I've always bounced around between a lot of different hobbies, from bowling to video games to DIY home improvement and electronics projects. But I always try to have a hobby that keeps me active. Right now, I spend most of my time outside of work climbing, both indoors and outdoors. I actually started climbing indoors in a gym several years ago, but over the pandemic, I've expanded my climbing horizons with a lot more outdoor and rope climbing. I've always found climbing to be a very interesting and exciting sport because I've never thought about it as physically demanding. I believe anybody and everybody can get into climbing and that a big focus of climbing is not necessarily getting stronger but figuring out what works for your body and applying that to solving climbing problems in ways that work best for you. The climbing community is also extremely supportive and collaborative.
We have a lot of flexibility and growth in our roles at Vianai. Personally, I started out on the Design & Strategy team working on UX research and prototyping demos, mainly for client projects, but for the past year and a half or so, my main focus has been on front-end development for our platform product. I since transitioned into more of a Product Owner role as well.
These days my work has been shifting a bit away from development and more toward product planning and team coordination on how to deliver new features for the upcoming release. Much of my time is spent on determining what new features and feature improvements we can deliver based on client needs and our own roadmap. I am also starting to engage the team on what design and wireframing needs we have as well as the effort required on the technical side to achieve our goals.
I think the most exciting part about the work I am doing is that we are trying to enable more people and more companies to work on AI projects and be successful in those AI projects through our platform. As I've come to learn, AI is still quite immature and underutilized in industry, and a big reason is that there are still too few people who truly understand how AI works and how to make it work across the enterprise. I'm glad that our focus is not necessarily on making AI better or smarter (although that'll hopefully be a byproduct of the platform) but on enabling more people to better understand and better work on AI projects. This is because people will always be at the center of problem-finding and designing AI solutions, so empowering these people, hopefully, will lead to wider adoption of AI in industry and the use of AI in more impactful use cases.
I think customers really appreciate our approach to problem-solving and the customized support that we provide them for our platform. We always try to take a user-first approach to problem-solving, and I think that provides our customers with better, more impactful solutions. And we try to maintain constant, high-touch, open communication with our customers about platform issues and feedback, which allows us to more quickly iterate on new features and feature improvements needed for them to find success within our platform.