About
About Me
How I Got Here
I'm William Hallatt, coach and founder of lead | front left, where I help experienced professionals become competent leaders.
I've been the software engineer turned architect, individual contributor promoted to team lead, the team lead stepping into management, and the engineering leader responsible for multiple disciplines and delivery streams. I've built teams, shipped products, and led cross-functional, distributed groups across medium-sized businesses and enterprise-scale organisations (and I'm still at it).
Leadership is learnable, but training is not enough. Coaching bridges the knowing-doing gap by helping people wrestle with the complexity of their context and apply what they know in ways that work.
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The Professional Stuff
Experience
I have more than 15 years in software development and engineering leadership. In recent years I’ve led cross-functional, geographically distributed groups across multiple teams to ship systems used in high-stakes marine survey and asset-integrity work, combining AWS-based data pipelines, near-real-time video streaming, and high-performance 3D visualisation. Before moving into broader leadership, I spent years hands-on: building web applications, developing 3D training simulators for mining, and contributing to mission-critical telecom systems.
Why I Became a Coach
I discovered the power of coaching while in leadership roles, particularly after reading Michael Bungay-Stanier's The Coaching Habit and David L. Marquet's Turn the Ship Around. The impact I saw on myself and my teams was so significant that I decided to formalise my skills with a Graduate Certificate of Applied Coaching, which ultimately lead to you reading this!
Leadership is learnable, but training is not enough. Coaching helps people wrestle with the complexity of their context and apply what they know in ways that work.