Connecting the Dirt World to the Digital World, Yamada Shi Reinvents Herself at EquipmentShare

Canada’s National Ballet School is known for training world-class professional dancers. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely launching pad for a career in the construction industry, but Alyson Yamada Shi has shown that innovators aren’t limited to one stage. 

As EquipmentShare’s VP of Product, Yamada Shi is playing a key role in modernizing American construction, a mission she describes as “connecting the dirt world to the digital world.” She leads teams that continually improve the T3® platform to help contractors enhance the productivity, safety and security of their operations.

“It's empowering to be in an industry and a field at the heart of the built world. We get to tackle some of the most complex challenges at EquipmentShare, and the opportunities are endless.” — Alyson Yamada Shi

Her pivot from performing pirouettes to building products that transform dusty jobsites is a story of reinvention. It began on one of her worst days. She suffered a career-ending hip injury not long after she started dancing professionally.  

“It was really traumatic for me at age 19,” Yamada Shi said. “I had spent the last 10 years of my childhood training for this, and all of the sudden, I couldn’t see what tomorrow looked like. It felt like my world was crumbling.”

Then she turned devastation into opportunity.

Finding a new purpose 

After the injury, Yamada Shi applied to colleges and was accepted to Stanford, the same university where she had her hip surgically repaired. She agreed to participate in a research study of patients who had undergone the same procedure, and one of the researchers recommended she take a physics course.

That class led to her majoring in mechanical engineering and discovering her talent and passion for working in the machine shop. 

“It was fulfilling something that I’d lost since being a dancer,” Yamada Shi said. “In dance, you use your body to express yourself. The physicality of working in a machine shop and using your body to build something instantly resonated with me.”

After graduating, she spent a decade proving herself in a series of product design roles. She helped build prototypes of physical items ranging from medical devices to consumer electronics, building products and financial software. 

“If you look at the path of my career, I’ve always gravitated to opportunities at the intersection of the physical and digital world,” Yamada Shi said.  

Meanwhile, EquipmentShare was rapidly growing from a small Midwestern startup to a national leader in construction equipment rentals and technology. The T3  operating system has been one of the key drivers of the company’s growth. It combines hardware like trackers, keypads and cameras — compatible with any make or model of equipment — with software that gives users real-time visibility into the location, utilization and health of their fleet. 

Yamada Shi was intrigued, and she joined the company in 2023.

“The culture of working in a machine shop is very similar to the construction industry,” she said. “Being able to serve people doing manual labor and working with their hands, figuring out ways to make their lives easier, is really what drew me to the mission of EquipmentShare.”

Half art, half science

Yamada Shi is proud of the recent innovations her teams have produced. They include groundbreaking new hardware like the Gen6 keypads that ensure only authorized workers can use equipment or enter jobsites, as well as platform infrastructure improvements that enhance the rental customer experience and shave valuable time off the workflows of mechanics.

She divides her time between diving deep into the details of development with her teams and engaging with EquipmentShare and T3 customers to learn more about their needs. This split creates constant feedback loops that help evolve and grow the T3 platform. Yamada Shi describes the process of understanding and synthesizing this feedback into meaningful product experiences for customers as “half art, half science.” 

The same phrase could describe Yamada Shi, a dancer who reinvented herself as a builder of physical and digital products. Looking back, she can even say she’s grateful for the injury that changed her path and ultimately led her to EquipmentShare, where she has the opportunity to solve the industry’s biggest  problems.

“My injury led me to major in engineering and created this affinity for making the analog world better,” she said. “That’s what led me here, and EquipmentShare in so many ways has been a blessing. I don’t feel I would have been given the opportunity anywhere else to grow and make an impact in so many ways.”

— EquipmentShare is growing nationwide, and we’re on the lookout for talented team members in all departments. Check out our job openings.