From the bridge to the Orca AI product team

I’ve been at Orca AI for five years, joining early as employee number 15 and the fourth person on the product team. Over that time, I’ve worked across customer-facing roles and product leadership, and today I lead Orca’s product. With the recent shift in my role, I wanted to share a bit about how I think about building product and why Orca’s products look and behave the way they do!

How life at sea shapes technology

Before Orca AI, I served as a captain in the navy. I graduated from a naval academy and spent years on active vessels, including time as a bridge officer responsible for navigation and safety.

At a young age, I was accountable for a ship worth millions and for the lives of the crew on board. Night entries into port, dense traffic, small vessels, light pollution. Even with a dozen crew members beside me, the responsibility felt heavy – that kind of experience stays with you.

Spending years onboard changes how you think about technology. You become very aware of what helps and what distracts. You learn how much confidence depends on clarity, and how important it is for systems to work quietly in the background so crews can focus on making decisions.

A lesson from the bridge

During my early time at Orca AI, I spent time observing crews on the bridge, and one watch stood out. The bridge was full of noise. Alarms, beeps, alerts going off constantly. Ironically, the loudest sound came from a printer, not from anything related to risk.

At the same time, the officer and the lookout barely spoke to each other for hours. It means important information stayed in their heads, while the environment kept pulling attention in the wrong direction.

That experience influenced how we designed spoken alerts in SeaPod: using voice alerts clearly stating the risk to share context instead of adding more sounds to an already busy bridge.

Building for real operations

At Orca AI, product work is never abstract. Every customer brings different challenges, environments, and expectations. The role of the product is to find solutions that provide real value while staying grounded in how maritime operations actually work. That balance between innovation and practicality drives our roadmap.

Two things guide how I approach this work. First, there are always real people behind every system we build. Second, usability matters more than complexity. Products should feel intuitive and supportive, not demanding.

Looking ahead

Maritime operations underpin more than 90% of global trade at some point along the supply chain, yet the industry has been slow to adopt technology that truly fits how work happens at sea. Which also means there is still a huge opportunity to improve how vessels operate, communicate, and make decisions!

As Orca AI’s new Product Director, and as we continue to expand our product portfolio, my focus remains the same: build systems that respect the realities of life at sea and help operators work with greater confidence, clarity, and efficiency.