Andrew Keser

I grew up in a family of gardeners — my dad's side ran a flower business, and my summers were spent in the garden, where I developed a love of playing in the dirt and collecting bugs. That's where I first learned to think in systems: how small things connect into a larger whole, and how resilience looks more like steady adaptation than brute force. Fifteen years into B2B SaaS now — currently Director of Design at Smartling — I still solve problems the same way a garden does: patiently, from the roots up, where design, technology, and systems thinking overlap instead of staying in their own lanes.

Accessibility became personal in that work. A neurological condition affecting my vision reframed what I thought I understood about compliance — not a checkbox, but a design problem worth getting right. The energy that could have gone into anxiety went into a multi-year accessibility program at Smartling. That's the kind of work I'm drawn to: hard, human, and worth doing right.