Mounica Veggalam

Mounica Veggalam, Leadership Coach

Most impactful leadership lies at the intersection of:
- Personal growth
- Showing up with strong presence
- Learning to connect and lead other humans

I support leaders to scale their impact and create business results by guiding them through the above areas.

Career and Leadership Coach

Microsoft

I often get asked, “How are you a leadership coach when you haven’t been a manager yourself?”

The leadership I talk about is not strategic or tactical.

It’s self-leadership.

Your career trajectory — whether you reach C-Suite heights, or stay stuck in the middle — it starts with you. With what’s going on inside you.

This is the powerful lesson I realized at Microsoft. 

I observed inadequate leadership, average leadership, and excellent leadership. 

I was in heated design discussion rooms, witnessed managers make technical choices from their insecurities, and noticed the best empathetic leaders lost in overwhelm without any recognition.

I also saw powerful leadership from people who challenged the status quo. And challenged their own beliefs.

They were the people who did the right thing
- even when they’re anxious,
- even when they’re frustrated,
- even when they were at the edge of saying, “screw this sh**”

Your frustrations, disappointments, and resentments are where your growth opportunities lie.

When you understand and transform your inner landscape, your capacity for leadership expands, and you'll see the outside results: the promotion, the better project, and the better titles.

That’s the best way to make an impact in this world.

This is transformational leadership.

If you want to learn to lead your people from the inside-out, reach out and we’ll talk.

I am deeply invested in my personal transformation and leadership. That’s how I’m a leadership coach. That’s how I lead my clients to discover entirely new ways of presenting themselves.

I offer trainings, coaching and deep personal transformation, so you can feel fulfilled in your leadership mission. Send me a private message and we’ll chat.

Software Engineer

Practice Fusion

One of my mentors there asked, “Would you rather teach your kids to be smart or to be kind?”

What if I could do both?

With that question, I realized how starkly I’m drawn to deep philosophical concepts and the nature of the human mind. 

And this realization would set it in years later. But I didn’t know that then.

This internship was my entry into the software engineering world. 

It was incredible, surrounded by brilliant people in the startup culture. This is where I released my first feature into production, had my first exceptional manager, and gave my first talk in front of 200 smart people (I was terrible). 

It paved the way for another incredible role at Microsoft.

I won’t lie— I was arrogant about my IQ and my ability to grasp technical concepts quickly.

But I also had crippling self-doubt and introversion that got in the way of my impact.

Even through all that, a couple of things are common today:
— I value people and human connection. Regardless of my arrogance and self-doubt.
— I’m constantly pushing myself beyond my comfort zone. No matter how scary it is.
— I always look at my side of things. Even when I don’t want to. Especially when I don’t want to.

Today, this helps me serve my clients powerfully, 
— I point to the truth at the risk of them not liking me.
— I can deeply support them in facing the risks and uncertainities.
— I invest time and energy in confronting my beliefs and blindspots, so they don’t have to manage my ego.

It's a deeply rewarding experience.

Software Development Engineer Intern

Life & leadership coach for professionals, leaders and entrepreneurs | Software engineer turned coach & inner-work guide

Hi there! 👋 I’m Mounica. I help visionary tech leaders fast-track their careers so they can create more impact, build stronger teams, and bring their vision to reality, all with joyful life-balance.

I’m a software engineer turned transformational coach. Throughout my career, I was driven and confident on the outside. I achieved accolades, promotions, and patents. On the side, I tried to handle all my dissatisfaction with life through meditation and spiritual studies.

But none of that changed the *experience of life.*

I was always looking into the future for everything to settle down. My conversations lacked joy. I was subtly controlling in my relationships so I didn't break down. I was obsessed with achievement. 

Now I have a general sense of creative joy while taking up big projects. And I'm more present with my family.

It wasn't an overnight transformation (nothing worthwhile ever is). I approach this work from an intersection of developmental psychology (think ontological leadership and Robert Kegan's constructive map) and Eastern non-dual spirituality. 

Here are 3 levels of transformation you can expect through working with me:
1. Embodying your leadership voice & an internal compass, so you show Executive Presence.
2. Holding multiple, often conflicting, perspectives, so you bring a vision you deeply desire to reality.
3. Holding multiple identities, so you find creative joy in every choice you make (and have you ready for non-dual interconnected perception of the world).

This work is not about adding knowledge or skills but creating a *fundamentally different kind of mind* that takes the largest perspective, is more complex, and can handle more uncertainty.

My clients report:
- Influence without losing their ethics or empathy
- Command respect in a room full of brilliant (or skeptical) people
- Have ease, joy, and fun creating the results they want

If you’re curious, send me a DM!

Helping tech managers fast-track their careers with personalized 1:1 coaching.

I help with -
- Making tough career decisions
- Landing the next big role and making a vertical moves
- Transforming into a leader who delivers, impacts, and inspires.

Management skills and Relationships come easy to people managers. But what sets you apart is the Leadership mindset. I help managers become leaders and achieve their career goals along the way. 

The typical titles of my clients include:
- Engineering Manager
- Director of Engineering/Program/Product Management
- PM Manager
- Senior/Principal Engineers/PM

Airtasker

I’m currently managing and hiring for a fully remote team based in Portugal, that has set out to improve and modernise the core experience of getting work done on the platform.
We also own a large portion of the monolithic architecture of the platform and we are giving it a visual refresh for users and an architectural refresh for developers.

The team so far has contributed to big improvements across our customer experience. Which has resulted in Taskers on the platform earning millions more each year.

We’ve created a visual design and product vision as well as technical architectural vision for our space that has garnered support from across the organisation and giving our team a reference to where we are headed.
We’ve upgraded large parts of the web and iOS monoliths and introduced seams and new patterns for teams to better own different parts of the user experience and improve them into the future.

Senior Engineering Manager / Portugal Country Lead

From May 2020 I became the director of engineering for the teams focussed on the top of the growth funnel. These teams were focussed on International expansion and SEO engineering.
This was an opportunity to be a manager of managers and step into a more guiding role for teams and broader organisational culture (not something I had much time to focus on in my own startups previously).

During this time the company shifted to being fully remote because of Covid. As I was the most experienced remote worker in the company, I wrote the guidelines and created a community of people interested in improving remote work processes.

When the VP of engineering left, I took over the engineering management of the hiring process. I took some improvements that had been in the works for two years and saw them across the finish line. So our candidates could have a better experience and we’d have a good range of signal gathering.

Director Of Engineering

In Aug 2019 I took on the management of the engineers in the team. I was the first fully remote engineering manager in the company.
This was my opportunity to really strengthen my professional people management skills with good mentors to support me.

During this time I led the development of a server driven UI contract for generating SEO pages, with highly cacheable content.

I also successfully led the backend engineers across the company during a two week sprint to upgrade our Rails Monolith from Rails 4 to 6. With zero downtime for our users.

I led the team to also take our average SEO page speed from 30 to 70. Beating the majority of our competitors.

Engineering Manager

In May 2019 I took on the role of Tech Lead for the Growth group, leading 3 teams to focus on SEO/Acquisition, tooling for our marketing department and a team introducing a new payment method to the platform.

Tech Lead & Senior Staff Software Engineer

Joined in 2018 as a staff software engineer for the growth product team. This evolved into creating several foundational pieces to the Airtasker marketplace and its international expansion strategy. Including a SEO landing page generation system and a location system for reverse geocoding.
I was the first full time remote engineer at Airtasker, so I took it upon myself to create the company’s remote work guidelines and help set up practices and equipment in the office that would allow meetings to involve remote participants.

Staff Software Engineer

Front-End Foxes School

Volunteering as a mentor to provide whatever help I can to women who are entering the tech industry.

Mentor

Eventfuel.io

Eventfuel.io is a platform for running live, hybrid and virtual events. I built the first prototype of the platform in 2011 when working as an organiser of Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon.
For 4 years I ran it as the CEO and co-founder in Lisbon Portugal and saw it become one of the leading event SaaS platforms in Europe. At its peak there were hundreds of events per week running on the platform.
Hundreds of users getting access to invaluable content and context and providing their feedback instantly to the event organisers.
Multiple Fortune 500 companies utilise the platform to run their events.
During 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, the events industry was hit hard and Eventfuel.io was no exception. The amazing team have built a virtual events platform, working with event organisers every day to help them build great virtual events.

Co-founder

Apple

I worked as a remote consultant for Apple, leading a team of engineers to develop and maintain a secure platform for thousands of small and large scale events annually. Creating streamlined attendee experiences and supporting them and the organisers with valuable information and communication channels.

We worked with the Technical Training Programs and B2B and Education sales teams to support their events throughout EMEIA, Asia, and North America.

Software Engineering Manager

Roster Right

After my stint as a consultant I took on a role as technical advisor to the founder Lisa. Advising her on how to guide a few projects and giving feedback of some of the technical choices that were in front of her.

Technology Advisor

I joined Roster Right as a senior technical consultant for a short stint while they were bringing on a new permanent employee.
I quickly adapted to their Ruby of Rails with React monolith and delivered a string of value for the users of the platform. I then also technically onboarded the new permanent hire.

Senior Full Stack Consultant

Manybots

I worked on the underlying server architecture for the platform and helped prepare the platform for the company vision.

I worked closely with the other founders to create an MVP product and present it to a string of Angel investors.

Head of Technology

Silicon Valley comes to Lisbon (SVC2Lx)

I organised the technical side of the SVC2Lx events program and summits from 2011 to 2012. Cloud services, apps, WiFi, streaming, projection, all the technical plan and tools for enabling the whole team to do their jobs better.

Director Of Event Technology

Capgemini

I worked at Insight4 (now part of CapGemini) as a software engineer. I worked on products such as Travellr.com, MitelCallAccounting.com, QuickTimeSheets.com and also worked as a database engineer working for a variety of government departments.

Department of Education, Tasmania

I worked as a database migration specialist in the department of education. I was responsible for migrating millions of records of data from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 and then 2008. I updated the databases to be compatible, put tests in place to make sure that data was all migrated successfully, and executed the migrations.

Database Developer

NexusLAN

I was the public officer for the non-profit organisation NexusLAN who organised monthly gaming events in Launceston, Australia. We had over 200 regular attendees of the monthly 36 hour events.
I participated in all facets of the event, from setting up the network hardware and servers, to the running of tournaments and managing attendees.

Public Officer & Technical Lead

🇵🇹 After 8 years in Australia, I’m back in Portugal building a tech hub for Airtasker.
If you’d like to be of a company changing people’s lives by enabling them to earn money with any skills. Then connect and we can chat! 😃


I grew up on a dairy farm in Tasmania. Living in that world for 21 years, engrained a work ethic in me that I’ll never shake (and on the flip side is one of my biggest flaws).

I’ve been a pizza delivery guy, a barman, a service station attendant, founded 7 companies and worked for a variety of companies from consultancies, startups, scale-ups and big tech.

I’ve worked as a software engineer and a technical leader, but as a founder I’ve also taken on many many many different hats and learnt to have empathy with a huge variety of functional roles.

I worked for Apple as a consultant building event technology for 6 years. I’ve worked with small scale startups in Portugal and Australia developing prototypes and exploring what creates customer value in a variety of industries.

Since 2018 I’ve been most heavily involved in Airtasker as an engineering leader. I have had the opportunity to focus on being a passionate and professional people manager and organisational leader while guiding how we deliver more and more value to our users.

I’ve really enjoyed learning from great colleagues that have come from big tech (Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon) or startups of various sizes. From these people I’ve learnt so many lessons that have helped shape my perspectives on what patterns can be affectively applied at different stages of a company’s life, how to build products that scale for users and teams over time.

I have also developed a much clearer understanding of how to find and guide groups of talented humans to create value for customers.
I’ve somehow managed to keep pretty close to the metal as a manager, still pairing and mobbing with my team every other day.

Right now I’m applying all of these experiences building out a remote tech hub for Australian based Airtasker in Portugal. Hiring everyone, building the culture of the new team and creating the practices that make the 9 or 11 hour time zone difference a forcing function for better communication, rather than a hindrance.

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Mounica Veggalam

🚀Niko Roberts

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