My career has run through every layer of how an organization works: the technology it's built on, the operating system that runs it, and the leadership that holds it together. For twenty years I moved between those layers, one role at a time. AI is what lets me work across all of them at once.
I started out as a technical product manager at D-tree, a digital health organization, building digital systems that helped health workers in Sub-Saharan Africa deliver life-saving care to people in their communities. That work taught me how technical systems actually get made, and it taught me the more important lesson underneath it: a system is only as good as the people and processes around it. I watched well-funded technology fail, again and again, not because the technology was wrong but because no one took the human side seriously.
Over the years, the scope of my work kept widening. It moved from single projects to whole organizations, where the challenges are different. Technology still plays a role, but the harder problems are clarity of vision, and the systems, processes, and accountability that let a team actually deliver on it. I became CEO and led that work directly, growing a team from 20 to 70 people and a budget from $2 million to $6 million across programs in multiple countries. By the end, I understood both sides of how organizations really work: the technical side and the human one. That combination is what I bring now as a fractional COO.
In 2025 I started Layer Advisory. Today I partner with purpose-driven founders and leadership teams in startups, small businesses, and nonprofits, across the US, Europe, and Africa. I work with people doing work that matters and teams that are growing faster than their systems can keep up with.
Then AI changed what was possible for me. Not only because I can finally build the technical things I spent years wishing I could build. It's that I can bring everything else I've learned to it too. I know what it takes to grow systems and teams, and now I can put that experience to work with AI: building tools, and more importantly building AI-driven systems where teams stay aligned and the technology works with them and for them, toward clearer vision, stronger accountability, and real progress. I'm not a developer, and I have not had this much fun with my work in years.
What I'm most interested in right now is what it actually means to become AI-native, both as an individual and as an organization. Rethinking how we do our work, on our own and as a team, as agentic systems get more capable and the ground keeps shifting under us. I explore that in my own practice first, in real client engagements, figuring out what holds up and what doesn't. I share what I learn as I go, and I help others do the same. That's what TEMPO is, a cohort for non-technical professionals who want to build their own AI operating systems. My favorite moment in the whole program is the one where someone realizes this was never out of their reach. I get to watch the light go on. That is why I do it.
I live in Portugal with my husband and our two kids.
