I've always been interested in the gap between what we expect and what actually happens.

I started by learning how technology shapes behaviour inside organisations.

I spent seven years at Cornerstone OnDemand, an enterprise technology company focused on talent management, moving from technical support through data into product management leadership.

I worked on software that organisations used to manage, develop and make decisions about their people. It gave me an early understanding that technology changes how organisations work, what people pay attention to, and the decisions they make.

But working at larger scale introduced a different set of questions.

At Riot Games, I led product work on behavioural systems for League of Legends, a global community of more than 140 million monthly users.

At that scale, the gap between intention and outcome becomes impossible to ignore. We would design an intervention with a clear goal and strong evidence behind it, and still watch something different happen once it entered a complex social environment.

Technology shaped behaviour. Behaviour shaped the community. The community shaped what happened next. Understanding the system around a product started to matter as much as the product itself.

That shifted the questions I was asking. Instead of only thinking about what to build, I found myself asking why something was happening, what was maintaining it, and what we were assuming about how people would respond.

What began as a product role became something closer to behavioural systems work, drawing on product design, experimentation, data and machine learning alongside the social sciences to understand what was producing behaviour at that scale and what might shift it.

What was most useful was that it taught me about reading the system, rather than going straight from problem to cause to solution.

The more I looked, the less often the visible problem turned out to be the whole problem.

A behaviour that looks like an individual choice can be shaped by incentives or social norms. A strategy that looks sound can be undone by power differentials that make it hard to execute. A technology that promises one outcome can change who has a voice, what behaviour is rewarded, and where responsibility sits in ways nobody anticipated.

Sometimes what stands in the way isn't a lack of intelligence or commitment at all. It can be a constraint somewhere else in the system entirely.

I became more interested in these interactions than in treating each problem as its own isolated case. That took me deeper into systems thinking, behavioural science and questions of leverage, and eventually into writing about it.