A bicycle made out of clocks leans against a bridge railing.

Unlikely Connections is a consultancy and incubator that values applying unexpected — unlikely — expertise to new contexts.

UC is led by Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron. She has worked in design, product, and also marketing, engineering and sales; in-house and agency-side; in government, non-profits, private companies, and startups; in the United States and Australia. 

For the majority of the past 15 years, she has been a founding team member at companies like Uber and Kraken, or a high-visibility consultant in domains like banking and telecoms. She has had a front row seat to the struggles that design and product teams go through in a range of business environments. This experience has given her extensive practice communicating constructively with everyone from junior ICs up to leadership teams, CEOs, and founders or boards.

The first and most unlikely connection Aimee applies in her work is international relations. She also leverages her PhD training in curriculum and instruction, research methods, and evaluation; and her business operations and software developer experience.

Over time, Aimee has been repeatedly complimented on her ability to find out everything, about everyone, in every team, within about 3-6 months of working at a company. (Her most recent record for identifying pain points in a design team was while still interviewing.) She uses this information to help cross-functional teams execute better. 

Aimee has also developed and taught original workshops on listening, feedback, facilitation, and presentation skill building. She has channeled these pieces into a framework called “teaching as a professional competency” which allows for employees to be evaluated on less-visible or directly impactful activities like knowledge sharing as part of their performance reviews and promotions. 

Start with service design.

We practice what we preach, and include design from the beginning on software projects. Better thinking up front is cheaper.

Our Values

Respect others’ time.

We use tactics like Smart Brevity, consider the purpose of our communications, and choose the right channel for the right purpose.

Create an inclusive workplace.

We create the safe place to do our best work that we can’t find elsewhere. The definition changes depending on the mix of people.

Say thank you.

We show gratitude for others’ help and recognize a task, milestone, or job well done. Simple praise goes a long way in boosting morale.

Provide feedback in context.

When a job is not well done, we provide timely, constructive input on where it fell short. We also consider our role in the situation.

Leave space to think.

We manage projects to have time and space to think critically and plan well. We experiment to balance action with thinking.