Conviction mattered more than knowledge.

Today I’m using AI to build an end-to-end identity verification and compliance platform. I gather requirements, design the experience, write the code.

After more than 14 years, I’ve learned that what matters most isn’t the name of the role. It’s knowing how to do what needs doing, when it needs doing. But I didn’t get here overnight.

Before all that, I designed an electronic signature and document management solution for AutenTIC that’s still in production. “It’s like your own child,” a leader used to tell me whenever I talked about that product. He was right — and I’m glad it’s doing well.

I also designed portals for public institutions. Designing for the public sector is slow, demanding, and has zero glamour — and it’s exactly where the craft gets serious. But to get there, I first had to prove to myself that I could handle real projects.

Before that product came the first real projects: healthcare service finders, document management apps, and landing pages for public and private organizations. I designed so much for the public sector that at some point I lost count — and the urge to keep counting.

Along the way, without planning to, I started leading teams. The strange part was that I liked it. Both things: designing and leading. Neither was in the plan. And all of it started with a project I probably shouldn’t have been given.

In 2012, I was given my first project: designing the screens of a web app for residential communities in Colombia. Spoiler: I had no idea what I was doing.

I’d learned a few very basic things about development — adding inputs and images to a screen like a kid playing at making pretty things that didn’t work for anyone. To my classmates, I was the best app designer in the class. They recommended me with all that confidence.

And there I was, facing that project with no manual and no certainty, just the conviction that I had to do it. More than 14 years later, that’s still the only difference that matters.