Different problem every time.
Same loop.
I’m Stephen Lin. I get dropped into things nobody has defined yet: an operation, a data estate, a strategy nobody has numbers for. I work them out by researching, experimenting, and putting numbers on things. Then I write it down, explain it in plain terms, build the fix, and keep adjusting until it holds.
It doesn’t stop at the office. I’ve built thirteen instruments from curated and custom-fabricated parts, designed fourteen game expansions, talked restaurants into seven private dinners, and officiated two weddings. Same loop, different materials.
Three phases, five ways back
Nothing here is a straight line. Each phase repeats until it clears its own bar.
Research means digging through whatever data and documentation already exist, then talking to the people who carry the rest of it in their heads.
A history of problem solving
Two columns, same eighteen years.
Alongside the job
11/2025 – present
11/2024 – present
05/2023 – 10/2023
10/2020 – present
Three of these are still going. I’ve been helping The Record Co., a nonprofit recording studio in Boston, with data and operations since 2020.
The title says data. The time says operations.
All 204 months, assigned to the leading function of each job title.
Four of six titles name two functions, so this shows which one led. Operations is the biggest slice at forty percent, more than data, and it hasn’t been in my title since 2018. The gold rail is where AI entered the work: May 2024, two years before it showed up in the title.
The core didn’t change. The toolkit did.
Each thread is one skill, drawn across the years it was actually in use.
One thread runs the full width and never breaks: problem solving, 2009 to 2026. Strategy and team building run the whole length too. Everything under them is a tool I picked up for a specific problem.
The toolkit, year by year
Every skill named on this page, stacked up in the order I picked them up. The gold band is how many the job needed that year.
Skills later roles haven’t required
Audience Development
2009–2012 · SmarterTravel- SEM
- SEO
- PPC
- CRM
- Email Marketing
- Digital Marketing
- Revenue Optimization
- Budgeting
Business Operations
2012–2020 · Jetsetter and Bókun- Payments & Fraud
- Systems Integration
- M&A
- Product Management
- Project Management
- Roadmapping
What I actually have open
Gold ones are what the current job runs on.
Data platforms & engineering
BI and analytics
Generative AI
Product & program
Design & music production
The other through-line
Seventeen things I’ve taken on alongside the day job, and what they have in common.
Nine of seventeen touch music: a recording studio, a nonprofit board, a teaching post, an AI fellowship, and thirteen instruments. Food is the other cluster. I talked a venue into every one of those, and none of them would have happened otherwise.
Two employers, an ocean away
Where my employers were headquartered, plotted at true bearing and distance from Boston. Rings are 1,000 miles apart. I worked remotely. Not entirely.
Reykjavík every six weeks for sixteen months. Berlin every quarter for two years. That’s roughly 119,000 miles of commuting, about five times around the equator. I never relocated.