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I started becoming interested in commerce when I joined Nebulab, where we help mid-market and enterprise brands use technology to launch unique shopping experiences. That led me down a rabbit hole of branding, marketing, customer experience, and much more.

Even though I’ve been a consultant for most of my life—first as a solo consultant, then as part of larger organizations such as Gigster, and now running an entire consulting firm at Nebulab—I’ve always found consulting very ephemeral and hard to define. Most days of the week, my idea of consulting is the art of navigating tension and offering perspective.

While “customer experience” (CX) is a vague term that takes on different meanings depending on what the vendor of the day is trying to sell you, I think it’s best defined as the sum of all the interactions a customer has with your brand over time.

For someone who is interested in a million different subjects, having a good grasp of how knowledge is created and spread is critical. It’s an incredibly fascinating topic, and a good mental framework dramatically accelerates your learning speed.

While I started my career as a software engineer, I quickly understood that I was much more interested in the real-world impact of my work than in the craft of software engineering per se. I also understood that, in most industries, the only way to increase your impact past a certain threshold is to build and lead organizations.

At its core, marketing is the art and craft of building mental and physical availability for a brand through advertising and distribution, which in turn enables brands to serve their functional and cultural purpose.

I come from a software engineering background, and I still consider myself a software engineer at heart. Despite my passion for the humanities, I have a very analytical mind, so I tend to think in terms of problems, frameworks, processes, and solutions, no matter what I’m doing.

Strategy is the art of devising the most effective and efficient way of taking a system (an organization, one’s career, etc.) from point A to point B. As such, strategic thinking is a foundational skill for any entrepreneur—dare I say, for any human being.

A system is any interconnected set of elements working together to accomplish a broader purpose. Systems thinking is the ability to understand what kind of system(s) are useful to consider in a given scenario, how those systems work, and how to direct the systems to shape their behavior.

Writing is the first thing I remember falling in love with: I started creating stories in kindergarten, and I’ve never stopped since—it’s just that the stories have, for the most part, become fictional and contain more numbers.