Menlo Park, California, United States
I build products at the frontier of human-AI interaction — and I've spent my career proving they work. Taking over a dormant US subsidiary and building it from the ground up, I turned fka SV into Silicon Valley's leading independent in-vehicle UX research firm — growing it to framework contracts with global OEMs and major tech companies, and authoring the industry's definitive methodology for designing and validating AI-powered consumer experiences. That work became two SAE EDGE™ Research Reports and a Springer International publication — peer-reviewed, practitioner-facing, and still referenced by product teams shipping in-vehicle AI today. At Zoox, I led the product launch execution for the world's first commercial autonomous vehicle services in Las Vegas and San Francisco. No playbook existed. I ran the situation rooms, built the metrics and data infrastructure in Databricks and SQL, stood up automated executive reporting to the CEO and CTO, established the company-wide Jira working model, and drove every product manager to define success criteria rooted in real rider behavior. I also redesigned the metrics architecture — defining the leading and lagging indicators that told us how an agentic AI system was actually performing for real consumers at scale. My foundation is engineering. M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from RWTH Aachen, hands-on ADAS and AV research at one of Europe's leading automotive institutes, and a career spent working directly with data science and engineering teams rather than above them. I'm drawn to roles where the product has never existed before, the user behavior is genuinely unknown, and getting it right actually matters.
Zoox is building the world's first purpose-built autonomous robotaxi service — a fully driverless, bidirectional vehicle operating in complex urban environments with no human fallback. I own the product launch execution and operational infrastructure for Zoox's first commercial consumer services, reporting to the Director of Product and providing regular updates to the CEO, CTO, and CPO. - Served as Launch TPM for the Las Vegas and San Francisco commercial service launches — genuinely first-of-their-kind consumer products with no prior playbook. Ran the situation rooms for both cities, coordinating real-time response across engineering, operations, safety, and product to resolve launch-blocking issues and drive go/no-go decisions. - Built the company-wide metrics framework in Databricks using SQL, defining leading and lagging indicators across the full product and rider experience stack. Drove all product managers to define measurable success criteria tied to real consumer outcomes rather than output metrics. - Designed and shipped automated executive reporting systems that translated raw fleet and rider data into actionable insights for the CEO, CTO, and CPO — replacing manual reporting with real-time dashboards and accelerating decision velocity on launch readiness. - Stood up the data pipeline infrastructure for the Weekly Business Review, surfacing product, operational, and rider-experience metrics in a single executive-facing view and establishing the cadence for ongoing performance tracking across the organization. - Designed the Zoox Jira working model for program tracking within Product — adopted company-wide as the standard infrastructure for driving alignment across a matrixed organization spanning engineering, product, operations, and safety.
Advising early-stage German startups entering the US market on product strategy, go-to-market execution, and building AI-powered products for American consumers. Focus areas include autonomous mobility, human-AI interaction, and consumer product development.
fka SV was Silicon Valley's leading independent research and validation firm for in-vehicle user experience — serving global OEMs, AV startups, and major tech companies building the next generation of AI-powered automotive products. I took over a dormant US subsidiary with few clients, small revenue, and no product strategy, and built it from the ground up into a trusted partner for some of the most innovative vehicle and technology programs in the world. - Built the business 0-to-1: repositioned the company's strategic vision, defined the service offering, and won the first clients entirely through technical credibility and hands-on delivery. Grew revenue 36% year-over-year and achieved a >75% client retention rate — in a space where most engagements are one-off projects. - Won three long-term framework research contracts with a regional automotive OEM and a major tech company — the highest-trust commercial relationship in professional services, where clients commit to an ongoing partnership rather than a single study. - Led 10+ end-to-end user studies informing 5 separate product launch decisions for global OEMs and tech companies — recruiting participants, designing study protocols, running sessions, synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data, and delivering product recommendations hands-on at every stage. - Authored SAE EDGE™ Research Reports — "Design of the In-Vehicle Experience" (EPR2022012) and "Evaluation of the In-Vehicle Experience" (EPR2023009) — establishing the practitioner's methodology for how to build and validate AI-powered consumer experiences in safety-critical environments. SAE EDGE™ is the highest-prestige publication format at SAE International for emerging and unsettled technology domains. - Co-authored "A Practitioner's Guide to Evaluating Distraction Potential of In-Vehicle Voice Assistants" (Springer International, 2022) — bridging academic research on human-AI voice interaction directly to product design and evaluation criteria.
Evaluated Silicon Valley's autonomous driving ecosystem across 50+ startups and technology leaders — assessing technical maturity, financial stability, and product-market fit to identify strategic opportunities. Built the business case that repositioned the US subsidiary's strategy, directly leading to the creation of fka SV Inc. as Silicon Valley's leading independent in-vehicle UX validation resource.
- Profit optimization of B2B and B2C products and services of a Germany based, independent aftermarket automobile workshop chain