My Story
I fell in love with software as a teenager and never looked back. What started as tinkering turned into a career - engineering, architecture, VP roles, CTO. I still write code. I still love the craft. That part hasn't changed.
What did change - and not smoothly - was learning how to lead. Like most tech leaders, I was handed responsibility without preparation. Nobody taught me how to build trust with a team, navigate a difficult executive, communicate a vision to people who don't think like engineers, or manage my own head when pressure was high. I was technically strong and organizationally lost.
I've sat in budget meetings as the only person in the room thinking in systems instead of margins. I know what it feels like to be technically credible and organizationally invisible. To be told you need "executive presence" without anyone explaining what that means. To be good at the job and still feel like you're on the wrong side of an invisible line.
"I closed that gap. Then I started helping others close it faster."
I spent years building a real approach to leadership development - not from books alone, but from doing the work, making the mistakes, and eventually figuring out what actually moves the needle. I started coaching other tech leaders because I knew how much time I wasted learning things the hard way that someone could have just shown me.
I coach from inside the arena. I'm not looking back at a career I finished - I'm still in it. That means when we talk about managing a difficult stakeholder, navigating an org restructure, or figuring out how to show up differently at the executive level, I'm not recalling what that was like. I'm living it alongside you.