Luna Frank-Reese

Coaching

I work with professionals who are:

  • interested in building or honing leadership skills, either as a people manager or as a senior engineer
  • looking to improve their organizational and interpersonal skills in order to build their career at any stage
  • hoping to increase their compensation, level, or impact within their current company

My experience is primarily in the software industry, but I am happy to meet with people looking to improve their interpersonal, leadership, or organizational skills in any role. If you are interested in working with me, you can learn more and contact me here.

Recent Posts

Thoughts on learning, management, and growth in software engineering

  • When Secrets are Part of the Job

    Part of a leader’s job is to keep secrets: a big upcoming reorg, a project that’s still under wraps, the health situation of a member of your team. The more influence you have in an organization, the more of these kinds of secrets come up…

  • Structuring Your Charitable Giving

    I suspect that many of you who read this blog are in a position to do some amount of charitable giving. So, this month, I’m taking a break from writing about all those things that help us earn money and instead writing about giving it…

  • The Power of Implicit Storytelling

    Shortly after I transitioned to management, the startup I was working for was acquired by a large multinational company. During the process of onboarding, I was in charge of running introduction sessions about my team’s system for a group from our new parent company. I…

  • A To-Do List You’ll Actually Use

    I know so many people who need a good to-do list but can’t make one stick. The more senior you become, the less your work is tracked in Jira or other project management tools. Your days are often filled with ad-hoc tasks, like a PR…

  • Argument Alchemy

    In my last role, I needed to work closely with teams halfway across the world. We usually only had a couple precious hours of overlap in which to meet. I’d be blinking sleep out of my eyes in the early morning, and they’d be desperate…

  • Returning to My Leadership Values Document

    When I first moved into management, my mentor suggested I think through my management style. What was most important to me as a leader? What did I need my team to know? As I always do when I need to think clearly, I began to…

  • My Leadership Values

    I wrote the first version of this document in 2020 as a newly minted manager of an engineering team. I return to it when I am building a relationship with a new colleague, handling a difficult situation, or navigating a role change. I’ve updated it…

  • The Divorced Parents Problem

    I grew up with two loving, clever, and very willful parents. They divorced when I was around three years old, and generally we all got along quite well. However, when I was a teenager, I started to notice a pattern that cropped up over and…

  • Putting Potatoes on the Crowded Table

    I’ve seen a lot of senior engineers and junior managers, tasked with pushing forward a big and important cross-team effort, hit the same big block. How do you get all those other teams to actually do what you need them to do? Here’s how I…