Aboubacar Haidara

In April 2021, I was hired as an analyst at one of the world's largest shipping companies and handed a problem that didn't have a department attached to it yet — because it didn't exist.

Equipment and container data across the company's national network was inconsistent, unaudited, and untracked in any structured way. There was no team assigned to fix it. No process to follow. No system to plug into. Just a problem, and me.

So I built the department myself.

I started with SQL — writing the first audit tools and validation logic by hand to find where the data was breaking. From there, I built the governance framework: risk scorecards, exception workflows, escalation paths. Then I built the platform to run it on — a case-management system in Power Apps that could route issues, score severity, and hold an audit trail for everything that happened inside it. What started as one analyst trying to catch errors became the operating infrastructure for a nationwide function.

Four promotions later, I'm the Manager running the department I built from nothing. I lead a team of five, coordinate with more than twenty external vendor and enterprise partners, negotiate contract terms directly with Procurement, and serve as the point of contact for global brands who need real-time visibility into how their cargo moves. Along the way, I taught myself to use AI tools not because anyone asked me to, but because I kept running into problems that manual work couldn't scale to solve — including training a custom AI model to read and extract data from documents that used to require someone doing it by hand.

Most people join a team. I had to build one first, and then earn the right to lead it.

That's the pattern I look for in every problem now: not "what's broken that I can fix," but "what's missing that I should build." It's the reason I'm drawn to roles where the mandate isn't to maintain something that already works — it's to create the thing that doesn't exist yet.