Christoforos Kapsalis

Marketing Engineer · I turn technical products into things people can use

I grew up in Agrinio, a small agricultural town in western Greece, where I spent more hours on a mountain bike than anywhere else. Like most kids from the countryside, the moment I turned eighteen I wanted out, to see somewhere bigger. I worked for it, did well in the national entrance exams, and left for Athens to study at the Athens University of Economics and Business. In a system where attendance is optional, I did not miss a class.

That is where I first noticed something odd about myself. My interests pulled in two directions I had been told did not belong together: I loved working with data and finding the insight that explains a situation, and I loved sales, marketing and communication. For a while I assumed I would have to choose one.

Instead I found the seam between them. My first real role was as “the data person” in a marketing department, and I did well enough there that my employer sponsored a master’s in data science at the American College of Greece. It was my first international environment, and it changed me, not only for the machine learning and predictive analytics I came for, but for the people I met from all over the world. All the way through it I kept working as a marketing analyst, which is, more or less, what I have been ever since.

Being a marketing analyst meant living between two kinds of expertise. The data half I had covered; the marketing half still had an academic gap I wanted to close, because I wanted to be a whole professional rather than half of one. That is what took me, on a Fulbright scholarship, to Syracuse University in upstate New York for a master’s in marketing.

And it was there, during the frozen Syracuse winter of 2026, with the rare gift of free time to think, that the thing finally resolved. I realized that my love for data and my love for marketing were never two interests balanced against each other. They both sit on top of something older and simpler: a passion for helping people do their best with the means they have. In my work, those means are the software tools in front of them.

Once I saw it that way, the work in front of me changed. At my company documentation barely existed. Our offering was Power BI reports over a semantic model, and later a conversational layer on top, and in that world documentation is usually an afterthought. But I could watch marketers open our tools and get nothing out of them, not because the tools were weak but because no one had helped them across. So I started writing documentation on my own, part-time, from Syracuse. I got some things right and plenty wrong, all on instinct, until I came across the Diátaxis framework, created by Daniele Procida at Canonical, and my instinct finally had a name and a shape.

Seven years of an unlikely academic path (economics, then data science, then marketing) turn out to have been pointing at one thing all along. Economics taught me to approach a problem whole, and in a structured way. Data science taught me to read and test code, and to speak with the people who build it. Marketing taught me to stand in someone else’s shoes and start from what they need. The work I want is where all three do the same job at once: helping people do their best with the tools in front of them. Sometimes that work is called documentation, sometimes product marketing, sometimes enablement — the reader-first discipline underneath is the same, and it is the only job I have ever really had.