I help individuals realize powerful personal growth across all aspects of life:
professional, wellness, family, and balancing it all

I’ll partner with you to :

  • Grow into a new leadership role

  • Be an effective team leader

  • Forge strong relationships

  • Organizational development and transformation

  • Balance your personal wellbeing

  • Identify and go after work that brings you joy

  • Refine how you show up personally and professionally

  • Manage a sense of overwhelm to establish balance and recapture lost energy

What is Coaching?

Coaching is best described as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.

We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfillment.

You have all the answers you need within yourself, my role is to help guide you to find them and take meaningful action so you can realize your personal success in ways you haven’t before.

Coaching is not:

  • Therapy: Therapy focuses on your past (and makes diagnoses) - coaching is focused on the future

  • Mentoring: Mentoring is when an individual with a specific background provides pointed advice on what to do (I can provide this at times as it pertains to my experience, but you’ll grow more through coaching because you’ll learn how to use your unique power)

Coaching can help

Finding your way, your calling, and your voice

  • Personal empowerment and building confidence

  • Manage your time and energy

  • Finding balance in your personal life

  • Determine if your current role is the right fit, needs an adjustment, or if it’s time to move on

  • Find your spark, what are your strengths and passions? How do you turn those into what you do every day?

  • Personal growth
    (I’m not a therapist, but can work with you on helping to balance personal challenges or opportunities where you need an unbiased perspective)

Leading a Team

  • Leading with empathy

  • Learn how to be a people manager who others will respect and follow

  • Build a fun, healthy team culture others envy

  • Talent and org evaluation, feedback, organizational planning, org charts, advocating for headcount, recruiting, and hiring

  • Communicate with a multi-layered organization to build trust, talking at all hands and town halls

  • Helping individuals bring their whole selves to work to find success (and teaching them how to help others do the same)

Driving & Measuring Impact

  • Blend business and design strategy

  • Drive teams to execute with focus

  • Foster a culture of radical focus and radical candor that people will love (rather than avoid or loathe)

  • Leverage practices and systems to develop and measure goals (OKR’s for example)

  • Build, scale, or fix design systems so they can be a strategic asset to the company (rather than a style guide used for design)

Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Forge healthy cross-functional relationships (or mend broken ones)

  • Align goals across functions or groups

  • Identify what work to start / stop / continue

Learn about my style

Testimonials
Cody Swann
Cody Swann

Coaching Client & Previous Staff

I first worked with Nicole during my time at Dialpad, and I've been lucky enough to continue working with her as my coach as I pursue my dream of building a digital product agency.

Nicole has been instrumental in developing my leadership and interpersonal skills, which has improved how I communicate with my clients and partners. Her coaching has helped me create a more collaborative work environment, resulting in improved productivity, stronger team dynamics, and higher quality of work.

What I appreciate about Nicole is that she makes coaching sessions not only informative but also enjoyable. Her warm, approachable style and sense of humor put me at ease, even when discussing challenging topics.

Nicole's coaching doesn't just stop at the professional level, either. She's been a huge help in navigating personal challenges that have affected my work. Her empathy and holistic approach to coaching have been incredibly valuable.

Overall, I highly recommend Nicole to anyone looking to improve their design leadership, communication, collaboration skills, and overall quality of life. She's an amazing coach, and I feel grateful to have had the opportunity to work with her.

Ya'el Keren
Ya'el Keren

Staff & Mentee

I’ve had the great pleasure of working with Nicole as my manager and mentor at Dropbox for over 3 years. Nicole is an incredibly supportive and encouraging coach. She has a remarkable talent for understanding people's unique strengths and growth areas and providing insightful feedback and actionable guidance to help them reach their goals. Nicole is a great listener, always taking the time to understand other people’s perspectives and concerns before providing valuable advice.

I highly recommend Nicole as a coach and mentor. Her skills and expertise will undoubtedly be an asset to anyone looking to achieve their full potential in their personal or professional lives.

Fred Carreido
Fred Carreido

Coaching Client

I've been so lucky to have Nicole in my corner as I navigate this new stage in my career. She's been an amazing resource for me, really helping me fine-tune my leadership skills with practical advice and tools that I can use every day. I know that with her expertise and mentorship, I'll be able to grow and advance in my career for years to come.

Marek Szeszycki
Marek Szeszycki

Staff & Coachee
I’m grateful to have had the privilege of cultivating a career supported by Nicole as both a previous manager and long-time mentor. Nicole approaches coaching with a mix of empathy and reflection which has helped me reach a deeper level of introspection and forge a career path which aligns with my strengths of communicating and facilitating design activities to break down complex experiences and important decisions. I continue to be excited about my career trajectory, which has been influenced by Nicole’s coaching skillset.

Leif Hill
Leif Hill

Staff & Mentee

Nicole is one of the best leaders I’ve ever had the privilege to work under!

I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with Nicole and benefitted from her wisdom and advice many times. Even though we do not work with each other now, I still contact her and she always makes time to listen… really listen, and in this day, that is a rare skill. I know that others will benefit from her wisdom and advice like I have. She’s the best! 

Emilia Ronchetti
Emilia Ronchetti

Staff & Mentee

Nicole is one of the best leaders I ever worked with. During our 1:1s she always challenged me, and pushed the right buttons, to get the best out of me. She brings all her industry experience to every call. I would go to her with a problem and she already had experienced it in one or more organizations so she gave me great advice and made me feel confident I would be able to solve it too.

Marshall Norman
Marshall Norman

Staff & Mentee

Let me tell you about Nicole. She came on at Dialpad as VP of design and in the course of a year, she fought tooth and nail to make design a voice that can now lead the conversation of the product. And she did it with thoughtfulness and understanding—bringing balance to the organization.

As if that wasn’t a massive feat of determination and grit, she also took the time to make sure every designer felt heard, important, and needed.

Nicole has the rare ability to give meaningful, productive advice while showing respect and empathy for a person. Two things that are hard to find in one package. On more than one occasion and in more than one setting, Nicole has met me where I was, listened to me, and then helped me get my head straight so I could move forward.

 

How would we work together?

Chemistry call (free)

This is the first call in which we get to know each other in a casual chat for 30 minutes. I can tell you more about myself, and get to know what’s on your mind. We can then decide if there’s good chemistry between us such that we’d make a good team. I will never put you on the spot - I leave it to you to consider if the connection is right and if you’d like to work with me, we’d follow up over email after this session.

Engagement Agreement

We’d agree on a 3- or 6- month engagement whereby we meet for 60 minutes every other week and I’ll work with you to define 1-3 primary goals to ideally make progress on together during that time. I’m also available between sessions over email, chat, or brief phone calls.

Discovery

In partnership with you, I would first set a session to learn about you and understand as much about your history, your life, your job, and anything else that is important for you to share. I want to learn about your dreams and your struggles, what is on your mind, and if you have any specific goals or situations you’d like us to work through. It’s important for me to learn about who you are as a person and how you fit in the world so that I can provide the best guidance.

60 Minute Bi-weekly Sessions

In each session, we will start with discussing what you’d like to walk out of the session with - is it specific actions? A new framing to consider? A task that will help you grow? You are in charge of what you want to get out of coaching, so it’s only right that you define that coming into the session - I’ll be your partner to guide you along the way.

At the end of each session, we will discuss what you learned, what takeaways you have, and what specific actions you will take between this and the next session. I may give you homework or challenge you to take an action that brings you outside your comfort zone or close to meeting a specific goal. At the beginning of the next session, we will start with reviewing actions taken from the previous session and an open discussion about learnings.

Wrap up

After all sessions are completed, we’ll review your goals and celebrate your growth over the engagement. If you’re ready to move on, we will say goodbye until the next time you need guidance, or if you’d like to renew then we’ll create a new agreement.

A little about me

I’ve spent the last 20+ years leading teams of various sizes, across multiple geographic locations and between a handful of different industries, both within tech and elsewhere.

Over the years, I’ve gained valuable experience as a leader and spent many hours mentoring and coaching individuals at all levels. I’ve spent the most time coaching designers and design leaders, but I’ve also guided partners across other functions.

Sometimes I’m referred to as “mama bear,” but I’m also a fierce leader who advocates for my teams, builds strong relationships, and drives serious impact with my human-first approach to leadership.

Read about my personal story →