The backgroundI come from operations, not design school.
Before I built websites, I spent close to a decade inside banking, accounting, economic development, and higher education. My job was almost always the same: see what was broken, build the system that fixed it, and make sure it held. I learned how real organizations actually work from the inside, and I learned what happens when the system doesn’t hold.
From there I moved into Online Business Management, which put me inside the backends of small consulting and coaching practices. Same pattern, smaller scale. Client information copied across five tools every time someone new signed on. Onboarding held together by memory because nobody had ever written it down. Five or six SaaS subscriptions paying for the privilege of not being connected to each other. I didn’t learn about these problems from a marketing textbook. I lived them alongside the people running those businesses.
That’s the reason I stopped being an OBM and started building platforms instead. The clients I worked with didn’t need another tool. They needed the tools to stop being separate.
So when I design a CRM, I’m thinking about what happens when a lead comes in at 2am, who has the ball, and when the follow-up fires. When I build a client portal, I’m thinking about the onboarding handoff, not just the login screen. The operations background isn’t backstory. It’s the reason the builds are different.
— Tiffany
Founder · Fidelis Virtual