You’ve rolled out AI tools and individual output is up, yet the board still asks what changed for the business.
Usually the bottleneck has moved, from writing the code to everything around it.
Code waits for review, work stalls at handoffs and in approval queues, and rewards pull another way. I find where your work waits, then help your leaders decide what to change and see it through, mentoring them and working hands-on with their teams. I spent ten years as an Agile coach, learning why new processes and tools change little while who owns what, and who approves it, stay the same.
I was product lead on production machine learning at StubHub in 2013, and today I build and run deterministic and LLM tooling for clients myself. Most recently I built and shipped three tools into a 25+ team organisation; only one needed an LLM. Delivery Intelligence ranks the work across every team’s backlog in a single view, gives date ranges with a stated confidence, and can put an estimated dollar figure on the delay where the business states the value it expects. A backlog data-quality tool keeps that data fit to decide with, and AAR Maker is an LLM-based coach for after-action reviews. Each began as mentoring I gave in person.
“[AAR Maker] turns a meeting Chris used to facilitate into a structured artifact the team produces continuously. Conservatively saves hundreds of engineering hours a year.”
Christophe Louvion, CTO
Helping leaders through the change
I founded Approach Perfect in 2020 and have since sold and delivered engagements to four client organisations. Minimum Viable Bureaucracy: A Field Guide is the handbook I’ve built up over my last three engagements, free under Creative Commons.
I’ve mentored product leaders from Product Owner to CPO, CPTO and CTO. Christophe Louvion has hired me into four companies over the 18 years we’ve known each other.
“Chris brings a level of authenticity that is seldom seen in today’s work environment and he creates safe spaces that allow people to authentically share. … Also, please don’t judge him for his terrible dad-jokes.”
Katie Lucas, now EVP, Human Resources at ispace-U.S. (worked with me at Holo.Host)
Alongside the structural work I do developmental coaching with the leaders these changes ask the most of, most recently VP-level leaders at a global financial-services firm. My training started with ICAgile’s facilitation and coaching courses, then Motivational Interviewing, then Co-Active. I’m now in the second year of Level 3 of my Alētheia training, and I’m training in Radix Body Centered Psychotherapy with the Australian Radix Training Centre. My contemplative practice predates my coaching career.Between the coach training and the contemplative work, that’s over 400 hours. How the coaching runs (method, confidentiality rules, limits) is public at how coaching works with me.
1 Between the coach training and the contemplative work, that’s over 400 hours.
The book
The argument behind this work became a book. Come Prepared to Die: An Engineering Leader’s Field Guide to the Leadership Paradigms AI Is Exposing is serialising now; the finale is due by mid-October 2026. The book argues that AI gains keep landing inside delivery structures designed before these tools existed, so the business sees little of the gain until the organisation around them changes. The death in the title is the old leadership paradigm and the identity built on it.
How I got here
At PagerDuty I was product lead for analytics, then for incident response. I devised and ran the regressions behind OpsDex, an operations-maturity index built from incident data across the customer base, and I’m the lead inventor on its 2016 patent. Across those roles the harder constraints were usually organisational (who owned what, who approved it, and what leaders couldn’t see from where they sat), so I crossed over to work on that side of the problem.
| When | Where, and as what | Who says so |
|---|---|---|
| 2025–26 | A global financial-services firm Client. Worked with the CTO and product leaders across three value streams and 25+ teams | “The analysis reframed what looked like execution problems as cross-team boundary failures.”Christophe Louvion, CTO |
| 2024–25 | NRC Health Client. Strategic advisor to the CPO and CPTO | “…he completely reimagined our planning process and software development approach in just a few months.”Chris Butler, Manager, Software Engineering at NRC Health |
| 2021–24 | Episource, a division of UnitedHealth Group Client. Advised the SVP Product and CPTO | “Teams across the board were able to perform at a higher level … thanks to Chris’ and his team’s coaching.”Elliott Foster, Director of Software Engineering at Optum “…helping us untangle cross-team dependencies, improve release planning, and build real transparency into our roadmaps.”Raymond Hoang, now Chief Technology Officer at Aveksana |
| 2020–21 | A healthcare startup Client. Mentored the Head of Product and Engineering through a scaling phase | “Our collaboration, quality and joy skyrocketed.”Phillip Hartin, now Senior Product Manager at Laravel |
| 2019–20 | Holo.Host Enterprise Agile Coach | “His ability to unify teams brings an atmosphere of joy and togetherness.”Matthew Brisebois, Founder at Web Heroes |
| 2016–17, 2018–19 | Accenture | SolutionsIQ Agile Coach, large enterprise clients | “Chris has the unique perspective of a former product owner which is invaluable when coaching other product managers.”Ruhaab Markas, now VP, AI Products at Buildertrend (worked with me at eBay) |
| 2014–16 | PagerDuty Sr. Product Manager, Incident Management | “What we didn’t expect, however, was that we also got a transformative Agile leader thrown in for free.”David Shackelford, now VP of Product Management at Vanta |
| 2011–14 | eBay Inc / StubHub Sr. Product Manager | “…he has a great vision for recommendation and discovery, understands the system in great detail…”Cliff Lyon, now Senior Director of Engineering at Salesforce |
| 2008–11 | Evolve Media Sr. Product Manager | Product Owner for Momtastic, launched in under four months.Cynopsis, 2 September 2010 |
| 2007–08 | Oversee.net Product Manager | “In my opinion, Chris is hands down the best product manager with whom I have worked.”Alla Weinberg, now Principal Design Operations at Harmonic Design |
| 2005–09 | Student of Fortune COO and Co-founder | Acquired by Chegg in 2011, after I left.Chegg 2013 10-K, Note 6 |
| 2005–07 | Leads360 Director, Client Services | “Chris was the second employee hired at Leads360 and quickly became an essential cornerstone in the growth and success of our company.”Tony Christopoulos, then CTO |
New Zealand
I was one of 525 Fellows selected from more than 3,400 applicants for the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, which ran New Zealand’s Global Impact Visa in partnership with the government.It was named after Sir Edmund Hillary with his estate’s consent and created to bring a hand-picked global community of entrepreneurs, investors, and change-makers to build from New Zealand. It’s how I came to live in Nelson, at the top of the South Island. In 2019 I gave a talk at its New Frontiers gathering about caterpillars, the liminal goo inside the chrysalis, and what executives try to delegate that they can’t; the line I still stand behind is Deming’s “if you can’t come, send no one.” I start at 6am in Nelson, which is 9–11am Pacific depending on the time of year.Here’s how our time zones overlap.
2 It was named after Sir Edmund Hillary with his estate’s consent and created to bring a hand-picked global community of entrepreneurs, investors, and change-makers to build from New Zealand.
Working together
I take advisory and embedded engagements with leaders of organisations that build software. The first paid step is two days on your own queues and your people’s accounts, ending in a written decision note; the rest of the ladder is on the diagnostic page. I also hold a small number of standalone coaching places; how that practice runs is public. Either way, book a conversation: hi.chrisgagne.com.
I’m also open to a full-time role in AI transformation, AI adoption or AI enablement, remote-first.US citizen, no sponsorship needed; NZ-based, keeping US-facing hours with Asia-Pacific coverage. My full record, with evidence links, is a CV written for your AI assistant.
4 US citizen, no sponsorship needed; NZ-based, keeping US-facing hours with Asia-Pacific coverage.