---
title: "Journey"
description: "Research, consulting, product ownership: the roles in order, and what each one led to."
lang: en
canonical: https://potenza.dev/journey/
alternate:
  it: https://potenza.dev/it/percorso/index.md
author: "Emilio Potenza"
---

> Site index
> Markdown pages are indexed at https://potenza.dev/llms.txt

journey

# Almost two decades, from the lab to digital products.

1.  2026 – today
    
    ## Aruba — Product Owner / Team Manager
    
    Lately I've had the luck and the privilege of leading a very capable frontend team as we renew and improve some of Aruba's long-standing products.
    
2.  2021 – 2026
    
    ## Florence Consulting Group — Front-End Lead / Technical Team Leader
    
    I led the design and delivery of digital products for international brands. I grew the frontend team and coordinated work across multiple suppliers, with responsibility for the architecture of the platforms behind those products.
    
3.  2017 – 2021
    
    ## Florence Consulting Group — Senior Front-End Developer → Solution Architect
    
    From senior developer to solution architect and product lead on long-running brand platforms.
    
4.  2015 – 2017
    
    ## Salesoar — Front-End Developer & Data Science
    
    Marketing-automation platform for large-scale ad campaigns; first full-time software engineering role.
    
5.  2010 – 2015
    
    ## Research (PhD / Postdoc) — Bioinformatics — University of Padua, University of Florence, Ghent University, Fondazione Edmund Mach
    
    Five years in bioinformatics — ML models, pipelines and reference databases. _(Details on [Research](https://potenza.dev/research/).)_
    
6.  2007 – 2009
    
    ## Università di Bologna — MSc in Bioinformatics
    
    International Bologna Master in Bioinformatics, graduated with honours. Thesis on alternative splicing in plants, written at Fondazione Edmund Mach — where the PhD would start a year later.
    
7.  2003 – 2007
    
    ## Università di Firenze — BSc in Biotechnology
    
    Where it all starts: wet lab, PCR, microarrays. The thesis became my first scientific publication.
    

milestones

## How I got here.

1.  research
    
    ### The doctoral scholarship
    
    Winner of the GMPF doctoral scholarship at Fondazione Edmund Mach, in Trento — the grant that turned a biotech degree into five years of real research.
    
2.  startups
    
    ### The leap into startups
    
    A brave leap from academia into the startup world, at Nana Bianca. Two years that taught me how the whole digital world really works — and made me the developer I became.
    
3.  consulting
    
    ### The test of consulting
    
    Put to the test in enterprise consulting, for large Italian and international brands. That is where I learned how you run complex projects and teams of specialists.
    
4.  product
    
    ### The leap into product
    
    And finally the leap into product, at Aruba — where I hope to put all of it to good use.
    

Selected brands I've worked with