Paul EsseneHead of Product & Technical Innovation

Paul Essene leads the Digital Innovation product team, driving initiatives using human centered design to conceptualize, develop, test, and ultimately deploy technology in support of our clients and partners needs.

Paul comes to Opportunity International bringing 30 years of experience in public/private sector consulting and delivering solutions in companies such as Microsoft and Amazon in program and product management roles.

Paul is passionate about deeply understanding the human needs underlying problems, and delivering technical solutions and experiences for our clients and partners. Paul built experiences for the partner community at Microsoft to help their customers understand how cloud services could meet the needs of small and mid-sized businesses. At Amazon, he was involved in the core retail search experience, as well as in Kindle as product manager, opening up Kindle content sales for Arabic language content in new countries. In his final role before joining Opportunity, he worked for Apple in the Artificial Intelligence team focused on accessibility features. He decided to leave the corporate space to use his experience in support of Opportunity International’s mission.

He lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife and family.