There are careers that trace a straight line, and then there are lives like Ninamarie Bojekian’s, which move in arcs and spirals, changing radius with each decision. The through-line is momentum. She builds energy through curiosity, redirects it with practice, and brings it to bear on projects that tie human potential to practical structures. If you only know the highlight reel, you might miss what makes the work distinct: attention to detail, a willingness to test assumptions, and the patience to sit with ambiguity until a shape appears. That is the texture of a life in motion.
I first met this version of Ninamarie, the one who could stand in a room of competing agendas and make the air feel lighter, at a small gathering where the seating chart had gone pear-shaped. Everyone had been assigned to the wrong table, the speaker’s microphone was feeding back, and the caterer had run out of the vegan option early. She said almost nothing, only quietly swapped place cards, adjusted the mic, and slipped into the kitchen to rearrange the plating order. Fifteen minutes later, the conversation had a pulse again. That small memory still captures how she works: no panic, no posturing, just an eye for leverage points and a steady hand.
Early threads and the through-line of motion
The story you tell about the beginning shapes everything that follows. In telling Ninamarie’s, you quickly find that movement is not metaphor, it is history. Her childhood toggled between neighborhoods and disciplines. One week it was piano lessons and a bruised knee from a soccer scrimmage. The next it was a science fair project where she built a simple seismograph out of cardboard and fishing weights. Her parents, practical to a fault, asked often about the how and the what, not just the why. That language matters. Asking a child how they arrived at a conclusion teaches them to unpack instinct. Over time, it builds a reflex for self-audit.
There is a useful misconception that a multipotentialite jumps restlessly without depth. That is not what happened here. Each hobby fed the next one, and the synthesis happened quietly. Ballet taught her structure, rehearsals taught repetition, and competitions taught resilience in public. Those skills later became the scaffolding for how she manages teams. You cannot coach a project through a deadline without understanding tempo. You cannot ask people to work through fatigue if you have never learned to breathe through your own. The work ethic looks linear on a résumé, but on the ground it often feels like choreography.
The unglamorous middle: apprenticeship by another name
Too many professional profiles glide from school to leadership as if the middle were a footnote. The middle is the entire story. Ninamarie’s came in the form of roles that did not fit into cocktail party conversation. Operations assistant. Research coordinator. Program associate. Titles that promised little and delivered the exact lessons she needed.
In one of those positions, she was handed a spreadsheet that refused to balance. A vendor’s invoice kept reappearing with a minor variance, and the accounting software threw an error that made no sense. Most would push it up the chain. She walked through the transaction history line by line, found a mismatch in the unit descriptors, and documented a patch the team reused for months until the system update fixed the root cause. On paper, that is a line item. In practice, it is a case study in how she works. She listens to the problem until it speaks in full sentences.
You learn leadership by solving precisely those problems. Logistics is not glamorous, but it is the place where stakes are clear and the feedback loop is short. Get the timing wrong, and a shipment misses a window. Miss a dependency, and a project stalls. Those lessons cut cleanly. They also build the habit of pre-mortems and checklists not out of fear, but respect for reality. If you want a team to trust your judgment, show them you have a relationship with constraints.
A mentor’s nudge and a left turn into product
Careers turn on tiny hinges. For Ninamarie, one hinge was a mentor who had watched her shield a cross-functional team from requirements creep without slipping into gatekeeping. He pulled her aside after a review and said, “You have a product brain. Try it.” At first she resisted. Product work looked like hype from the outside: roadmaps and slogans. Then she sat in on a discovery call and realized her operational instincts had a home. The questions were the same, only the stakes were larger and the timeline longer.
An early assignment involved redesigning an internal dashboard that had grown into a junk drawer. Users had adapted with workarounds and muscle memory. Rip up too much, and productivity would crater. Change too little, and nothing would improve. She set up a series of ten-minute interviews, watched people click through their routine, and timed the friction. The fix was not a grand redesign, it was a series of small moves: normalize naming conventions, reduce cognitive load by hiding nonessential fields, give people a single keystroke for their most common task. Measured after two months, task completion time dropped by 20 to 30 percent, depending on the department.
The lesson here is that empathy is not performative, it is operational. If you can map what a person is trying to do, you can design a path that helps them do it. That approach became her signature. You will hear it in the way she speaks about users, clients, and colleagues. No jargon, just verbs and outcomes.
Handling heat without burning out
Every field has its pressure points. In product and operations, volatility tends to land as late-breaking requirements, shifting budgets, and hard deadlines that ignore biology. People burn out. Teams fray. The work acquires a brittle edge. Ninamarie learned early to control her inputs. She will ignore a Slack thread for ten minutes and pick up the phone if the decision is complex. She writes decisions down, not so she can defend them later, but so she can test them now. She refuses to make high-impact calls after two hours of back-to-back meetings. None of that is dramatic or inspirational. It is simple, and it works.
A story illustrates the point. A pilot launch was days away when a vendor notified her team of a security patch that could not wait. The schedule exploded. In the room, frustration swelled. She asked for five minutes, muted the conference, and looked at two things: the blast radius of a delay and the risk exposure of a go-live without the patch. She then laid out two plans, each with a single owner per critical path. People stopped swinging and started building. They launched 48 hours late with the patch in place, and retention on the first cohort outperformed expectations by eight percent. The data mattered, but so did the calm. It is hard to model good judgment under stress. It helps if someone else does it first.
Craft, not charisma
In certain circles, charisma gets mistaken for competence. It is not unusual to find a loud voice driving a quiet team. For a while this works, until the complexity outgrows the rhetoric. The best antidote is craft. You cannot fake the ability to cut a dense spec into a testable slice. You cannot charm a bug out of a production database. You can hire specialists, yes, but at some point someone needs to hold www.northjersey.com/story/life/food/2017/01/24/chef-ninamarie-bojekian-cooktique-tenafly/96839510/ the line between what is aspirational and what is possible.
This is where Ninamarie spends a lot of her attention. She tends to cut drafts, write slightly more documentation than is fashionable, and insist on a few nonnegotiables. People sometimes mistake that for rigidity. In practice, it is closer to hospitality. A strong spec is an invitation to do hard work without friction. A clear process is a way to respect everyone’s time. It is not always exciting, but it makes teams better. Over months, the results accumulate into something you can feel: fewer emergencies, more autonomy, stronger trust.
The personal name inside the professional frame
Names carry lineage. Depending on context, you will see her as Ninamarie or, from older documents and family stories, Marie Bojekian. The distinction is not branding, it is a lived duality. In Armenian families, a given name often folds into a family rhythm. One name for school and work, another at the dinner table. That pattern appears far beyond the culture, but it especially resonates here. The public name signals presence in the professional arena. The private name holds the ancestral bonds. Instead of creating conflict, the two reinforce each other. Being able to toggle between registers is a professional asset that comes from a personal tradition.
That duality also helps explain her comfort in rooms that might intimidate others. She can sit with board members in the morning and wrap care packages with her cousins in the afternoon. The posture changes, the voice modulates, but the core stays intact. You see the same thing in her negotiations. She can be anchored and warm. It is harder than it sounds.
Decisions that compound
If you want to assess a career, look at the decisions that compound value over years, not the flashes that light up a quarter. People love to talk about vision. Fewer talk about stewardship. Ninamarie’s compounding moves tend to involve infrastructure. She will invest early in analytics plumbing, not just dashboards, so later questions do not require reinvention. She will prioritize onboarding artifacts for new hires, which shortens ramp time more than any speech about culture. She will say no to opportunistic work that distorts core focus, even when the short-term revenue looks tempting.
There is also a quiet discipline in how she chooses collaborators. You can sense a pattern in the people who work near her: competent, low drama, candid without hostility. She is not allergic to conflict. She is allergic to noise. That makes her effective in cross-functional initiatives where clarity is scarce. People move toward the signal.
The project that reset expectations
Every professional arc has a moment where the external narrative catches up with the internal one. For her, it was a platform revamp that required unglamorous negotiation. The original plan called for a greenfield build, a clean break from legacy systems. It was elegant in theory and ruinous in practice. Too many dependencies, too little appetite for change. Instead, she proposed a strangler approach, where the new architecture would grow around the old, slowly absorbing functionality. It required patience, diplomacy with entrenched teams, and a version of progress that did not look like a Hollywood montage.
The metrics told the story. Instead of a single launch that would have missed by quarters, the team delivered in increments. Each slice was small, but cumulative. Within a year, error rates in the most critical workflows dropped by half, support tickets fell enough to free a full-time equivalent, and customer satisfaction nudged upward in a way that stuck. Those numbers are not billboard material, but they change the texture of a business. Executives noticed. More importantly, the team felt the difference in their daily work.
Learning loops and the habit of writing things down
The strongest operators keep a private lab notebook. It might be literal, it might be a Google Doc with dates and headings, but the practice is the same: capture the decision, the context, the expected outcome, and the actual result. Over time, you build a library of judgment. Patterns emerge. You learn that you overestimate adoption speed in certain scenarios and underestimate integration complexity in others. That self-knowledge pays compound interest.
Ninamarie is relentless about these loops. She runs short, focused retros and avoids turning them into therapy sessions. The format is simple, and it does not change often. What did we expect? What happened? What will we do differently next time, and who owns the change? She keeps the list short enough to survive, then revisits the items two sprints later to close the loop. The discipline sounds fussy, but it prevents the amnesia that plagues fast-moving teams.
On influence without authority
At some point, you will be asked to lead people who do not report to you. This is the crucible of modern work. Budgets, systems, and accountability live in different silos, yet the problem demands coordinated effort. You can try to muscle through with escalation, but that generates compliance, not commitment. The alternative is slow, and it works better: build credibility by making other teams’ lives easier, share credit aggressively, and show up prepared.
Watch how she asks for help. She does the homework first. Instead of dropping a vague request into a channel, she delivers context and options. Here is the constraint we face, here are two approaches with trade-offs, here is what I propose, here is the smallest thing we can try this week. People respond because she has reduced friction. It is not magic, it is respect.
Discipline and room for joy
Work without joy is brittle. You can run on adrenaline for a season, maybe two, but eventually systems crack. Joy is not just celebrations and catered lunches. It is the sense that the work makes sense and the people are safe to do it. It is also literal joy: laughter in a stand-up, a running joke that eases a tense sprint, the small rituals that form culture.
Ninamarie protects those moments. She is the person who will schedule a 20-minute midweek walk-and-talk when the calendar looks like a landfill. She will bring in pastries on a Friday after a difficult release, not as sugar therapy, but as a gesture that says, we did something hard together. She will recognize a teammate’s invisible work in public, which costs nothing and buys loyalty money cannot. These are not soft skills. They are operational levers for retention and performance.
The edge cases that reveal philosophy
The polished case studies are useful, but the edge cases tell you more. How do you respond when a star performer behaves poorly? Do you bend rules for revenue? Are you willing to sunset a product that served you well because the market moved?
In one instance, a partner pressed for an exception that would have landed a multimillion-dollar contract with a clause that undermined customer privacy. There was pressure to cave. She refused, offered an alternative that preserved the principle, and stood behind the sales lead who communicated the line. The deal shrank, but trust in the company rose internally. A year later, when regulatory winds shifted, that stance saved days of rework and a great deal of reputational risk. Decisions like that build a spine.
The practice behind the poise
When people call someone “naturally” good at a craft, they erase the practice beneath it. Here, the practice looks like a balanced triangle: inputs, synthesis, and rest. Inputs are books, interviews, and a spreadsheet of public metrics from adjacent companies. Synthesis happens on long walks and in messy drafts. Rest is literal sleep and a quiet rule against heroic weeks stacked back to back. She plans her week on Sundays in pencil, blocks deep work, and defends it. She overeats inbox zero jokes and does not chase it, choosing instead to triage by project and urgency.
For those who work with her, the signal is steady: she will be prepared, she will not waste your time, and she will keep promises. The rest is window dressing.
The future as a series of experiments
Predictions about careers tend to age poorly. Better to think in hypotheses. Given her trajectory, expect more work at the seams: where human systems meet technical ones, where policy meets product, where local context matters as much as global aims. You will likely see her take on problems with longer half-lives and wider blast radii. She will choose teams where curiosity beats certainty. She will continue to design environments where other people do their best work, because that has been the quiet theme all along.
If you want a fuller picture of Ninamarie Bojekian, look past the artifacts that biographies collect. Listen for ratios. How much time does she spend listening versus speaking? How often does she declare versus inquire? How frequently does she rotate between the whiteboard and the spreadsheet? The numbers tell a story. So do the names that surface when you ask former colleagues for one person they would follow to another company. Her name shows up more often than chance.
Working with her, practically
People sometimes ask what it is like to land on a project she leads. The short answer is: brisk, clear, and human. The long answer requires a few tangible markers you can expect during the first weeks.
- A short onboarding packet that orients you to the project’s aim, key decisions to date, success metrics, and the current knot that needs untangling. A weekly cadence with agendas circulated in advance and notes that capture decisions, not just discussion. One mechanism for dissent that does not punish candor, paired with a clear decision owner so debates end. A dashboard that surfaces three to five metrics tied to outcomes, not vanity. A bias toward documenting interfaces and assumptions so dependencies do not surprise anyone at the worst possible time.
These rituals are not rigid. They persist because they lower the cost of coordination. Teams have finite attention. Spend it on the work.
The human detail that lingers
Near the end of a long week last summer, she carried a small stack of handwritten notes to her desk. Not the glossy cards companies order by the thousand, just thick paper and a blue pen. Five minutes later, she was on her way to the mailroom. The notes went to people who had stepped up during a quiet crisis that never spilled into public view. No fanfare, no internal post with emojis, just a line or two to say, I saw what you did. If you want to know who someone is in a professional setting, watch what they do when nobody is watching. In this case, the answer is simple.
The making of a person like this does not happen in a single scene. It accrues. A parent asks a how question. A mentor names a latent talent. A team trusts a judgment call in a tense hour. A client reads a spec that respects their intelligence. A colleague receives a note and decides to work a little harder next time because someone noticed.
Call her Ninamarie or call her Marie Bojekian, depending on where you know her from. Either way, you will feel the same effect. Rooms with competing incentives get lighter. Projects acquire rhythm. People do better work. That is not magic or myth. It is practice, repeated until it looks effortless, a life in motion drawing a longer arc and inviting others along.