Why I Left 17 Years of Engineering Management — to Coach Full-Time

I spent 17 years of my life managing software teams at companies like Amazon and Snap Inc. And the thing that made me leave my job was not frustration.

It was honesty.

When you manage engineering teams, you do a lot of things. You run sprint planning, sit in roadmap reviews, and deal with stakeholder alignment, hiring pipelines, performance cycles, reorgs, and budget conversations.

That is the job, and I was good at it.

But across five industries and multiple companies, I kept noticing that one part of the role pulled me in more than anything else.

The conversations that happened outside the structured stuff

It was the conversations that happened outside of all the structured stuff.

• The senior manager who came to me because they could not figure out why they kept getting passed over.
• The engineer doing genuinely strong work who had no idea how to make it visible.
• The director who had never been taught how to manage up — was slowly losing credibility with their VP without realizing it.

I was the person people came to for those conversations, because I had been on the other side of the table.

I had made the hiring decisions, given the promotions, so I knew what actually moved the needle and what did not. I could see when someone was leaving value on the table because they didn’t know how to communicate their impact.

Squeezed into the margins — until I stopped pretending

For a long time, I kept squeezing that work into the margins. Between roadmap meetings, sprint reviews, and escalation calls, I’d find 30 minutes here and there to sit with someone and help them think through their career.

And every time, it was the best part of my day.

At some point, I stopped pretending that was a coincidence.

This is not a burnout story

Nobody pushed me out. I didn’t have some dramatic moment of clarity on a mountain somewhere. It was a slow, honest reckoning with what I actually cared about — after doing the job long enough to know the difference between what I was good at and what I genuinely wanted to spend my time on.

I coach now because the work I used to squeeze into the margins is the work I was always meant to do full-time.

Helping senior tech professionals see their own value clearly — and communicate it in a way that gets them recognized, promoted, or hired into the role they actually want.

A proper introduction

I realized I’ve never properly introduced myself to many of you (especially the new connections). If you are a director, VP, staff engineer, or senior manager in tech, I’d love to have a chat. Check out my contact page — I look forward to hearing from you.