An unconventional path that turned into an operating advantage.
This is not a linear career story. It is a story about pattern recognition, resourcefulness, and deliberately collecting the puzzle pieces needed to bridge business, product, data, and AI.
I grew up between Greece and Bulgaria, two cultures that shaped me in complementary ways. Greece taught me mathematics, logical rigour, and analytical thinking. Bulgaria taught me resourcefulness and technical depth. We fixed appliances ourselves, built PCs with my siblings, and learned to make things work with limited resources. That instinct stayed with me and later evolved into building my own clouds, servers, and systems because I refused to be blocked by technical gaps.
My early career looked scattered on paper: telecoms sales, insurance, luxury hospitality, promotions, guest relations, NHS translations, fine dining, and corporate temping. At the time, it felt like misalignment. In reality, it was preparation. Each role taught me something about how money moves, how customer behaviour shapes decisions, and how different functions inside a business see the same problem from different angles.
In 2018, I designed my first AI-led value proposition. That was the pivot. I did not have every skill yet, so I intentionally put myself in situations where I had to build them. I gathered the pieces along the way: product analytics, data architecture, experimentation, automation, privacy, and AI design patterns. I did not wait for the perfect training course or the ideal job description. I built while doing the work.
Within a relatively short period, I moved from overseeing marketing vendor work and acting in interim management capacity, into implementation, then into product, commercial opportunity identification, and eventually C-suite advisory on data products, transformation, and board-level strategy. I had the honour of working with exceptional domain experts, engineers, data professionals, UX specialists, and product managers along the way. Those teams sharpened me.
I also took part in hackathons and startup bootcamps in Bulgaria and London, often collaborating across nationalities and disciplines. That is where I learned a lesson that stayed with me: it is not difficult to work with people who have no point of view; it is difficult to work with smart people. Smart people have earned convictions. They defend craft, standards, and technical depth. It takes real facilitation skill to explain a financial trade-off to a gifted designer when the MVP needs stripping back, or to align a technical team around commercial urgency without flattening quality.
Looking back, I can see what Steve Jobs meant about connecting the dots — the value is rarely obvious in the moment, but it becomes clear over time. I bring that same approach to every engagement: strategic, practical, and focused on what actually moves the business forward.