The question I keep getting
"Why defense?" It comes up in every conversation. At dinners, at design meetups, in DMs from former colleagues. Sometimes with genuine curiosity. Sometimes with thinly veiled judgment. I want to answer it honestly.
What I was doing before
I spent years in consumer tech. I designed products used by millions of people. The work was technically interesting, the teams were talented, and the problems were real -- within a certain definition of "real."
But over time, a dissonance grew. I was pouring creative and intellectual energy into optimizing engagement metrics, reducing churn, and making people spend slightly more time on platforms that, if I was being honest with myself, did not make their lives meaningfully better.
I do not say this to disparage consumer tech. There is genuine craft and value in it. But for me, the gap between effort and impact had become too wide.
What pulled me toward defense
Two things converged. First, the geopolitical reality in Europe shifted dramatically. The war in Ukraine made it viscerally clear that security is not a given, and that technology plays a decisive role in who can defend themselves and who cannot.
Second, I realized that the design challenges in defense are among the hardest and most consequential I could work on. The users operate under extreme stress. The information environments are noisy and adversarial. The stakes are not conversion rates -- they are lives.
I did not leave consumer tech because I was bored. I left because I found something that demanded more from me.
The uncomfortable parts
I will not pretend this is a simple, clean narrative. Defense technology raises real ethical questions, and I think about them constantly. Who uses these tools? Under what rules of engagement? How do we build safeguards into AI systems that operate in lethal contexts?
These questions are exactly why designers need to be in the room. If the people building these systems do not include those who think deeply about human factors, usability, and ethical design, the systems get built anyway -- just worse.
What I found at Helsing
What I found was a company that takes these questions seriously. A team of people who believe that European democracies should be able to defend themselves with sovereign technology, and who are building AI to make that possible. The design problems are staggeringly hard. The users are among the most demanding I have ever designed for. The feedback loops are unlike anything in consumer tech.
The honest answer
I left consumer tech for defense because I wanted my work to matter in a way I could feel. Not engagement metrics. Not retention curves. Actual capability for people who protect others.
That is the honest answer. It is not simple, but it is mine.