Daniel Nordby - E-commerce solutions architect & technical lead

I translate between the people who run the business and the people who build it.

I didn't start in tech. I have a degree in business management and spent seven years in finance - Series 7 and all. I didn't love it. As a kid I wanted to write software for NASA, and I'd worked on some early web-based software before finance took over. That part of me never went away, so I re-taught myself to code and kept going.

The detour turned out to be the most useful thing I brought with me. I understand how a business makes money, and I understand what it takes to build the thing, so a lot of my work is translating between the two. When a stakeholder says "this needs to be a more seamless experience," a development team needs tickets someone can actually pick up and finish, not acceptance criteria that sit in a backlog until they die. And when a feature starts looking expensive, I'm the one asking the business how much money it will actually make, before it turns into scope creep and a change order.

The biggest translation job is usually the re-platform. "We need a new e-commerce engine" is often a set of real problems described as a single solution. A new platform won't solve those problems - it gives you new ones. That doesn't make it the wrong move, but the questions come first: does it talk to your ERP? How much of your stack is custom? How old and messy is your data? Sometimes the answers point to a migration. Sometimes they show you're already on the right platform and just need some house cleaning.

That's the work I enjoy most: a puzzle too big to see all at once, where nobody's sure where to start. I break it down until the pieces are clear, then lead the implementation team from concept to finished product.

Strategy is only half of it. I still write code every day - for clients when there's a build underway, and on my own projects when there isn't. The latest is Mural Hunter.