Geoff M.
5.0
Studied at University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Works at Kansas Leadership Center
Available December 14 at 9:00 PM UTC
Usually responds within 48 hours
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About Geoff
Geoff's coaching journey, driven by the mantra "do less, be more," traces its roots to an unexpected encounter at the Kansas Leadership Center in 2019. During a break in a leadership intensive he was facilitating, one of the staff cornered him, planting the seed that would grow into a prolific coaching career. Initially skeptical, Geoff questioned why he should become a coach. However, the staff member saw potential in him that Geoff had overlooked. Fate intervened a month later when Geoff’s calendar unexpectedly cleared, prompting him to reach out to and accept the coaching opportunity. Geoff ventured to Wichita, where he immersed himself in the world of coaching, spending 2020 working towards his first accreditation (ICF ACC), mostly over Zoom due to the COVID lockdowns. Geoff’s coaching philosophy centers on being fully present, intensely curious, and a masterful listener. Through powerful open-ended questions, he empowers clients to unlock their own solutions, viewing coaching as a collaborative journey rather than a prescriptive process. Before transitioning to coaching, Geoff’s career in the tech industry spanned more than 35 years, with notable roles at Microsoft, Google, and Pandora. He earned a reputation for building and nurturing high-performing teams, attributing his success to the application of principles in what he terms "leadership moments." Geoff’s coaching success, marked by more than 500 clients primarily in the tech and education sectors, defies convention. His deliberate choice to navigate the coaching landscape without a website or marketing materials underscores his belief in the power of genuine connections and word-of-mouth referrals. Beyond coaching, Geoff’s interests are as diverse as his professional journey. He actively participates in the San Francisco Bay Area Coaches chapter of the ICF, offering pro-bono coaching to local schools and conferences. At home, he embraces the challenges of puppy parenthood with Opie, the Yorkie. Geoff’s 15 minutes of fame in the software engineering realm came in 1996 when noted computer scientist and author Donald Knuth acknowledged him for catching an error in his book, The Art of Computer Programming, Sorting and Searching (1973). Today, Geoff’s narrative is one of transformation, embodying a mission to foster leadership for healthier, more prosperous communities.
Why do I coach?
I coach to give back. I am an ICF PCC credentialed coach specializing in leadership coaching and tech interview preparation (engineering leadership, sys design, behavioral, and project retro interviews). I have coached over 500 individuals ranging from junior to C-suite roles. I was extremely fortunate in my career to achieve more than I expected. Now, I have the opportunity to help others do the same. I am new to the Leland platform but not new to coaching. My hourly rate on Leland is currently heavily discounted compared to other platforms, where I am a top coach with a perfect 5.0 rating and many hundreds of positive reviews.
Work Experience
Coach
Kansas Leadership Center
January 2024 - Present
https://kansasleadershipcenter.org/team/geoff-mendal
Career & Leadership Coach
Self Employed
August 2019 - Present
I help make leaders great. I bring my leadership development skills and decades of experience from the tech industry to help those in leadership roles mobilize change in their organizations. I work 1:1 with talented managers and senior ICs who want to strengthen their leadership muscle. Leaders who feel stuck, are struggling to find their purpose, or have work/life balance issues can benefit by working with me. I also work with companies, am available for short- and long-term contracts, and relish working with intact teams.
Director of Engineering
Pandora
September 2017 - August 2019
My unstated role in the company was as a deep thinker, disrupter and change agent for Software Infrastructure Engineering, challenging the status quo by not settling for incremental progress or adhering to company norms. Outside my defined/expected role, I was a member of a SWAT team charged with making significant progress on diversity and inclusion within Engineering. Similarly, I helped to seed leadership and culture with the company's new Atlanta-based engineering team. After being promoted to this role, I spun up a new Oakland and Atlanta based team that owned both mobile and backend/server infrastructure tools for internal customers (Dev and Quality Engineering). Initial goals for this team were to completely automate the CI/CD pipeline, migrating its workflow from on-prem to self-service in the cloud (hosted on MacStadium, GCP and AWS) to support daily or more frequent hands-off automated deployments, evaluating cloud test automation providers (Sauce Labs, Perfecto, Browser Stack, pCloudy, etc.) against an in-house solution, migrating legacy services from Perforce to git (with full history), removing roadblocks to enable migration of the primary/DR data centers to active-active, wholesale replacement of Tableau based dashboards with Hygieia powered ones, and providing auto-provisioned, on-demand production-like sandboxes to Dev and QE in under 5 minutes per instance. Additionally, I helped define long-term strategic initiatives for Pandora's newly formed SRE team.
Manager, Software Engineering
Pandora
July 2016 - September 2017
I led multiple teams comprising release engineers, DBAs, and platform engineers who owned the build and deployment of Pandora's server, web, and mobile (Android and iOS) client apps and back-end services, maintain the internal test and staging environments, and initiated migrations of Engineering's SCM from Perforce to git.
Release Engineer
March 2013 - July 2016
I was an individual contributor on the Android Build and Release team working to help improve the quality and velocity of Android OS platform and unbundled app releases, and to improve the existing automation/infrastructure to accomplish these aims. I also facilitated two internal People Dev leadership programs: one was a 3-day immersion for the next generation of Google engineering leaders and the other was an Adaptive Leadership 3-day experiential course for more senior leaders. I also performed on-demand leadership coaching for alumni of these programs. Periodically I taught cooking classes at the Google Teaching Kitchen, and occasionally cooked with the Google culinary team including offsite catering and charity events.
Senior Engineering Manager
January 2007 - March 2013
I managed a basket of teams in the Developer Infrastructure group that operated and helped architect massive performance and scalability improvements to the SCM systems used internally by every engineer in the company, world-wide, plus release platforms and automation. I also sat on a hiring committee, served as the 24x7 on-call escalation point for all infrastructure teams that I managed, coordinated with Legal on urgent SCM court-ordered discovery requests, helped drive the annual company-wide disaster readiness exercise, and served as the SOX POC for a subset of SCM/RE services.
Senior Strategist
October 2005 - January 2007
I began my Google career as an individual contributor in the Eng Infrastructure Build & Tools team. My primary responsibilities were to be a change agent for core Google infrastructure and create runway with existing infrastructure to allow long-term disruptive changes to take hold.
Senior Strategist
Microsoft
May 2000 - September 2005
I was a build/release and developer tools front-line manager in the MSTV and MSN TV divisions.
Director of Product Development
Talarian
June 1998 - May 2000
I held multiple roles during my tenure. As a Software Architect, my duties were to design, implement, and integrate server-to-server multicast for the company’s flagship product, SmartSockets on an extremely tight schedule. As Director of Product Development, I oversaw a team of product developers as the consensus builder and issue resolver. My duties included defining, prioritizing, and documenting product features, creating and maintaining project schedules, coordinating release schedules with other departments, collaborating with people at all levels in the company, recruiting, budgeting, and performance reviews. As the Manager of Engineering Infrastructure, I was responsible for producing the core build infrastructure for the SmartSockets family of products.
Education
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer and Communication Sciences
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