About JP

I’m Jennifer Parsons, JP to most who know me. I’ve spent 17+ years in tech, the last 4+ in engineering leadership. I’m self-taught, neurodivergent, and a Gen-X woman in an industry that wasn’t really built for any of those things. I figured a lot of this out the hard way.

My superpower: I take broken processes, figure out what’s actually wrong, and bring people along to help fix them. That applies to teams, to workflows, and to the individual engineers and leaders I coach and manage.

I bring a non-traditional background and skills to the table:

• Former graphic designer and career changer
• Engineering manager
• Magazine editor and publisher
• Neurodivergent leader who figured out how to build sustainable systems that work with my brain, not against it
• A long history of mentoring and showing up for my community in this industry

If you’d like to know more, check out my LinkedIn or resume website.

• GitHub
• Instagram
• Bluesky
• Mastodon
• Spotify

Not your Instagram coach

I don’t have a morning routine I want to sell you and I’m not going to give you five pillars of authentic leadership. I’m not here to go viral, I’m just here to help.

I still work in tech so I’m living with the same challenges you are. I don’t have a secret to the universe, but I do have a lot of experience and a lot of empathy.

I’m from New Jersey and I wear that forthrightness on my sleeve. I tell it like it is, but I do it with care and kindness. I want to help you get to the other side of whatever’s going on, not just commiserate about how bad it is.

I also might drop the occasional F-bomb. It’s like the salt on a well-seasoned sentence.

What I’ve done

I’ve led teams through the kind of situations that don’t have clean answers.

Like a cross-functional team with low morale, missed sprint goals, and a client who’d stopped trusting us. We became the highest-performing team at the company because we worked together to solve the problem and communicate.

I’ve inherited legacy codebases with no test coverage and poor accessibility and built the team up to actually care about that stuff. I’ve supported direct reports through personal crises, navigated organizational politics, and managed projects for government clients where “just ship it” is never an option.

I’m good at the part of leadership that doesn’t fit so well in a LinkedIn soundbite.

Why I coach

I became a manager because I care about engineers. I care about how we do the work, but more importantly about how we grow and treat each other.

A lot of what makes engineering leadership hard isn’t technical. It’s the ambiguity and abstract or absent “definition of done”. I also understand the feeling that you should already know how to do this, but don’t…yet. I coach people through that because I’ve been in it. Most of the advice out there undersells how hard the transition actually is.

How I work

I listen before I solve and I ask direct questions to understand the problem better. I’ll tell you what I actually think, including when I think you’re making it harder on yourself than it needs to be, and I’ll do that with care and kindness.

I don’t run a set curriculum. Sessions are built around what you’re actually dealing with, not a fixed agenda. If something blows up at work between sessions, we can work that. Leadership is about being flexible and adapting to change. I model that in my coaching and mentoring.

Outside of work

I’ve run Luna Station Quarterly, a speculative fiction magazine publishing women-identified authors for the last 17+ years. I work with my hands building analog stuff and making zines. I’m a baseball fan (go Dodgers!) and I read and write fiction.