About Chris Gagné

I started by building a company. Student of Fortune, an online tutoring service I co-founded in 2005. It drifted into eBay-for-homework right as I was heading to business school, so I left in 2009 rather than ride that further (Chegg bought the company two years later). At eBay’s StubHub I was product lead for the recommendations engine: production machine learning, 2013, with a three-person data-science team. At PagerDuty, as product lead for incident management, I began its work on incident response and devised and ran the regressions behind OpsDex, an operations-maturity index built from incident data across the customer base, excluding research opt-outs. I’m the lead inventor on its 2016 patent, the first-named of four.

Across those roles the harder constraints were usually organisational (how the work was structured, and what its leaders couldn’t yet see), so I crossed over to work on that side of the problem. I now work with Org Topologies (where I’m a Certified Consultant), Large-Scale Scrum, flow economics, Theory of Constraints, and Cynefin. At Accenture | SolutionsIQ I coached teams and their leadership at eBay, a global hospitality platform, and a global entertainment business.

At Holo.Host I coached two co-founders, the Director of Product and their teams in a globally distributed organisation using Large-Scale Scrum. I founded Approach Perfect in 2020 and have since won, scoped, priced and delivered engagements across four client organisations. At Episource, I advised the SVP Product and CPTO through acquisition and integration into UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, and managed five Agile coaches supporting a 300+ person organisation. At NRC Health, I led portfolio prioritisation with more than 30 stakeholders, including C-level leaders; work in process fell, throughput rose, and we realised value sooner. I’ve mentored product leaders from Product Owner to CPO, CPTO and CTO.

From February 2025 to May 2026, I worked with a global financial-services firm’s CTO and product leaders on ownership and planning across 25+ teams in three value streams, planning together fortnightly with separate backlogs. I also provided developmental coaching for VP-level leaders, and built the three tools above into that engagement. Minimum Viable Bureaucracy: A Field Guide is the operating handbook I’ve evolved over my last three engagements, across strategy, structure, processes, rewards and people, free under Creative Commons. One executive has hired me into four companies over the 18 years we’ve known each other.

My public work includes freeCodeCamp’s 2018 Top Contributor award, a Tradeoff Matrix teaching video, and two Edmund Hillary Fellowship panels I moderated on generative AI in 2023. Recordings, interviews and external references are collected on the vetting page.

Alongside the structural work I do developmental coaching with the leaders the new operating model asks the most of. My training started with ICAgile’s facilitation and coaching courses, then Motivational Interviewing, then Co-Active. I now study and practise Alētheia with Steve March, and Radix Body Centered Psychotherapy; my contemplative practice predates my coaching career. Between the coach training and the contemplative work, that’s over 400 hours, itemised with dates on the vetting page. How the coaching runs (method, confidentiality rules, limits) is public at how coaching works with me.

I was one of 525 Fellows selected from more than 3,400 applicants for the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, New Zealand’s Global Impact Visa, the world’s first immigration programme built around positive global impact. It was named after Sir Edmund Hillary with his estate’s consent and created with the New Zealand government to bring a hand-picked global community of entrepreneurs, investors, and change-makers to build from New Zealand. It’s how I came to live in Nelson, at the top of the South Island. In 2019 I gave a talk at its New Frontiers gathering about caterpillars, the liminal goo inside the chrysalis, and what executives try to delegate that they can’t; the line I still stand behind is Deming’s “if you can’t come, send no one.” I’m a US citizen, authorised to work in New Zealand, and my mornings run 9am–5pm to 11am–5pm US Pacific depending on Daylight Saving Time. Here’s how our time zones overlap.

The pattern became a book. Come Prepared to Die: An Engineering Leader’s Field Guide to the Leadership Paradigms AI Is Exposing is serialising now; the finale is due by mid-October 2026. The book argues that AI gains keep landing inside delivery structures designed before these tools existed, so the returns fall short until the structure changes. The death in the title is the old leadership paradigm and the identity built on it.

I take advisory and embedded engagements with leaders of organisations that build software. The first paid step is two days on your own queues and your people’s accounts, ending in a written decision note; the rest of the ladder is on the diagnostic page. I also hold a small number of standalone coaching places; how that practice runs is public. Either way, vet me first at the vetting page, then book a conversation: hi.chrisgagne.com.

I’m also open to a full-time role in AI transformation, AI adoption or AI enablement, remote-first (US citizen, no sponsorship needed; NZ-based, keeping US-facing hours with Asia-Pacific coverage). If a full-time seat lands, the practice winds down in an orderly 30 days.