I didn't start as an operations consultant. I started as a teacher who couldn't stop asking why things worked the way they did — and whether they could work better.
I spent 14 years teaching World History at Newton North High School — one of Massachusetts's most academically demanding public high schools. But teaching was only part of the job.
Alongside the classroom, I was simultaneously managing the master schedule for 2,100+ students annually — a politically charged, technically complex process that involved 15+ department heads, 200+ courses, and zero margin for error. I built the first online course registration system for the school, replacing a three-week paper process with a self-service digital platform.
I evaluated and recommended SIS software across a 21-school district, developed 25+ training resources, and upskilled over 1,000 colleagues on tools they'd never used before. I was doing product management, program management, data analysis, and user research before those were my job titles.
"I kept building systems to make things work better — not because anyone asked me to, but because I couldn't look at a broken process without wanting to fix it."
I also led a cross-functional Collaborative Teaching Community for 12+ educators, ran professional development on technology integration and DEI, and designed 400+ self-paced learning experiences — some of them built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before I knew that was a skill worth having.
I was doing program management before that was my job title.
The thread that connects every role I've ever had
In 2023, I stepped out of the classroom for the first time in 14 years — and into an entirely different kind of work at The Possible Zone, a Boston nonprofit serving 1,000+ students annually in STEM workforce development.
The organization had the mission. It didn't have the systems. I came in as Senior Manager of Program Operations and immediately started treating it like a product problem: where's the data? Where are the bottlenecks? What's being done manually that doesn't need to be?
In 12 months, I drove 250% enrollment growth by rebuilding the intake and tracking process from the ground up. I served as de facto product manager for a custom SIS build — embedded with the development team as domain expert and user advocate, gathering input from frontline educators and translating it back to developers.
I designed an Asana ticketing system that cut reporting errors by 80% in 6 months and managed $500K+ in student stipend payments — including diagnosing that 80% of complaints were about communication, not the payments themselves, then building a multi-channel solution to fix it.
At TalkingPoints — a national edtech nonprofit serving 650+ school districts — I joined as Implementations Program Manager working with student data and partner relationships at a scale I hadn't operated before. The platform touched millions of family-school interactions across the country, and the operational infrastructure wasn't keeping up.
There was no implementation playbook. No consistent KPI framework. No unified view of what was happening across hundreds of district partners with vastly different contexts. I built all of it — but the more interesting story is how.
This is where I went deep on enterprise systems. I learned Salesforce, PlanHat, and Jira not as end users but as people who configure and connect them — mapping data flows, identifying where information was getting lost between systems, and building the Salesforce → PlanHat → Jira integration that finally gave the team a single source of truth for partner health and implementation status.
I also started using AI deliberately as a force multiplier. Not as a novelty — as infrastructure. I used it to draft automation logic, analyze partner data at scale, accelerate documentation, and build processes that one person could maintain but that produced the output of a whole team. The question I kept asking: what can I build now that I couldn't build before?
"AI didn't replace the judgment I built over 20 years. It made it possible to apply that judgment at 10× the scale."
I also served as Implementation Product Owner for the launch of a new Attendance Module — the first section-level attendance feature in the product's history. This meant working across sales, CS, support, and 100+ district partners simultaneously, managing the gap between what the product could do and what districts actually needed, and translating complex edge cases back to the engineering team. In everything but title, it was a product management role.
Tools & systems I worked in
The question I kept asking: what can I build now that I couldn't build before?
On learning to use AI as infrastructure, not just a tool
The problems I'd been solving for institutions for 20 years — the broken processes, the manual workarounds, the systems that only work because one person knows everything — don't just exist in schools and nonprofits. They show up in daycares, family restaurants, small businesses, solo operators. Anywhere people are doing meaningful work and spending too much time on admin.
I started Grounded Systems to fix that. The same approach I'd developed across 20 years and several organizations — diagnose the real problem, build the simplest thing that actually works, hand it off in a way that sticks — applied directly to smaller organizations that couldn't afford a full ops team but needed someone who thought like one.
The first proof of concept I built for myself: the Rhinebeck Community Connector. A production system that aggregates community events from 45+ local sources into one searchable calendar — built end-to-end using AI-assisted development, custom scrapers, an OpenAI enrichment pipeline, and a Supabase database. It runs every morning at 6 AM without me touching it.
That project crystallized everything. The tools I'd been learning — APIs, automations, AI workflows — weren't just useful for large organizations. They were exactly what let one person build systems that used to require a team. That's the core of what Grounded Systems offers: institutional-grade thinking, scaled to real organizations.
What I bring to every engagement
No six-month roadmaps before anything ships. I move fast, show you progress early, and make sure it sticks.
I start by listening. What's actually slowing you down? What are you doing manually that shouldn't be manual? We find the right problem before talking solutions.
Not every problem needs a custom build. Sometimes it's a better-configured tool or a simpler process. I'll tell you which — and recommend the simplest thing that actually works.
I build iteratively and show you working systems early. You give feedback, and the final result reflects how you actually work — not how I assumed you would.
I document everything and train your team to run it confidently without me. The goal is systems that make your life easier long after our engagement ends.
I'm always happy to start with a conversation — no commitment, just a chance to talk through what you're working on.
Work with me →