It's nice to meet you.

I'm a technology consultant and strategist who specializes in the surprisingly difficult work of helping people understand each other. For over a decade, I've built and led emerging technologies functions for organizations including Avanade, Nordstrom, and Starbucks—focusing on the human side of technological change rather than the technological side of human change. My work combines rigorous research methods with strategic foresight to help organizations navigate what comes next, whether that's AI tools, XR technologies, or quantum computing.

 

But what really distinguishes my approach is an obsessive focus on what real people actually need, how they actually work, and what will actually help them—not just what's technically possible or strategically expedient. My research has informed technology strategy and product development across healthcare, retail, and manufacturing sectors, with a track record of publishing industry-leading insights on emerging tech topics while maintaining the kind of human-centered approach that keeps real people at the center of the story.

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My particular superpower is "English-to-English translation": helping engineers understand designers, helping executives understand users, and helping everyone involved in building something new stay aligned even when they're speaking entirely different languages. I've learned that the hardest part of innovation isn't the technology—it's getting everyone rowing in the same direction.

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Before founding Subextual Research & Strategy, I spent six years as Principal Researcher for Emerging Technologies at Avanade, where I designed and led research programs that influenced executive decision-making and kept the company ahead of major shifts in technology development and use. Earlier roles at Nordstrom's Innovation Lab and Starbucks's retail innovation team taught me that the best strategic insights come from watching real people interact with new technologies in real contexts—not from conference rooms or whitepapers.

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I hold a BA in Integrated Social Sciences from the University of Washington and has continued her learning through programs at the Santa Fe Institute, where complex systems thinking meets the kind of interdisciplinary curiosity that makes her good at this work.

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I believe that technology should serve people, not the other way around—and that the best way to figure out what that actually means is to ask people, watch people, and resist the urge to assume you already know the answer.