We didn't want to build another dashboard.

Hi, I'm Chris.

I think in systems, but I care about people just as much. Most of my career has been both at once: pulling people together around a shared picture of what's actually happening, and never quite settling for good enough. My career started with systems engineering work for the Army and Navy, where I first wanted to see more than just my own piece of things: the people counting on the system, the process carrying it along, and what actually came out the other end. That's stayed the lens I see everything through ever since. From there I spent 23 years moving between systems engineering, UX design, and building software and digital products from the ground up, along with leading the teams and programs behind that work, across enterprise and financial platforms, plus a run in hospitality before all of it.

Across every one of those years, in every one of those organizations, Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, startups, I watched people lean on tools that were supposed to give them visibility into what was actually happening. Some of them were genuinely powerful. None of them were quite right. Somewhere between the real person on the other end and the report, chart, or number meant to represent them, the person got lost.

I always felt like a small piece of a much larger system, with more moving parts than any one seat, or any one tool, could ever show me. What I wanted, before I had a name for it, was what my Government days would later teach me to call operational awareness. Not just my one corner of the system, but the whole picture, moving, in real time.

I've been working on Skydive ever since I left that career. It's that same want, pointed outward. Giving people the operational picture I always wished I had for myself, of the system they're actually part of, not just the one corner of it a report shows them.