Mar Tarres, Vice President of Product Management at Anterix, grew up along the Mediterranean coast in Barcelona, Spain, where her love for the outdoors first took shape through life in the water. A competitive synchronized swimmer who competed for Spain’s national team, Mar spent much of her childhood immersed in the discipline, resilience and teamwork the sport demanded.

Even then, she found herself drawn to engineering, specifically, “playing at the intersection of domains.”

After earning her Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Mar quickly realized she was less interested in staying within one discipline and more interested in the spaces between them. “I’ve always pictured myself in the middle of a Venn diagram, where different domains connect and meaningful solutions happen,” she explains, a mindset that has become the foundation of her career.

Early internships exposed Mar to the gaps that can exist when technology is misunderstood or disconnected from the people and industries trying to use it. She was fascinated by the challenge of translating complexity into action. Mar discovered a unique ability to bridge the disconnect between operations, technology, strategy, and execution. “I wanted to apply my engineering and technology training to solving real-life problems,” she says.

Her career eventually led her to telecommunications, consulting, and, ultimately, the utility industry–a place where she found every piece of that intersection colliding at once: telecom blended with utilities, technology with business strategy, innovation with execution. Mar found herself at the center of her Venn diagram.

At the end of the day, “Technology, operations, and strategy only matter if you can move them beyond a PowerPoint and into execution.” And what drives execution? A team.

Mar has been inspired by numerous mentors throughout her life, especially her sister, a longtime Olympic coach, and an early project manager who would later lead a multibillion-dollar international corporation. From them, she has developed a philosophy rooted in passion, creativity, and the power of a team. Excellence is rarely individual: “Individual excellence only goes as far as the strength of the team around you.”

Eight years ago, she brought that philosophy to Anterix, where she helped cultivate a collaborative environment that creates the foundation for meaningful products and strategies to find success. “Excellence, creativity, the power of the team, and being true to yourself,” she says. “Those are the things that stay with me.”

Today, Mar’s work centers on one idea: connectivity is never just about the network itself. “It’s about how connectivity can help transform the way utilities operate.” For her, technology matters when it solves real problems, like enabling utilities to adapt to rapid change, improve visibility, respond faster, and better serve communities facing increasing uncertainty.

As someone who has spent her life outdoors, Mar has seen first-hand the growing challenges wildfires have created for utilities. “Wildfires are no longer seasonal events. They’re becoming more frequent, more intense, and increasingly a constant operating condition for utilities.”

She believes that “modern utilities need infrastructure that turns real-time visibility into real-time action” to adapt to a drastically changing environment.

Beyond the technical challenges at the intersection of telecom and utilities, Mar believes there is an even broader issue: disconnection. Every team communicates differently, revealing how difficult it can be for systems, industries and organization to communicate effectively with one another. Mar acknowledges that “the challenge is not connectivity itself- it’s the fragmentation of connectivity across systems, teams and industries.”

That belief continues to shape the way she approaches both work and learning. Whether through industry podcasts, conversations at trade shows, or studying how different utility teams operate, Mar is constantly trying to understand the language people speak. What is the language of engineers? Of business leaders? Of distribution experts? “You need to learn how the industry itself communicates.”

When the complexity of the world grows too loud, Mar returns to the places that have always grounded her. She runs. She hikes. But most of all, she returns to the water. It’s where she finds stillness, and fittingly, where her idea of connection first began.