut shrink 15% in a year. Then I moved to store operations as second in command to the store director, with more than 300 people on the team at peak and 20,000 payroll hours a month to answer for. For a stretch I was the interim store director, in one of LA’s highest-volume stores.

A store teaches you something that software people learn late. A process only exists if the person on the floor can run it.

In 2015 I joined Amazon to launch Prime Now’s fourth warehouse. There were 24 by the time I moved on, and I’d helped launch eight. Nobody had written the manual for a warehouse that delivers in an hour or two, so we wrote it as we went. I built delivery routes by hand until engineering turned the logic into a product.

Then I got into the data, and I never really got out. I owned inventory planning, first for the Southwest and then for hardlines nationwide, and I built the planning tool in SQL and Excel because the one I needed didn’t exist. I helped launch Amazon’s first four multi-temperature grocery hubs, and worked the assortment and inventory side of relaunching more than 45 urban fulfillment centers. Each one was a full flip: new shelving, new assortment, new website, new back end. Without the hubs, those sites wouldn’t have had the grocery and CPG assortment they needed.

I finished at Prime Wardrobe, the try-before-you-buy program. It had found its market, and now it had to make money. That’s the 1-to-2 stage. About two of every three items came back, and my job was to make that a business anyway.

Six years, four jobs. I learned that I like the seam between operations and product more than either side of it.

I started FullViz in late 2021. A few months later SAP hired me to build a retail store product line from scratch. There was no roadmap, so the first job was to write one. I led nine product managers across the US, Germany, and China, and went to Denmark, Germany, and Israel to sit with retailers and find out what they needed. I’d spent nearly a decade on the receiving end of enterprise software. Now I got to see how it’s made (it explained a lot).

The roadmap won a $10 million engineering investment. We launched Intelligent Returns, the first product the line shipped, and cut the share of engineering time going to technical debt from over 30% to under 10%. FullViz kept going alongside it.

After SAP I went in-house at two consumer brands. At Nuna Baby I worked from purchase order to sale across four brands and nine countries, and set up the first business review that put all of them on the same page with the same numbers.

At Gorjana I ran supply chain through a warehouse move and a holiday peak, with 123 stores to keep stocked. I owned the operations side of opening new stores (eight of them while I was there), and I automated the returns flow.

FullViz is where all of that lands. Small and growing retail and consumer brands hire me when the business has outgrown the way it runs. I work on the systems and the operations at the same time, because I’ve never seen one get fixed without the other.

Three times now, I’ve ended up owning what happens when the product comes back. At Prime Wardrobe it was return performance and cost. At SAP it was Intelligent Returns, as a product. At Gorjana it was the returns flow in the warehouse and the customer care behind it.

Every return has a sunk cost, and a company needs a way to manage it. Most also undervalue what a good return does for loyalty. The returns notes are here.

I’ll gladly use business as a reason to travel, and I like working with people around the world. Early in Prime Now I went to the UK to help turn a site around. At Prime Wardrobe we launched in France, Italy, and Spain. At SAP my team sat in Germany, China, and the US, and I met retailers in Denmark, Germany, and Israel. At Nuna the numbers came from nine countries.

Retail is a sum of its parts. Shoppers behave differently from one country to the next. The operational needs and the technical tenets underneath stay the same.

I’ve done improv for almost five years, short-form and long-form. I’m not any funnier than I was on Day 1. No stand-up (yet).

I write, mostly to make room for the part of me that isn’t a spreadsheet.

I log what I eat in MyFitnessPal and my behaviors and workouts in Whoop, and I’m aware of how that sounds.

If we get on a call, I’ll probably bring up something I’m growing or something I’m eating. Right now I’m growing every herb there is and feeding my romas to the tomato bugs. Somehow I have more jalapeños than I know what to do with. And my sourdough starter needs to get out and stretch soon.