Why I Left UX to Become a Leadership Coach

About this post:  Why would you give up a tech management role to become a leadership coach?  What do you mean by “Tech Success Coaching”?  I have received numerous questions from peers and friends for this pivot over the past several weeks. This article continues a public journaling of topics related to leadership coaching of engineering, design, and product management leaders. #leadershipcoaching, #techleadership, #executivetraining, #careercoaching, #personaldevelopment, #techcareer, #careeradvice, #leadershipdevelopment, #mentorship, #coaching

Why would you give up a tech management role to become a leadership coach?  What do you mean by “Tech Success Coaching”?  I have received numerous questions from peers and friends for this pivot over the past several weeks.

The simple answer is positive impact. As a leadership coach, I can have an increasing positive impact, leverage my existing tech skills, and enjoy the day-to-day process.  I now focus on coaching engineering, design, and product management leaders in the information technology sector because this involves the most rewarding and joyful parts of my former role as head of a global product research team. Specifically, I most enjoyed 1:1 meetings with my teams, researching new product needs with users, and running strategy sessions with VPs, C-Suite folks, and other leaders. During coaching, I leverage my background in Computer Science and Engineering Science roles, where I’ve focused on ways to improve the user experience of tech interfaces via in-depth interviews, surveys, analytics, biometrics, and other human-centered approaches. My style of leadership coaching mainly combines my past work in system thinking to map & align technical constraints and qualitative product research interviews to better understand human needs. 

Over the past 20 years in various tech innovation roles in startups to multinationals, I witnessed over and over new promising tech innovations from engineers, scientists, designers, product managers, researchers, and other technocrats struggling to get embraced. The largest impacts that I’ve had to date mostly involved listening carefully to a variety of diverse stakeholders from humanist and technical perspectives, then helping the stakeholders find a new, better path forward. These efforts often unlocked millions of dollars in revenue and significant human potential.

The term “Tech Success Coaching” is intentionally broad from a technical perspective. My approach is to focus on the personal dynamics within professional organizations that have high uncertainty and complicated constraints. In other words, problems that are difficult from both people and technical perspectives. “Coaching” refers to a deep listening, questioning focus with a client where we focus on future and present activities, including goal setting with a growth mindset. This differs from therapy that tends to be more focused on the past & present. This differs from advising or mentoring where the typical dynamic is for more speaking and suggesting from one’s past experiences. “Tech Success” refers to any application of scientific knowledge, including software, hardware, biotechnology, and chemical technology. So, success refers to me helping a client leverage and grow their innate skills to champion technology adoption within their organization with a target 500% return on investment (ROI) for the coaching program.

This Thanksgiving holiday, I’m particularly grateful for initial clients and colleagues who have encouraged me to gradually devote more and more time to leadership coaching, with the full focus starting last month. I’m looking forward to continued growth and positive impact in the months to come. Finally, I appreciate everyone who has been reading these articles over the past couple months that are essentially a public, anonymized version of my regular journaling exercises. Keep reaching out with your thoughts and questions!