About

About Formative Solutions

Coaching grounded in human experience, real-world complexity, and the patterns that shape how you move through work and life.

Hi — I’m Mike.

I’m a coach, facilitator, and technical practitioner with a long history inside product and engineering teams. My work now centers on helping people understand their patterns, navigate complexity, and design ways of working and living that feel more honest and sustainable.

Before coaching, I spent years as a software engineer and technical lead — working with web systems, databases, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, microservices, and the messy realities of scaling teams. The work was interesting, but what stood out most were the human patterns underneath it all: burnout loops, unclear expectations, over-functioning, conflict avoidance, and the pressure to stay “on” even when the system itself was strained.

I started recognizing those patterns in myself, too — taking on too much, trying to fix everything through effort, or focusing on delivery while ignoring what my nervous system was trying to say. Coaching became the place where those patterns finally made sense, and where they began to shift.

Formative Solutions grew out of that journey. Today, I help individuals and teams see the deeper systems shaping their work: the beliefs they inherited, the roles they were rewarded for, the structures they’re navigating, and the unspoken rules keeping things stuck. The focus is always the same: more clarity, more honesty, and more choice.

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How I approach this work

Coaching integrates emotional experience, personal patterns, and the systems you move through. The goal is clarity, agency, and a more grounded way of leading and living — not performance or perfection.

People first

Coaching starts with what’s happening inside — the overwhelm, the pressure, the patterns that keep repeating. These aren’t flaws to fix; they’re signals pointing toward what needs attention.

Systems-aware

Personal growth doesn't exist outside context. Coaching considers your relationships, expectations, team norms, history, and the unspoken rules shaping how you show up.

Experiment-driven

Instead of forcing big transformations, we design small, safe-to-try experiments — each one offering insight you can build on. Change happens through curiosity, not pressure.

Coaching shaped by real experience — technical and human

Years in engineering and years of personal growth both inform the coaching work. The core focus, though, is helping individuals understand their patterns, navigate complexity, and make more grounded choices in work and life.

Understanding the reality you’re in

Coaching happens in the context of your actual life — the deadlines, pressure, expectations, emotional weight, and patterns you’ve developed to survive complex environments. Sessions slow things down so you can see what’s happening beneath the pace.

Connecting inner patterns with outer systems

What happens inside you often mirrors the systems around you. Coaching helps connect those dots so you can work with both — not just cope with what's broken or force yourself to push harder.

Support through transition and complexity

Whether you’re navigating burnout, a role transition, conflict, or the sense that something needs to change, coaching offers a grounded place to look honestly at your patterns and experiment with new ways forward.

Credentials & background

Coaching work is informed by years inside product and engineering teams, alongside dedicated study of systems, leadership, and human development.

Coaching & facilitation

Training and ongoing practice in 1:1 coaching, group facilitation, and systems-informed work. Sessions draw from reflective inquiry, experiment design, and nervous-system-aware pacing rather than scripts or quick fixes.

  • Experience coaching individuals in tech and adjacent fields
  • Facilitation of retrospectives, workshops, and team sessions
  • Focus on patterns, experiments, and integration into real life

Technical & systems experience

Background in software engineering and technical leadership, including work with modern web stacks, infrastructure, and distributed systems.

  • Web development with React, Astro, and modern JavaScript
  • Experience with databases, microservices, and internal APIs
  • Exposure to Kubernetes, Docker, and GCP-based environments

Web projects & tools

Portfolio of websites and tools personally built and maintained, often in service of coaching, team work, and experiment-driven practices.

  • Sites and landing pages for individuals and small teams
  • Lightweight internal tools and dashboards
  • Experiment-driven prototypes to support new ways of working

Journey into coaching

Coaching didn’t arrive as a single turning point. It grew out of years in engineering, Agile practice, and personal work on patterns that kept repeating — in systems and in people.

Software engineer

Early roles in software engineering and web development, seeing how products actually get built: trade-offs, late nights, shifting requirements, and the quiet pressure to keep everything running.

First introductions to Agile

Exposure to Agile frameworks and practices — noticing both the potential for better collaboration and the gap between ceremonies on paper and how teams actually felt inside them.

Technical lead

Increasing responsibility for systems and delivery. Realizing that the hardest problems weren’t purely technical, but lived in expectations, communication, and the emotional load of being “the responsible one.”

Scrum Master & technical manager

Stepping into roles focused on both people and process. Supporting teams through sprints, releases, and organizational change — and seeing where frameworks helped, where they hurt, and where human realities didn’t fit neatly into any model.

Agile coach & facilitator

Working with multiple teams and leaders on retros, ways of working, and cross-team alignment. Emphasis on experiments over rigid playbooks, and on treating team dynamics and reporting as part of the same system — work that continues today through Agile and team coaching engagements.

Coach for individuals & teams (present)

Center of gravity in 1:1 coaching, while still holding a strong systems and Agile lens. Supporting individuals and teams as they notice long-standing patterns, honor what those patterns protected, and experiment with new ways of leading, relating, and working — in both personal and team contexts.

Today, Formative Solutions brings these threads together through personal coaching, Agile and team coaching, and web solutions that support the systems clients are trying to build.

What clients often notice

The specifics are different for each person and team, but some common shifts tend to emerge over time.

For individuals

Many clients describe moving from “I’m the problem” toward “my patterns make sense given what I’ve lived through” — and from there, finding more grounded ways to set boundaries, make decisions, and relate to their work and relationships.

For teams

Teams often report more honest conversations, clearer expectations, and a shift from vague frustration to shared language about what’s actually happening. Experiments in process and communication become easier to design and sustain.

For leaders & organizations

Leaders frequently notice improved alignment between what is said and what is experienced. Conversations about pace, capacity, and trade-offs become more real, and decisions begin to reflect both delivery needs and human limits.

Additional notes.

Related writing exploring small shifts that influence people, teams, and systems.

Work with me.

Whether you’re navigating burnout, a role transition, complex team dynamics, or a general sense that something needs to shift, coaching offers a dedicated space to work with all of that more intentionally.

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