Founder
Olivia S. Mata
A conversation analyst who spent twelve years in restaurants, the last of them putting software into them. Founder of Situated Strategies LLC, and the person who scoped, built and launched every product in its portfolio.
- Ph.D. candidate, Communication
- Software implementation specialist
- Founder
- Albany, New York
Education and research
Olivia is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at the University at Albany, SUNY, working in ethnomethodologically informed conversation analysis: the empirical study of how people produce and repair understanding in ordinary interaction, worked out from recordings of real situations rather than from surveys or self-report. She earned her M.A. in 2020 and her B.A. in 2018 from the same institution, and has taught undergraduate communication courses as instructor of record.
Her dissertation, Grouping Up: The Achievement of Collectivity in and as the Achievement of Instruction, asks how a collection of individuals becomes a group in the first place, and how instruction is the mechanism that does it. She has published and presented her research in her field.
Day job
Twelve years in the restaurant industry, the last of them as a software implementation specialist: the person who takes a new point-of-sale or operations system into a working restaurant and gets it running, through discovery, configuration, data reconciliation, testing and staff training.
Shipping software into a restaurant means non-technical staff have to succeed on the first attempt, under service pressure, with no training budget and no patience for a second try. It's an unforgiving standard for onboarding, and it's the standard every Situated Strategies build, for herself or a client, is held to.
Why she helps founders launch
She started Situated Strategies in case academia wasn't for her and serving got too mundane. Both turned out to be true. So she's here now, building her skills in AI and putting her ideas into accessible apps that fill the gaps other tech leaves wide open in her own life. She likes to goof off, she likes to have fun when she builds, and she trusts the analytics to tell her what people are actually interested in.
And because she has done the whole checklist herself, six times, for businesses she had to live with afterwards. Have Another Cherry began at her own kitchen table as a fix for a shared-expense problem the existing apps refused to model, and became a web app with iPhone and Android apps and subscription billing. Making Moves came out of five moves in two years and a borrowed fork, and became a shop with a supply chain. Touchward came from wanting the moment you did the thing to feel like something. Oldie came from one old dog, Bambu, and two people who both give the pills and both forget whether they were given. Cartographer came from wanting an honest record of how those builds actually went. Codaptable came from the conversations she had to learn to have herself, and from wanting somewhere to practice them first.
Every one of them was scoped, designed and built by her, with AI-assisted development and specialists brought in where a product needed one. Along the way she learned what founders learn the slow way: that the idea is rarely the hard part, that most of the setup is unfamiliar rather than difficult, and that nobody should have to ask a stranger for the password to their own business.
Her research isn't decoration on the company. It's the method. Watching how people actually get things done together, before deciding what would help, is what she does for a dissertation, and it's what she does on the first day of every client project.
Elsewhere
Method
Built for one real situation before it was built for a market.
Each product was used by the person who made it, in the circumstances it was made for, before anyone else saw it. That's the whole method, and it's the one Olivia brings to a client's launch.