How I came to this work.

I did not come up through product management. I came up through sanctions and export control, which, it turns out, is an unusually good place to learn how trust actually works.

At FiveBy, I spent years building pictures of adversaries before they acted, work primarily conducted for Microsoft across sanctioned actors in Russia and CIS, Iran, North Korea, and China; dual-use defense technology routed through shell companies and nominee directors; and the fintech and GDPR frameworks that determined what you could know about a person and what you had to prove before you acted on it. The discipline is not pattern-matching rules against transactions. It is the opposite. You start with the actor and the controls fall out of that.

I carried that habit of attention into Amazon. In Merchant Risk, it showed up as a working assumption that seller fraud was an actor problem rather than an account problem. In Amazon Robotics, it showed up differently: Sparrow's adversary was not a person, it was operational chaos, and the answer there was architectural.

These look like two different jobs. To me they have always been the same one. Trust is what you get when systems work reliably for the people who depend on them and hold up against the people who try to break them.

So the discipline I have been building, across sanctions intelligence, marketplace integrity, and robotics, is the one that tries to design trust in structurally: through economics, through architecture, and through how the system is actually run day to day. Not bolt it on after the first incident. Not patch it in at the next compliance audit. Build it in from the beginning.