I got into this sideways.

I started out building web platforms for businesses that needed them, and I kept running into the same pattern. The system worked. The client was happy at launch. Six months later, half the features sat unused and the edge cases were making the operators' days harder.

Building the wrong thing well is still building the wrong thing. So I moved upstream, into research, information architecture and product structure, and kept the engineering so the decisions survive the build.

Most problems arrive described as a screen. The useful question is why it happened, because that's what tells you how to fix it. So I ask the questions nobody thought to ask, then map what the product is actually made of before I design anything.

Now I work on the complex ones: payments, identity checks, and platforms with several kinds of user, where the edge cases decide whether it works.

Teaching keeps me honest. Explaining a design decision to cohort after cohort of Women Techsters students is a fast way to find out which of your reasons are real.