No, the opposite actually.

One of the biggest challenges coaches have always had is that most people don’t know why they need one in the first place.

They think it’s just someone listening. Or mentoring. Or someone telling them what to do.

And they can’t understand why they’d pay for that. Fair enough, honestly. A lot of what gets sold as coaching is exactly that.

Then ChatGPT turns up and suddenly millions of people are talking through problems, reflecting on decisions and being asked questions they wouldn’t normally ask themselves.

For some people, it’s the first time they’ve ever experienced anything remotely like coaching. And that’s fascinating.

Because once you’ve had a taste of exploring your thinking instead of just reacting to it, you start to realise things don’t have to stay the way they are and you can get help to think things through.

But AI isn’t coaching. Not really.

A good coach doesn’t just help you think. They notice the thing you keep avoiding.
✅ The belief you’ve mistaken for a fact.
✅ The story you’ve been telling yourself for ten years.
🙈 And sometimes tell you the thing you least want to hear.

Based on lived experience, something AI can never replicate.

AI is brilliant at helping people start the conversation. A great coach helps them continue it, with real human empathy and understanding.

If your coaching can be replaced by ChatGPT, that’s probably useful feedback. But I don’t think AI will end human coaching.

It’s creating millions of people who finally understand why coaching matters.

P.S. there’s a lot to unpack in that image. I particularly like the bowl of boundaries and how the racoon thinks it’s unqualified… 🤣

P.P.S. stop dating lizards.

Come talk to me about it on LinkedIn

Mine were hiding in the corner like a little goblin.

I’d been nervous about raising my coaching rates for a while. The goblin had me convinced I couldn’t.

When I looked at what was actually holding me back, it wasn’t the market or the budgets or the timing. It was that goblin.

So I had a chat with them. They had a lot to say.

Goblin: “The market’s f*cked. No-one has jobs.”
Me: “Sure, it’s challenging. But it’s picking up again, and people do have jobs.”

Goblin: “L&D budgets are gone.”
Me: “A little tighter than they were, maybe. But the right clients are spending more than their allowances.”

Goblin: “Everyone’s too swamped with AI disruption to think about learning.”
Me: “Not true. People need support more than ever to navigate this sh*t.”

Goblin: “You’re not even a CTO. You’re not valuable.”
Me: “That’s some bullsh*t, pal. I’ve been the person a CEO leans on directly, four times over. I don’t need the title to do the work, or to be worth it.”

The goblin went quiet after that.

Now I can own my story, my experience and how valuable I am.

If someone doesn’t want to pay for me then they probably aren’t in real need of an experienced lived-experience coach. And that’s okay.

I’ve booked several sessions at my new rates. Rates I feel are appropriate for the client and me. And the clients are genuinely brilliant. Charging properly attracts the people who actually value the work.

If you feel nervous about pricing, or applying for a job, or whatever it is, interrogate your limiting beliefs and give them some kindness and perspective.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re not.

The future can surprise you. 🍰🦝

P.S. I keep remembering something a friend said to me: “you owe it to other women to charge what you are worth.” 🔥 If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for other people.

Come talk to me about it on LinkedIn

Now changing a button
is a high-stakes negotiation
across six teams,
two time zones,
twelve product managers,
and a Slack channel
everyone muted in 2022.

We did this to feel modern.
We did this because
conference talks
made us feel small.
We did this because
a diagram with more arrows
looks a lot
like progress.

Then the AI arrived,
and read the entire monolith
in one calm breath.
It looked at our
burning service catalogue,
and asked:
“Why?”

So now we’re going back.
To the big boring thing
that worked.
A decade of distributed systems,
event buses and
service meshes.
Only to discover
the optimal number of applications
was one.

We arrived exactly
where we started.
But tired.

P.S. Not sure why the raccoon thinks having one app will remove time zones and meetings. Enjoy the cursed whiteboard words. You’re welcome.

Come share your own microservices horror-story haiku on LinkedIn

AI has taken an existing problem, frontline EMs feeling pressure to code, and pushed it to breaking point.

The cycle usually looks like this:
👉 Founder hires a CTO who’s really an individual contributor.
👉 CTO hires engineers. Team gets too big to manage.
👉 One IC gets promoted to manager, with little or no support.
👉 “Manager” defaults back to the thing they know best: coding.
🫠 No one notices until there’s serious dysfunction down the line.

AI now hands organisations a free pass to reinforce this. “They can manage and code now.”

Hang on there, pal.

Just because EMs can code doesn’t mean they should.

Sometimes it’s the right call. Most of the time it isn’t.

Because a manager deep in implementation, especially on the critical path, isn’t listening.
❌ They’re not resolving the conflict brewing in the team.
❌ They’re not noticing the senior engineer who’s quietly disengaged.
❌ They’re not catching delivery risk before it becomes a missed quarter.

✅ That listening layer, which is often invisible, is what keeps organisations healthy. And in the age of AI it matters more than ever.

Someone has to understand where AI helps, where it creates unacceptable risk, and what it’s quietly costing you in quality.

Great managers multiply everyone around them. But most orgs struggle to see the value of management, because most managers were never taught to manage.

They were strong coders, left to figure it out alone.

If you want a genuinely AI-enabled organisation, you need great managers more than ever.

P.S. I hope the lone, unmatched double quote in the image stresses you out as much as it stresses me. 🤣 You’re welcome.

Come weigh in on LinkedIn

Come share your own management haiku on LinkedIn

Come comment with your own haiku on LinkedIn

I asked an AI image generator to show me a CTO, a VP of Engineering, a Head of Engineering, an Engineering Manager, and a Manual Tester.

99% of Fortune 500 companies now use AI to screen candidates. The same technology that just told you women belong in QA and people of colour cap out at Head of Engineering level.

The image generator and the hiring tool learned from the same internet. Filtering your pipeline before a human ever looks at it.

University of Washington researchers tested AI resume screening across 500 applications. The tools favoured white-associated names in 85% of cases. 🤦🏻‍♂️ Female-associated names 11%. 🤦‍♀️ Black male candidates were disadvantaged in 100% of direct comparisons with white male candidates. 🤦🏾‍♂️

Not some. Not most. One hundred percent.

A separate study of 332,044 real job postings found LLMs consistently steer women toward lower-paid roles.

A major HR SaaS tool is currently facing a class action covering millions of applicants. Over 40s screened out by age, women screened out by gender.

A federal judge ruled the software wasn’t just implementing employer criteria. It was “participating in the decision-making process.”

These are not bugs. That’s the system working as trained.

AI is not ‘reducing bias’. ❌ AI hiring is the biggest threat to diversity in tech right now. 🚨

Yes, AI application volume is a problem. But this biased AI filtering approach is a no-win situation. Don’t trade perceived ‘efficiency’ for a lawsuit.

Get some humans involved. Preferably ones that don’t all look like that carousel.

If you are one of the people this kind of filtering quietly screens out, you are not the problem here.

Research links:

• UW resume screening study
• 332,044 job postings study
• Workday class action

Come talk to me about it on LinkedIn

Come comment with your own haiku on LinkedIn

Then you wait.
You refresh your emails every 5 seconds.

Then someone not only buys but hits 5★ review.

And you’re like…
Cool. Excellent.
I will now base my entire self-worth on this.

Thank you to everyone who supports the real humans making things — we really care ❤️.

If any of this sounds familiar, we might need to talk.

Come talk to me about it on LinkedIn

“She outworks everyone. And she’ll never ask for a raise. Meet your new AI employee. Always on, never sick and no HR required.”

I’ve stared at this advert for two days and I still feel sick to my stomach.

Let’s start with the obvious: they made the AI a woman.

A woman who never complains, never gets sick, never asks for more.

No HR required means: no accountability. No recourse. No consequences.

This is what some men think the ideal employee looks like. Someone who performs endlessly. Asks for nothing. Has no body, no needs, no rights.

And they just raised £20million last week to do it.

The dehumanisation of workers. The feminisation of servitude. The removal of every protection humans fought decades to win.

Dressed up as innovation.

We are living through a moment where women are still fighting for pay equity. Where the gender pay gap is a documented, persistent, structural failure.

And someone looked at that fight and thought: what if we just… removed the woman’s ability to ask? And put it on a billboard?

I’m not against AI. I work in this space. But I am against this.

Come talk to me about it on LinkedIn