Viking Ships to Product Management: Selina Ali's Path into the Mac Admin Community

Before Selina was a Senior Product Manager and a host of the Mac Admins Podcast, she spent ten years underwater. She worked as a maritime archaeologist and commercial diver, reconstructing medieval and older wooden ships and mapping submerged landscapes. When she wasn't digging, she was building: Viking Age ships in Norway, and small wooden boats on Lake Huron during an apprenticeship in Michigan.

None of it looked like a path into tech. But the thing that drew her to archaeology is the same thing that keeps her in product management: a fascination with people, and with how they solve their problems.

Eating 8,000-year-old hazelnuts#

Archaeology, as Selina tells it, is mostly the study of other people's trash. Every so often, though, the ground gives up something extraordinary, and she got to be the first person in centuries, sometimes millennia, to see it.
She has seen footprints left by people crossing an ancient landscape 3,000 years ago, next to the tracks of animals that are now extinct. She has uncovered walls for the first time in centuries and found timbers that burned to charcoal where they fell during the violent capture of a castle. She has found leaves still green 6,000 years after they dropped, and 8,000-year-old hazelnuts that looked fresh enough to eat. She tried one. "They tasted like mud, though. Do not recommend."

The moments that stayed with her were quieter. "Somebody was here hundreds or thousands of years ago, right here where I am, holding this same object. Who were they? Could they have ever imagined some person would dig this up and study it, draw it, and try to piece together who they were?"

Every boat is an answer to a problem#

Selina specialized in ships, and to her, every boat is a record of a problem someone was trying to solve. At its simplest, that problem never changes. "I gotta eat, and there sure is a lot of food out there." Trade, migration, and war added new problems over time, and the boats changed with them.

The five Skuldelev ships, now at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, show how far one tradition could stretch. Skuldelev 1 was a big ocean-going trader that needed only a small crew. Skuldelev 3 was a small boat for fishing and short trips around Denmark. Skuldelev 6 sat in between, a mid-size cargo ship Selina calls "the goldilocks." Skuldelev 5 was a small, fast warship. And Skuldelev 2/4 was built for war at scale: almost no storage, room for 60+ people, very fast, and never meant to stay at sea for long.

Selina knows that last one well. From 2012 to 2018 she sailed its reconstruction, Havhingsten, a ship that needs a crew of at least 30 just to get underway.

Starting over in Eau Claire#

Ten years in, archaeology stopped adding up. So she moved back to the US to start over, landing in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where a good former housemate from Denmark lived. She had no job lined up and no tech job on her resume. But everyone in town said Jamf was a cool place to work, so she applied and started as a Tier 1 support agent.
It looked like a clean break. It wasn't. Selina's specialty in archaeology was digital capture, using technology to record sites and finds in enough detail that nothing was lost once the dig was over. That meant learning new tools quickly, getting them to work in difficult conditions, and testing the data they produced. Picking up a new piece of software in a support queue was a familiar kind of problem.

Her other skills carried over just as directly. Reconstructing a ship from scattered timbers is troubleshooting with half the evidence missing: you form a theory, test it against what's in front of you, and revise. Drawing and recording every find taught her that documentation isn't optional. Commercial diving runs on procedure and staying calm when something goes wrong. Six years on a ship that needs at least 20 people to sail taught her how to communicate clearly when a whole crew depends on it.

They got tested quickly. In our Women in Tech blog earlier this year, Selina described a call from a frantic customer in California. "A wildfire was cresting over the hill near their server room. The fire department was yelling for them to evacuate, but they wanted to grab a database backup first." She walked them through a quick backup and told them to go. "You can rebuild a tech stack, you can't rebuild a life."

The rest of her approach to support reads like fieldwork, too. When something escalates, she steps back and asks "the basic questions, sometimes the 'dumb' ones, until the real goal becomes clear." And she writes everything down, because "the small tidbits you capture today often become the answer to someone else's impossible question later." It's the same instinct as recording a dig layer by layer: you never know which detail someone will need next.
From there she worked her way up into product, and into the heart of the Mac admin community. She isn't a Mac admin herself, but as a Senior Product Manager at Addigy and a host of the Mac Admins Podcast, she's become one of the community's best-known voices.

What carries over#

Ask Selina what from archaeology still shows up in her work, and "Every time someone asks me a variation of this question, I give way too much information about archaeology. So sorry, not sorry."

The short version is that the job hasn't changed as much as the setting. "I am still fascinated by people. Only instead of looking at their trash, I am looking at their problems and their goals, and trying to build things that will work for them." She once studied the boatbuilders of the past, learned their tools, and sailed their ships. Now she does the same kind of problem solving with different tools: build for the job in front of you, then modify and iterate as you learn more or as the world changes.

The Skuldelev ships have one more lesson in them. After years of trading, fishing, and fighting, all five ended up filled with stones and sunk on purpose, scuttled to block the fjord and protect Roskilde. Their builders almost certainly never pictured that. "Products are like that too. They can serve their purpose, become something new, or be used in ways you never imagined. And then you iterate, improve, and build fresh, but always with the problem you are trying to solve in mind."

From Viking wrecks to Tier 1 tickets to product roadmaps, nobody plans a path like this. But the curiosity about people, and the respect for the problems they're trying to solve, is what ties Selina's careers together. Her advice for anyone making a similar leap: "Honor your experience from before your life in tech because it is totally relevant, no matter how different it is!"

Want to see what life aboard Havhingsten looks like? This documentary follows the crew.

Know someone with a "previous MacAdmin life" story like this? We're always looking for the next Mac admin to feature. Reach out to Kitty Shephard in Mac Admins Slack.