About

I began my career writing code. Over the next twenty-five years, I moved from programmer to engineering leader, from project and program management to portfolio leadership and PMO direction. I’ve worked in the trenches with developers debugging real systems, and I’ve sat in executive rooms where multi-million-dollar decisions were made under pressure.

That path gave me a dual vantage point: a detailed understanding of how work gets done, and a broad view of how strategy, incentives, and leadership decisions shape outcomes. I’ve seen what happens when roadmaps shift midstream, when priorities multiply without clarity, and when teams are asked to execute solutions that were never fully defined.

Carrying these perspectives has allowed me to earn trust across the organization. Developers know I understand their constraints and the realities of implementation. Functional leaders trust that I can connect strategy to what it means for their function and operating decisions. Executives rely on me as a candid advisor who brings facts, tradeoffs, and direct counsel when the stakes are high.

Across industries and portfolios, one pattern kept showing up. When clarity was strong, teams moved faster and with less friction. When clarity was weak, even the best teams struggled.

NousAltus reflects that perspective, combining “nous,” the Greek word for mind and reason, with “altus,” the Latin word for both height and depth. It represents the ability to see the big picture while going deep enough to understand what actually drives results.

NousAltus was built on that observation. I built the S.E.N.S.E.™ framework as a structured way to surface the real decision, align on meaning, and set the direction that matters before teams start building. The Upstream Thinker newsletter extends that work by exploring the real-world moments when clarity is skipped and decisions drift downstream.

My work focuses on helping leadership teams think upstream, clarify the decision at stake, define what “better” means in measurable terms, and set a direction grounded in their operational reality.