Hi, I'm
Alexandra Kasper.

Personal

Community, Adventure, and Meaningful Work. These are the values that have always guided me. The people who comprise my community - friends, family, classmates, and coworkers - are always my number one priority. From March 2025 to July 2026, that meant caring for my mother through stage 4 lung cancer. Throughout my career, it's meant hosting celebrations for dozens of coworkers' milestones. Adventure means walking into uncertainty wherever I find it, whether that's scuba diving, backcountry camping, sitting down at my pottery wheel, or starting a new project at work. And meaningful work, to me, has three parts: it has to have real impact on people's lives, it has to be technically challenging, and it has to let me be creative - that pull toward creativity is what first drew me into product management.

Professional

Six years in the genomics space gave me technically rich, deeply cross-functional work - collaborating with engineering, quality, data science, and product - without ever holding direct authority over the teams I led. I never quite felt like a typical engineer; I gravitated instead toward organizing and synthesizing complex ideas to get teams aligned around a shared spec or charter, work that spanned mechanical design, metrology, data analysis, and more. That instinct led me to become the sole PM on Illumina's NovaSeq X manufacturing data platform, a project that met real resistance early on and eventually reached 100% adoption. Coming up with creative solutions to alarm fatigue with process engineers was the first time I felt that same creative spark at work that I'd only ever felt in my hobbies.

Why Product Management

Nothing gets my creative juices flowing like someone telling me they have a want or need I know I can fulfill - it's the same instinct behind every cup, bowl, or serving platter I've crafted from clay. I've been leaning into the joy I found with product work at Illumina through EasyStride (linked below), where product positioning, competitive analysis, user interviews, hardware prototyping, and app design have all been part of the same creative process. Product management lets me step further into everything I value: the collaboration satisfies my need for community, the constant change feels like adventure, and building for consumer wellness means the impact is real and immediate.