Mounica Veggalam

Mounica Veggalam, Leadership Coach

Most impactful leadership lies at the intersection of:
- Personal growth
- Showing up with strong presence
- Learning to connect and lead other humans

I support leaders to scale their impact and create business results by guiding them through the above areas.

Career and Leadership Coach

Microsoft

I often get asked, “How are you a leadership coach when you haven’t been a manager yourself?”

The leadership I talk about is not strategic or tactical.

It’s self-leadership.

Your career trajectory — whether you reach C-Suite heights, or stay stuck in the middle — it starts with you. With what’s going on inside you.

This is the powerful lesson I realized at Microsoft. 

I observed inadequate leadership, average leadership, and excellent leadership. 

I was in heated design discussion rooms, witnessed managers make technical choices from their insecurities, and noticed the best empathetic leaders lost in overwhelm without any recognition.

I also saw powerful leadership from people who challenged the status quo. And challenged their own beliefs.

They were the people who did the right thing
- even when they’re anxious,
- even when they’re frustrated,
- even when they were at the edge of saying, “screw this sh**”

Your frustrations, disappointments, and resentments are where your growth opportunities lie.

When you understand and transform your inner landscape, your capacity for leadership expands, and you'll see the outside results: the promotion, the better project, and the better titles.

That’s the best way to make an impact in this world.

This is transformational leadership.

If you want to learn to lead your people from the inside-out, reach out and we’ll talk.

I am deeply invested in my personal transformation and leadership. That’s how I’m a leadership coach. That’s how I lead my clients to discover entirely new ways of presenting themselves.

I offer trainings, coaching and deep personal transformation, so you can feel fulfilled in your leadership mission. Send me a private message and we’ll chat.

Software Engineer

Practice Fusion

One of my mentors there asked, “Would you rather teach your kids to be smart or to be kind?”

What if I could do both?

With that question, I realized how starkly I’m drawn to deep philosophical concepts and the nature of the human mind. 

And this realization would set it in years later. But I didn’t know that then.

This internship was my entry into the software engineering world. 

It was incredible, surrounded by brilliant people in the startup culture. This is where I released my first feature into production, had my first exceptional manager, and gave my first talk in front of 200 smart people (I was terrible). 

It paved the way for another incredible role at Microsoft.

I won’t lie— I was arrogant about my IQ and my ability to grasp technical concepts quickly.

But I also had crippling self-doubt and introversion that got in the way of my impact.

Even through all that, a couple of things are common today:
— I value people and human connection. Regardless of my arrogance and self-doubt.
— I’m constantly pushing myself beyond my comfort zone. No matter how scary it is.
— I always look at my side of things. Even when I don’t want to. Especially when I don’t want to.

Today, this helps me serve my clients powerfully, 
— I point to the truth at the risk of them not liking me.
— I can deeply support them in facing the risks and uncertainities.
— I invest time and energy in confronting my beliefs and blindspots, so they don’t have to manage my ego.

It's a deeply rewarding experience.

Software Development Engineer Intern

Life & leadership coach for professionals, leaders and entrepreneurs | Software engineer turned coach & inner-work guide

Hi there! 👋 I’m Mounica. I help visionary tech leaders fast-track their careers so they can create more impact, build stronger teams, and bring their vision to reality, all with joyful life-balance.

I’m a software engineer turned transformational coach. Throughout my career, I was driven and confident on the outside. I achieved accolades, promotions, and patents. On the side, I tried to handle all my dissatisfaction with life through meditation and spiritual studies.

But none of that changed the *experience of life.*

I was always looking into the future for everything to settle down. My conversations lacked joy. I was subtly controlling in my relationships so I didn't break down. I was obsessed with achievement. 

Now I have a general sense of creative joy while taking up big projects. And I'm more present with my family.

It wasn't an overnight transformation (nothing worthwhile ever is). I approach this work from an intersection of developmental psychology (think ontological leadership and Robert Kegan's constructive map) and Eastern non-dual spirituality. 

Here are 3 levels of transformation you can expect through working with me:
1. Embodying your leadership voice & an internal compass, so you show Executive Presence.
2. Holding multiple, often conflicting, perspectives, so you bring a vision you deeply desire to reality.
3. Holding multiple identities, so you find creative joy in every choice you make (and have you ready for non-dual interconnected perception of the world).

This work is not about adding knowledge or skills but creating a *fundamentally different kind of mind* that takes the largest perspective, is more complex, and can handle more uncertainty.

My clients report:
- Influence without losing their ethics or empathy
- Command respect in a room full of brilliant (or skeptical) people
- Have ease, joy, and fun creating the results they want

If you’re curious, send me a DM!

Helping tech managers fast-track their careers with personalized 1:1 coaching.

I help with -
- Making tough career decisions
- Landing the next big role and making a vertical moves
- Transforming into a leader who delivers, impacts, and inspires.

Management skills and Relationships come easy to people managers. But what sets you apart is the Leadership mindset. I help managers become leaders and achieve their career goals along the way. 

The typical titles of my clients include:
- Engineering Manager
- Director of Engineering/Program/Product Management
- PM Manager
- Senior/Principal Engineers/PM

PA Leadership Coaching

I help Tech executives and leaders in Engineering and Product upgrade themselves, how they work, serve others, and create value in the world.

Leadership Coach

Inflow

Inflow's mission is to equip people with ADHD with the skills and support they need to reach their full potential.

I coach a number of folks across the org in their leadership development and in expanding their thinking to better cope with the complexity of day to day work.

Resident Leadership Coach

My role as Fractional CTO was focused on helping set Inflow up for success as the company grows: coaching and mentoring talented people, and to setup scalable processes across recruiting, software development process, and continuous improvement.

Fractional CTO

Hotjar

Hotjar is the Product Experience Insights software of choice for small and medium businesses.

I coach a number of engineering, product and UX leaders across the organization to be at their best when their best is needed.

Sharpist

Sharpist is the outcome-driven digital platform for people development that pays in on your KPIs by growing your employees with the power of coaching and personalized learning plans.

VP of Engineering

TourRadar

Reporting to the CEO, responsible for growing and nurturing the Engineering organization, along with its budget planning. Scaling up the company on the back of its series C round.

Doubled the team size within a year, to ~50 engineers, through a systematic, scalable and predictable hiring process, while increasing development and deployment velocity/frequency 3x.

Setting a clear direction and objectives for the team, communicating these effectively, and facilitating collaboration with different stakeholders across departments.

For a period of 4 months, led the Product org in addition to Engineering adopting a more structured, predictable and experimentation-based product development process.

VP of Engineering & Interim VP of Product

HelloFresh

(IPO: Frankfurt Stock Exchange 2017)

Responsible for driving and helping accomplish a long-term technical vision for a number of customer-facing teams. Aligning with the business and product vision of the company, empowering a fantastic and ever-growing group of engineers, and removing impediments to flow.

Heavily involved in engineering hiring, helping teams efficiently onboard new engineers, and coaching engineering managers in growing and nurturing their respective teams and individuals.

Director Of Engineering

Tasked with building a team for supporting and developing internal CRM technology. Being essentially a greenfield space at HelloFresh at the time, it led to the development of a modern event-driven architecture enabling us to tap real-time data fed into our CRM platform.

Engineering Manager

Architecting and develop a new Data Warehousing solution for the growing business. Hadoop, Apache Spark, etc.

Data Engineer

Architecting and developing the payments backend and integration with external payment service providers.

Senior Software Engineer

Sports Interactive

Portuguese localization of the market-leading football management simulation game Football Manager (formerly known as Championship Manager)

Translator

Universidade de Évora

- Backend development and maintenance of the University's Online Information System; 
- Design and implementation of integration mechanisms between the University's Online Information System and its counterpart Financial application;
- Design and implementation of public access APIs to the University's Online Information System, for use by external apps (kiosks, mobile platforms, etc) in different contexts.

Software Developer

LOUD! Magazine

Interviews, feature articles and album reviews for a leading Portuguese widespread metal music magazine.

Writer

InfluAds

Front and backend development of a PHP/Zend Framework based, MySQL/MongoDB driven, web app for use by the Influads network of publishers and advertisers.

Developer

Former VP Eng • Leadership Coach • I help you get in control of your work so it doesn’t control you.

🚀 Coach for tech leaders at all levels looking to step it up, and do well while doing good. If that's you, and you feel like someone who can expand your thinking could be handy, DM me. Let's chat!

🧠 Former engineering executive, manager and software developer, manager. Leadership, management and organizations through the lenses of complexity, systems, and how the brain works.

👹 The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world it’s either people or profit.

taplio

The Battle

Mounica Veggalam

Paulo André

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