I spent 27 years building tech products at scale. Then I built something more important.

I was good at the work. Good enough to find myself into some interesting roles at interesting companies. VP Product at Nokia, Director roles at Microsoft, Skype, eBay, and Meta. I helped build products used by hundreds of millions of people. I had the career that looked exactly like success from the outside.

And I was exhausted and drained in a way that promotions didn't resolve and vacations didn't cure.

What I eventually understood was that the problem wasn't the work itself. It was a fundamental misalignment between the career I had created and who I actually was, between what the job required and what I was genuinely built for. I had spent decades optimizing for achievement and ignoring a lot of feelings and signals entirely. Years later I walked away from tech to figure myself out and find a way to prevent others from making the same mistake.

It all came down to one single insight.

Then I built a framework for it so I could teach others how to live and work in alignment. The SEPARATE Framework came out of years of working through my own misalignment and then watching the same patterns play out in the people around me. It's not a productivity system. It's a way of understanding who you are and building a working life that fits that person.

Breaking Asphalt is the book I wrote to share my work. The Alignment Score is the tool I built so anyone could find out where they stand in as little as 5 minutes without needing to read the whole book first.

Senior leaders who are ready to stop managing their misalignment and start addressing it.

I work 1:1 with a small number of high performers who are good at their jobs, successful by conventional measures, and privately aware that something important isn't working.

If that sounds familiar, we should talk.

These days my wife and our son split our time between the Outer Banks of North Carolina and Southeast Asia, two worlds that couldn't be further apart in more ways than one. When I'm not coaching I'm usually in the water, playing music, or thinking about things that are two years ahead of where everyone else is looking.