I started as a teacher, not an operations consultant, and I kept asking whether things could work better.
I spent 14 years teaching World History at Newton North High School. Teaching was only part of the job.
I also ran the master schedule for 2,100+ students annually and replaced three weeks of paper registration with the school's first online system.
I evaluated SIS software for a 21-school district and trained over 1,000 colleagues: 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 Collaborative Teaching Community for 12+ educators and designed 400+ self-paced learning experiences, some built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
I was doing program management before that was my job title.
The thread that connects every role I've ever had
In 2023 I left the classroom after 14 years and joined The Possible Zone, a Boston nonprofit serving 1,000+ students annually in STEM workforce development.
They had the mission but not the systems. I treated it like a product problem: where's the data, where are the bottlenecks, and what's manual that shouldn't be?
In 12 months I drove 250% enrollment growth by rebuilding intake and tracking from scratch, and served as de facto product manager for a custom SIS build.
An Asana ticketing system I designed cut reporting errors by 80% in 6 months. Managing $500K+ in student stipend payments, I found 80% of complaints were about communication, not the payments.
I joined TalkingPoints, a national edtech nonprofit serving 650+ school districts, as Implementations Program Manager. The operations behind the platform weren't keeping up.
There was no implementation playbook, no KPI framework, no unified view across hundreds of district partners. I built all of it. The interesting part is how.
This is where I went deep on enterprise systems, learning Salesforce, PlanHat, and Jira as someone who configures them, then building the Salesforce → PlanHat → Jira integration that gave the team one source of truth.
I also started using AI deliberately as a force multiplier, as infrastructure rather than novelty, to draft automation logic and analyze partner data at a team's pace. 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 17 years. It made it possible to apply that judgment at 10× the scale."
I was also Implementation Product Owner for a new Attendance Module, working across sales, CS, support, and 100+ district partners and carrying their edge cases back to engineering. In everything but title, it was product management.
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
For 17 years I solved the same problems inside institutions: broken processes, manual workarounds, systems that only work because one person knows everything. They show up in restaurants, local businesses, and community organizations too.
I started Grounded Systems to fix that, with the approach I built over 17 years: diagnose the real problem, build the simplest thing that works, hand it off so it sticks.
My first proof of concept was the Rhinebeck Community Connector, which pulls events from 45+ local sources into one searchable calendar and runs every morning at 6 AM without me touching it.
That project crystallized it. APIs, automations, and AI workflows are what let one person build systems that used to take a team. That's what Grounded Systems offers: institutional-grade thinking, scaled to real organizations.
My first client was Charlie O's Bar & Grill in Red Hook. In 13 weeks I delivered a brand system, a website, a clean Google Workspace, and the templates the team uses weekly, timed to the September 2026 grand reopening and owned by the client. Read the case study →
What I bring to every engagement
No six-month roadmaps before anything ships. I move fast, show progress early, and make it stick.
I start by listening. What's slowing you down? What's manual that shouldn't be? The right problem comes before any solution.
Not every problem needs a custom build. Sometimes a better-configured tool or a simpler process is enough, and I'll tell you which.
I build iteratively and show you working systems early, so your feedback shapes the result.
I document everything and train your team to run it without me, long after the engagement ends.
Happy to start with a conversation. No commitment, just a chance to talk through what you're working on.
Work with me →