What Happens When You Add AI to Your Leadership Toolbox?
Discover how one engineering manager shifted from overwhelm to strategic leadership by using AI-driven workflows and coaching. Learn practical ways to reduce chaos, accelerate team learning, and use AI to amplify—not replace—your leadership impact.
If you’re leading a team and constantly juggling context, bugs, unclear roadmaps, and random questions from stakeholders, you’re not alone.
One of my clients was in that exact situation, until we used coaching and AI strategically to shift her out of survival mode and into true leadership.
She is an engineering manager with a new role at a fast-paced tech company. She was feeling overwhelmed by:
- A massive, inherited codebase with little documentation
- A team still building confidence in their technical ownership
- No product manager for months
- Bugs, bugs, and more bugs
- And then… surprise! She was expected to field technical questions about Bluetooth, which is a technology she hadn’t used before this role
She came to our call wondering:
“Am I supposed to know all of this? Am I failing as a leader if I don’t?”
This is such a common experience for engineering leaders.
You feel like you’re expected to know everything, anticipate everything, and explain it perfectly. All while leading with empathy and clarity, even when the systems around you are chaotic.
And for women and other underrepresented leaders in tech?
That pressure often comes with an added layer of scrutiny and second-guessing.
But here’s the shift we created together:
💡 What if AI could save her time and help her tackle her most pressing challenges so that she can focus on showing up strategically?
Here’s how we applied AI in her leadership role:
🔍 Architecture fluency without the deep dive
Rather than trying to become a Bluetooth expert overnight, we used AI to help her gain just enough context to engage strategically. One approach was:
Given an article on the latest Bluetooth 6 features, we prompted ChatGPT to brainstorm potential use cases that could enhance the product area her team owned.
Some ideas were great, others not so much, but it sparked useful thinking and helped her identify gaps, ask better questions, and contribute confidently in cross-functional conversations.
🧭 AI-assisted “spikes” to reduce future surprises
We built a lightweight process where her team could use AI to investigate future roadmap items by leveraging code inspection tools to highlight risks and surface hidden complexity, helping her partner more effectively with PMs.
🧠 Team learning, accelerated
To reduce reliance on tribal knowledge, we implemented a rotation where engineers used AI to learn unfamiliar parts of the system, fix small bugs, and present back to the team. It turned bugs into learning opportunities and rebuilt confidence in the team.
The result?
She reclaimed her leadership energy.
She was no longer stuck in reactive mode or doubting whether she was doing “enough.”
Instead, she was leading with foresight, clarity, and strategic influence.
This is the power of blending leadership coaching with intelligent AI workflows.
AI doesn’t replace strategic thinking.
It amplifies it.
It gives you the breathing room to be the kind of leader you came here to be.
If you’ve been curious about how to integrate AI into your leadership toolbox, or you want to work with a coach who can help you lead both strategically and efficiently, this is exactly what I help technology leaders do every day.
DM me on LinkedIn if you’re curious.
I’d love to hear where you’re feeling stretched, and how we can design support that fits.
And if you haven’t had a chance to grab it yet, I created a short, actionable guide you can start using right now:
➡️ The 4 AI Workflows Every Engineering Leader Should Implement This Quarter
