Why I Started Andromeda Tech & Advisory
April 16, 2026
Hi there! If you're reading this, you're probably either someone I know, someone who stumbled across Andromeda, or someone who's been in that moment where your product is growing faster than your plan for it. Either way, welcome. This is the first post on this blog, so let me start with a bit of context on who I am, what I built, and why.
The pattern I kept noticing
Over 11 years of working in enterprise product roles, from connected vehicle platforms to developer tools to eCommerce ecosystems, I kept seeing the same scenario play out. And I want to be clear: it wasn't because anyone was doing anything wrong. It usually looked more like this:
A team builds a proof of concept. It works. They get funding. They hire engineers and start shipping. The energy is incredible, the momentum is real, and everyone is heads-down making things happen. And then somewhere between "we shipped the MVP" and "now we need to scale," things start getting complicated, not because the technology is bad, but because the long-term plan hadn't been fleshed out yet.
That's not a failure. That's a completely natural consequence of moving fast and focusing on what matters most in the early days: proving the thing works.
But the challenge is that without a strategic layer (a framework for deciding what to build next, what to deprioritize, and how all of it connects back to the business), teams end up accumulating a lot of decisions that made sense individually but don't hold up as a system. Tech debt piles up. The tooling and infrastructure start looking like they were assembled during a fire drill. Features ship, but the "why" behind them gets harder to articulate.
I've seen this from the inside at companies of all sizes: from early-stage startups to Fortune 10 orgs with massive engineering teams. It's not a startup problem or a big company problem. It's a product maturity problem, and it's incredibly common.
The mindset challenge underneath it all
Here's the thing that makes this harder to address than it should be: product strategy as a discipline is still finding its footing in a lot of organizations.
It's not that people don't value product thinking. It's that in fast-moving environments, strategy can feel like a luxury. When there's pressure to ship, it's natural to prioritize execution over planning. When the engineering team is strong and the technology is solid, it's easy to assume the product direction will emerge organically from good technical decisions.
Sometimes it does. But more often, there comes a point where a team realizes they've been building without a shared understanding of where they're going and why. Not because anyone dropped the ball, but because product strategy is one of those things that's easy to push to "later”, until later arrives and it's urgent.
I've been on both sides of this. I've been the person inside the org trying to make the case for investing in product thinking, and I understand the competing priorities that make it hard. That empathy is actually a big part of how I approach this work now.
Why I built Andromeda
I spent those 11 years building UX research practices from scratch, leading platform strategy for connected vehicle fleets, rebuilding developer portals, and launching products into cloud marketplaces. The work was complex and fulfilling. But the longer I stayed in large organizations, the more I felt the tension between seeing what needed to happen and navigating the layers of process required to make it happen.
That tension built up over the years. The idea of working independently, being able to apply what I'd learned more directly without waiting for six layers of approval, had been sitting in the back of my mind for a long time.
Last year, I left my role at Walmart and made an intentional decision to take some time before jumping into the next thing. I traveled, recharged, and gave myself space to think clearly about what I actually wanted to build versus what felt like the default next step.
What I came back to was this: the gap I kept seeing, teams with strong engineering and real momentum that hadn't yet invested in the product strategy layer, was something I could help with. Not as an embedded full-time PM navigating someone else's org chart, but as an independent advisor who could come in, understand the real situation, and help build the strategic foundation that sets teams up for what comes next.
So I built Andromeda Tech & Advisory. I focus on product strategy, competitive analysis, market research, and roadmap development for technical products, particularly for teams that are strong on the engineering side and ready to get more intentional about the product direction.
I'm not here to hand over a 40-slide deck and disappear. I'm here to help you figure out what you're actually building, why it matters, and what "good enough" strategy looks like at your current stage, then get out of the way so you can execute.
What's coming on this blog
This blog is where I'll be sharing my lessons learned from over a decade of doing this work, and my own frameworks and approaches that I’ve fine-tuned over the years from my own experiences . I've got a dedicated Case Studies section for the specific stories, so the blog is going to focus on the thinking behind the thinking: how I approach problems, what I've learned about where product strategy tends to go sideways, and what I'd share with a founder over an honest 20-minute conversation.
First up: how to scope a product strategy engagement: what founders actually need versus what they usually ask for.
Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!
Interested in discussing further? Feel free to get in touch: annie@andromedatech.io