Megan Fales announced her new company with a wish that was unusually difficult to put in a sales brochure. She wanted to create the culture she had always hoped to find. In 2019, as she prepared to launch Transcenda with Alexey Koval, she made the terms public: equal opportunity across backgrounds and geographies, equal treatment for women, and fair treatment for employees and clients. A company, apparently, could begin with a complaint about the available workplaces and the nerve to propose another.
There was a commercial plan, too. Transcenda would help young businesses grow and established organizations change through software engineering. Her launch announcement also described an ambition to help employee-owned product ideas find funding and a route to market. These were founding intentions, rather than a list of completed ventures. The distinction matters: the interesting part of an origin story is often the standard a founder volunteers to be measured against.
The public launch followed on August 12, 2019. Fales was the American half of a partnership built across borders, with Koval and an early team in Ukraine. In her later recollection, she was the only team member based in the United States. Before the company could acquire the comforting habits of an established business, it had to learn how to work across distance. Geography was part of the job description from the beginning.
“What I desire is to create a culture I always wish I had found.”
Megan Fales, announcing Transcenda in 2019
Before the launch, a question about screens
Her route into that job ran through business development and technology consulting. She worked at JRD Systems, then Gartner, before joining Star in 2015. At Star she moved from strategic growth into a managing director role covering automotive and mobility and the US East. She attended Central Michigan University, studying management information systems. The career connected commercial decisions with the people and systems required to carry them out.
A glimpse of her product thinking survives in Star’s 2019 CES report. As vehicle interiors filled with displays, Fales argued for personalized experiences instead of simply adding more functions and screens. It was a useful reservation to express at an electronics show, where another screen can seem the answer to questions nobody has asked. The point was about the experience of the person in the car.
That concern helps explain the shape of the business she subsequently founded. Engineering, design, and commercial purpose would have to sit in the same conversation. A product can meet its technical specification and still disappoint the person using it. Fales’s earlier work placed her near that awkward intersection, where a feature must eventually justify the trouble of having been built.
There is a particular difficulty in making that promise to clients and employees together. Each group can ask for something the other must supply: more time, faster delivery, a clearer explanation, a change of plan. Keeping both in view requires repeated choices. The founding announcement exposed that tension early, giving the business a standard that would have to survive the ordinary negotiations of paid work as well as extraordinary events.
The co-founder who would say it plainly
Koval supplied a complementary emphasis on delivery. He describes successful projects in terms of capable people, defined processes, and integrity, including a willingness to surface risks and challenge decisions. He had spent his career bringing products to market and building engineering organizations. For a founder promising better treatment, a partner willing to have uncomfortable conversations was a practical choice.
Their working philosophy leaves room for an engineer to question the brief. That is consequential in a service business. A customer can buy capacity; buying useful disagreement requires a different relationship. It asks both parties to tolerate the moment when someone explains that a cherished assumption is expensive, incomplete, or unlikely to survive contact with the user.
Transcenda’s account of its founding describes teams assembled around business goals, with advice about engineering practices and the skills needed for a particular engagement. The aim was a working relationship that could improve the client’s ability to build products. It gave Fales’s cultural ambition a commercial setting: people needed enough trust to offer judgment, and enough responsibility to stand behind it.
When the calls became urgent
In February 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine transformed the meaning of a distributed team. Fales has recalled the first calls to wake colleagues, the urgent effort to establish that teammates and families were safe, and the movement across cities and borders. These were people with whom she had built the business day by day. Distance, once a scheduling problem, became a much harsher fact.
Her account puts the Ukrainian team at the center of what followed. Colleagues supported one another through relocation and unfamiliar working conditions. She has also thanked clients who maintained their commitment during those early months. The company says it retained its team and all client engagements through that period, while accelerating its expansion into other countries.
There is a temptation to turn such an episode into a founder’s trophy. Fales’s own recollection gives the credit more widely. The clients had choices. The colleagues were navigating events far beyond any office’s control. Holding a business together depended on their relationships and decisions as well as hers. The founding promise had become specific: people needed help, information, continuity, and someone who would answer.
A mission statement has the agreeable advantage of fitting on a wall. A relocation does not. The experience makes the early language about equal treatment across geographies more demanding to read. It also gives the company’s later international footprint a history: expansion carried an operational purpose, alongside the ordinary ambitions of a growing business.
A room that can span time zones
By April 2025, Fales was speaking at UXDX about communication across product development teams. Her session, “It Needs to Be Said,” addressed a familiar difficulty: talented technical people and the people depending on their work do not always communicate effectively. The program included feedback, client relationships, and collaboration between colleagues in different countries and time zones.
The subject is wonderfully resistant to glamour. Nobody has ever improved a meeting by announcing that it will now be transformational. Yet a delayed question can become a delayed decision, and a polite silence can leave two teams building toward different expectations. Fales’s choice of topic brought the discussion down to the daily exchanges on which a product depends.
Her presentation also concerned the gap between technical and nontechnical colleagues. A shared project does not automatically supply a shared vocabulary. Someone must make the work understandable enough for other people to decide, object, or contribute. That requirement follows naturally from her original insistence that a company should give people room to succeed.
For a leader working across borders, this is a continuing management task. The same sentence can land differently depending on role, context, and whether its recipient has the information behind it. Her public emphasis on communication connects the company’s early geography with the practical demands of its later scale. A larger team brings more chances for a useful idea to arrive, and more chances for it to get lost.
Three hundred people, still a relationship business
Transcenda now describes a network of more than 300 engineers, designers, and strategists across six countries: the United States, Brazil, Colombia, Poland, Ukraine, and Romania. Its specialists work within clients’ systems and teams. For Fales, the task has grown from building an initial cross-border partnership to leading an organization that serves enterprise technology leaders.
That arrangement makes the behavior of individual colleagues part of the service itself. A client encounters the company through the engineer discussing a risk, the designer asking about a user, or the person responsible for a difficult handoff. The founding concern with culture therefore has an immediate business consequence. It shapes what the customer experiences while the work is happening.
In April 2026, Fales was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year finalist for Michigan and Northwest Ohio. The regional recognition placed her alongside founders and executives from a range of businesses. It marks a public milestone in a career whose more persistent subject has been how teams work together, often beyond the customer’s view.
Engineers, designers, and strategists.
Six countries. One working organization.
The next conversation is about AI
Her attention has increasingly turned to the decisions artificial intelligence poses for technology leaders. In a public post, she described recurring questions about experimentation, risk to existing systems, and demonstrating a return on investment. Her advice favored taking action while preserving the ability to change direction. “Move fast, but build in room to pivot,” she wrote.
The caution inside that advice deserves its place beside the speed. A business introducing AI still has customers, working systems, and people who must understand what is changing. Transcenda’s stated plans include deeper work in AI, data science, and product design. The tools may change the work; the need to decide what is useful remains recognizably close to her earlier question about all those screens.
She is also listed as host of Substrate, a Transcenda interview show about the engineering, design, and product leadership behind software businesses. Its premise follows decisions between business leadership and the teams doing the building. Conversation has become both a management concern and a format for examining other leaders’ choices.
Fales began with the wish to build a workplace she would have wanted to find. The wish now has colleagues in six countries, clients with complicated products, and a fresh set of technological decisions attached to it. Its meaning can be judged in ordinary encounters: whether someone raises the problem early, understands the answer, and trusts the person answering. A rather exacting ambition, for something that began as a wish.