Who I Am
I’m Fiona, and I’ve spent 25 years across contact centres, incident management, knowledge management, corporate consulting, product marketing, and software development.
I’m based in Brisbane, Australia, lead global teams building AI-powered knowledge solutions for organisations in highly regulated industries where “good enough” isn’t enough.
My background hasn’t followed the typical product leadership path, and I wouldn’t want it to. I’m the person who starts in one role and ends up three spaces over, building tools because I saw a gap, learning a methodology because it solved a problem I was obsessing over, or diving into adjacent domains because understanding the edges makes the center clearer.
No matter what my job title says, I’m always operating in the spaces between. I have an intense desire to try everything, connect dots others don’t see, and use logical thinking combined with staying grounded in reality as my superpower. Some call it scope creep. I call it understanding how things actually work.
Why Grounded
The name came to me hearing yet another promise of how AI will “revolutionise everything” while conveniently skipping over every hard part of actual implementation.
Grounded because that’s where AI implementation needs to happen – on the ground, in messy reality, not floating in the stratosphere of hype and theoretical possibilities.
Grounded because after 25 years across multiple industries, I’ve learned that the most valuable expertise comes from being deeply rooted in production environments where things actually have to work.
Grounded because in regulated industries, you don’t get to “move fast and break things.” You need solutions that are stable, reliable, and firmly planted in compliance reality.
Grounded because the best technology in the world fails if it isn’t grounded in how humans actually work, what organisations can realistically achieve, and what governance structures can sustain.
And honestly? Grounded because sometimes this industry needs someone to pull the conversation back down to earth and talk about what’s actually happening in production.