I left school at seventeen to chase acting. Four years of theatre and voice work, and a version of myself I had to invent from nothing to pull it off. What it gave me is the thing I still use most: how to get inside somebody else's head and stay there. To read what a person needs from the way they behave rather than from what they say they want.
Then 2021 arrived and the stage stopped. I wanted to make things that outlast a run, and I had no product degree, no network and no shortcut. So I studied online. FutureLearn first, then Coursera, Udemy, edX. Certificate after certificate: business, project management, product, entrepreneurship. It wasn't a title that got me my first opportunity. It was knowing the job before anybody had hired me to do it, which is why I still think online learning is the most underrated thing in this industry. I went back for the conventional route too, later: the diploma, then university.
Books did the rest, and still do. Product Management in Practice, Continuous Discovery Habits, Inspired, The Mom Test, Don't Make Me Think, Zero to One, The Outsiders. Plenty from outside product too, because the job borrows from everywhere. Reading somebody else's experience is the cheapest way I know to buy time.
My first product role was at Contents, where I owned the B2C side. An AI company in the months the category went public: nothing was settled, most decisions got made twice, and product went from a job title to the thing I'm actually interested in. Then a spell at Fiscozen, one of Italy's fastest-growing fintechs, where I arrived improvising and left with a method — how a scaleup prioritises, ships, and says no.
Then came the part that changed everything: I started building my own. Crew was the first. Nobody hands you a brief when it's yours — you find the problem, you set the price, you negotiate with developers and stores and people who will never read your changelog, and every one of those conversations is a skill no job description would have given me. It taught me more than anything else I've done, and it's still teaching.
So that's the plan now, deliberately: a portfolio of apps and software that actually work for the people using them. Not a shelf of side projects. And alongside it, the work I take on with other teams. I'm picky rather than closed: I want to give my time to the projects I'd still be thinking about on a Sunday.
