I got into tech by accident.

At the height of the 2008 recession, I needed a job. I was then working at an Apple Retail store, but it was part-time and tenuous I needed something I could count on, full-time, with benefits. I answered a Craigslist ad to work at a call center supporting customers of Netflix – the then US-only, predominantly DVD-by-mail rental company.

What I thought would be a temporary (albeit more stable) job, changed my life forever. What started as a role answering customers’ questions, listening to complaints, and troubleshooting WiFi networks, propelled me into roles deeply intertwined in our product’s lifecycle. After answering phones myself, I supervised teams answering phones. Then I joined the team training teams to do those things in whirlwind, two-week sprints. It was a trial-by-fire crash course in workforce management, pivoting, and change management (during this time, the company was going whole-hog on streaming, and our curricula had to change almost as fast as the product teams pushed code). While all this was happening, I got really curious about how what we saw on the customer support side of the business could be useful to the rest of the company. I then joined our comms and insights team in charge of not only making sure Customer Support had what it needed to stay on top of every new country launch or content drop, but also distilling key themes back to Product, Design, and Engineering to help inform their roadmaps.

Once I understood this ecosystem, I was hooked – I loved understanding how all these pieces worked together, and I loved working cross-functionally in it.

I rode the waves of many reorganizations as the company scaled and weathered the “Qwikster debacle,” watching the stock crash, and later rebound in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

I took this experience along with me to my next role at Google, but quickly realized I still wanted hypergrowth energy in my life, so I hopped over to a plucky little upstart, short-term rental company, Airbnb. There I picked up the consumer/product insights torch once again, leading the function to becoming an embedded team in each product vertical, and owning a top company priority of reducing customer contacts and improving product quality as we moved towards going public.

Practically, I helped lead teams that built the kind of processes and structure to help bolster the change management required both in hypergrowth, and also in that stage that follows as companies tighten-up to appease stockholders. Emotionally, I realized the only way to do this successfully was to take care of all of everyone involved – you can’t hit targets if you’re not paying attention to what the people being asked to produce these outcomes need and want. My super power emerged in aligning teams cross-functionally, and doing so required motivating individuals by prioritizing the soft stuff, or “glue,” needed to get there.

In other words, justifying the ends over the means, just didn’t work. Instead, I found that creating the space to actually see an individual as they were muscling through their challenges made all the difference in getting where we needed to go.

I left tech intentionally.

Once I knew how I could impact teams on an individual, cross-functional, and org-wide basis, I realized this is what I wanted to focus on full time, and so began my journey into coaching and consulting.

I left the tech industry in 2020 before understanding the complicated period that was next. I put my dream on hold and joined a non-profit that I deeply love – at first to consult on a few projects, and then came on full time to run their operations.

Although I thought that taking this more operational seat might spark a new kind of passion, I realized that even though the work was fairly different on paper, I found myself needing to provide the same kinds of glue I had in my past roles, as well as teach our leadership team the importance of that work and how to systematize it into how we thought about culture building, performance evaluation, and hiring.

Which is all to say, I realized I was still kicking the proverbial can on my vision of coaching and consulting full-time.

Starting in 2023, I have been building my practice with a mix of private clients, as well as clients I have from Tandem, a mentorship platform for startups. I am concurrently taking a mix of coaching programs and doing lots of self-education to continue growing as a coach so I can continue to grow and learn alongside my clients.