Hi, I am Joel Chippindale

I am a CTO Coach. I run Monkey’s Thumb Coaching to support talented CTOs to accelerate their development and grow with their businesses.

I work 1-1 with CTOs, and also coach groups of engineering leaders.

In addition to my private practice, I facilitate Circles and work as an Associate Coach for CTO Craft, an Associate Coach for Foundology, a Coach-in-residence for the Refactoring, and a Success Coach for Cambridge Judge Business School’s CTO Programme. I am also a founder member of the Founder Coaches Network.

I speak and run workshops about leadership in technology at conferences, including Agile Cambridge, C3 Fest, CTO Craft, LeadDev, and LeadingEng.

Before becoming a CTO Coach, I spent over 20 years building, scaling, and leading software development teams, mainly in start-ups, including CTO and COO roles at FutureLearn and CTO roles at Econsultancy and Unmade.

I found that coaching was essential to my own development as a leader. I chose to become a CTO Coach, in order to support other engineering leaders who were on a similar journey.

Since I began working as a CTO Coach, I have enjoyed working with over 50 CTOs and many more engineering leaders to develop their capacity to lead with wisdom and confidence and support them and their teams to be able to do their best work.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter what I say about the work that I do. What matters are the results that my clients experience.