About ManagerForge
ManagerForge exists because the working world keeps promoting great individual contributors into management roles with no training, no playbook, and no real support. I've been that manager. I've managed that manager. After 20 years, I decided to do something about it.
During my five years at Amazon, I conducted over 1,250 interviews. Not as a hiring manager padding a resume stat. As a certified Hiring Bar Raiser, one of Amazon's most trusted evaluators of human potential. My job was to protect the standard, to help teams find not just good candidates but the right ones. Along the way I coached hundreds of colleagues on how to hire better, lead better, and bring out the best in the people around them.
What I kept seeing at Amazon, at Guitar Center, at ConsumerAffairs, across every organization I've ever been part of, was the same problem hiding in plain sight: managers who were brilliant at their craft and completely unprepared to actually manage people.
That's not an insult. It's just the truth about how the working world works. You get promoted because you're the best engineer, the best salesperson, the best analyst. And then one day you're suddenly responsible for a team, and nobody gives you a real playbook. You get a two-hour HR training, maybe a book recommendation, and then you're on your own, figuring it out in real time, on real people.
I've been that person. I've also managed that person. I've spent more than 20 years across industries building frameworks, developing talent, and creating the kinds of teams that people don't want to leave. ManagerForge is where all of that comes together: the tool, the frameworks, and the development system I spent my career wishing existed.
Here's what the data says, and what I've lived: the number one reason people leave jobs isn't pay. It's their manager. People don't quit companies. They quit bosses. And in almost every case, those bosses didn't start out bad. They just never got the tools they needed.
I've seen it at every level, in companies worth billions of dollars. The person who gets promoted is rarely the person who got management training. The best individual contributor becomes a manager, inherits a team, and suddenly they're operating without a roadmap. They default to what they know: doing the work themselves, micromanaging, avoiding hard conversations, or burning out trying to be everything to everyone.
Companies invest enormous resources in finding talent and almost nothing in developing the people responsible for keeping that talent. The manager is the linchpin of every team, and we treat manager development as an afterthought. ManagerForge exists to change that.
I grew up in New Jersey, an Eagle Scout who took things apart to see how they worked. I earned my degree in Plant Science from Rutgers, which tells you I was always more interested in systems and growth than following a conventional path. From there I built a career that spans more industries and disciplines than most people cover in three lifetimes: customer service, product management, marketing operations, e-commerce, customer data, and customer strategy. Both frontline and senior leadership across all of it.
I built global marketing operations at PerkinElmer from zero to a 22-person team. I led CRM and customer strategy at Guitar Center, a $2B omnichannel retailer, driving 20% YoY email revenue growth and managing 2.2 billion annual customer touchpoints. I have an MBA from Babson College (ranked #1 in Entrepreneurship, consistently) and a Certificate in Applied Generative AI from MIT. I am currently working toward an Associate's in Cloud Computing from Santa Monica College, because I genuinely cannot stop learning.
But the role that changed everything was Amazon. Five years inside one of the most demanding organizations on the planet taught me more about people, teams, and what it actually means to lead than everything else combined.
A few things that don't make it onto professional bios
I've been sober since 2012. I'm deeply active in the recovery community, and that experience, learning to be honest, to ask for help, to lead from vulnerability, has shaped how I lead probably more than anything else on my resume.
I'm married (coming up on 30 years), I have two kids and two cats, and I have a lot of tattoos. I grew up blue collar and I never stopped being blue collar. I will always roll up my sleeves and work alongside the team. I don't believe in leading from behind a desk.
I'm an Eagle Scout, which means I learned early: you prepare before you need to, you serve because it matters, and you leave things better than you found them. That's what ManagerForge is why ManagerForge exists: my commitment to leave the world of management better than I found it.
Core Values
They're the beliefs that have guided every team I have built, every decision ManagerForge makes, and every product we ship.
The best leaders lead with their humanity. Understanding the people you work with isn't soft. It's the most strategic thing you can do. We build products and cultures around this belief.
Growth is not a destination. It's a practice. We model the curiosity and continuous improvement we ask of every manager we train. If you've stopped learning, you've started falling behind.
Real leadership isn't about titles. It's about showing up, doing the work, and earning trust through action. Not words. We never ask of our teams what we wouldn't do ourselves.
Every opinion is a hypothesis until the data speaks. We apply the scientific method to everything: look at the numbers, identify the problem, test the solution, and iterate. We're not afraid of what we find.
We build trust through consistency, transparency, and follow-through. We say what we mean and do what we say. No exceptions, no shortcuts.
The best product in the world is nothing without the people who make it work. We treat people like people, with dignity, respect, and the belief that they are capable of more than they've been given credit for.
The world changes. Good leaders change with it. Rigidity is the enemy of progress. We build resilience and adaptability into everything we create, because the only constant is change.
We're not in this for the quick win. We build teams, systems, and relationships designed to compound over time. Quality over hacks. Roots over rockets.
Start free. No credit card. No onboarding call. Just add your first person and log your next 1:1.
Questions? Reach out directly.