I’m an engineer by training who moved into owning products: talking to users, deciding what gets built, and making the business case to clients.
I spent four years at ZS Associates building data and AI systems for global pharma clients. The early work was plumbing. I built pipelines that cut a two-week reporting turnaround to two days, and a reporting system that got reused across five client deployments and was later integrated into a $50M commercial product. Nobody gets excited about that kind of work, but everything I did later sat on top of it.
The turning point was an R analytics platform for data scientists. I owned it as a product and led a team of four. Before writing a roadmap, I interviewed the data scientists who would actually use it, and what they told me changed the plan twice. They wanted an IDE built into the platform, not the pop-out RStudio window the client had asked for. And they wanted to describe a whole report in one go instead of clicking through a step-by-step wizard. I took that research back to the client and the feature got reworked. The MVP grew into a $3M engagement, and I learned something the engineering work never taught me: the hardest calls usually aren’t technical.
The hardest calls usually aren’t technical.
After that, my job was as much strategy as building. I ran three client teams at once, handling staffing, scope, and client communication, and kept delivery 95%+ on time. I designed the knowledge base and agent roles for an agentic marketing-mix system, and got the client and AWS to agree on the architecture before AWS built it. It now informs $50M+ in annual marketing spend. I also launched an AI insights assistant one business unit at a time, making sure each unit trusted it before moving to the next. It reached 90%+ monthly active use and won the client’s firmwide Innovation Award.
Now I’m an MBA candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School, concentrating in AI in Business, Business Technologies, and Strategy. I’m aiming for product management and technology strategy, because those are the jobs where you work out what to build and why before anyone asks how. Pharma also taught me to build things that hold up under an audit: access control that actually holds, decisions you can trace back, and systems a regulated company will really use. I’d bring that habit anywhere.