Here are some stories from my journey in tech and product development:
Last Spring, I built an agentic Computer-Use product for a vulnerable population from scratch 10 months before OpenAI shipped Operator and pitched the head of AI at Microsoft (starting via cold-email) with support from senior leaders in accessibility at Linkedin, paralympians, and leaders in Copilot. When MAI decided to not pursue it, I built from scratch a different & independent solution, validated and iterated on the MVP through 20+ interviews (heads of assistive tech at colleges, folks at disability lab, showed up to volunteer as a tech literacy program for feedback), had 10K+ Reddit demo views, and between moving 10 times got featured tag by Google's Web Store.
4 months after I joined Microsoft AI I became the first PM in 2 years in the org to directly interview users, and founded a cross-org 10+ team of PMs and researchers that led to 40+ new research studies.
Three months in I built a Copilot for PMs from scratch that mapped out incentives of people in meetings with you to prepare for pitches, did autonomous spec reviews, and pulled up videos all using voice in just 4 days.
A year later, when I got feedback from OpenAI I was too junior to propose a research direction, in 5 days I built a full A/B platform from scratch, sat at a Starbucks near Seattle University, and got data points from 30+ Gen Z/Grad students which I sent as a report.
When pitching 30+ nonprofits for my agents for nonprofits hackathon, at midnight over 2 hours I coded an extension that let CEOs draft an email update which was automatically personalized and sent to their entire board with a Loom.
Junior year I DMed a running app company with a feature request, got offered a meeting with the head of product 4 days later, and learned Swift over the weekend to build a functional demo, got offered to be added as a dev on the app, and Rutgers professors voted it as most creative student project - PocketCoach.