Hey, I’m Cris!
I’m a product and operations nerd who went from covering the financial crisis on Wall Street, to building global product teams at Uber & Instacart, to helping local service businesses run smoother, grow smarter, and stop relying on heroic effort just to survive the week.
I live in Truckee, CA with my two daughters and one spoiled dog — and I work with operators across the country.
Why I do this
I’ve spent 15+ years studying how complex systems break and how real people behave inside the mess. From subprime mortgages to global marketplaces to food operations, I learned the same lesson over and over:
Businesses break the same way people break — slowly, then all at once — and always at the system level.
Most chaos isn’t caused by lack of effort. It’s caused by hidden constraints no one has ever take the time to diagnose.
My Origin Story
Wall Street → Learning to See the Truth in Complexity
At Bloomberg and NPR, I covered the subprime mortgage crisis from the front lines. I was young, sitting beside analysts and traders with decades of experience — and yet we were all learning in real time as the financial system unraveled. It taught me how systems fail, how humans react under pressure, and how to explain complexity clearly enough that anyone can understand it.
IDEO → Building Grounded in Human Behavior
At IDEO, I learned to design products around how people actually behave — not how we wish they would. I ran research, prototyped rapidly, and learned that clarity emerges through building, not theorizing.
Uber + Instacart → Systems at Scale
During hypergrowth, I built and led product teams, shipped tools used by millions, and trained PMs globally. These were the years that taught me to diagnose constraints fast and build systems that hold under real-world pressure.
All Day Kitchens → Operations in the Real World
As VP of Product, I worked with restaurant operators who experience more chaos before noon than most tech teams experience in a quarter. I learned how to translate sophisticated systems thinking into workflows real teams could actually use.
Now → Bringing Fortune 500 Rigor to Main Street Reality
At some point I realized I didn’t want my work to serve boardrooms anymore — I wanted it to serve the people actually running their communities. The wineries, contractors, climbing gyms, specialty shops, and regional operators making real things happen with real constraints.
They face the same systems problems as Fortune 500 companies — just without the infrastructure.
So I decided to bring that level of thinking to the operators who need it most, and who actually feel the impact of better systems every single day.
What do I do?
I help owner-operators identify the single constraint holding their business hostage — and I redesign their operations around it so they finally get time, margin, and sanity back.
I don’t give advice from afar.
I get into the build phase with you — because that’s where the clarity and leverage live.