program-management
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Troy Rudd and the price of a promise
He rose through finance to lead a business built on engineering judgment. At AECOM, Troy Rudd is betting on shared expertise and artificial intelligence - while an old contract tests his promise of a lower-risk future.
The coach who fired the cookie dough
Snap! Mobile turned a coach’s dislike of product sales into a digital fundraising business. Now it wants the rest of the athletic department’s to-do list, too.
Randall Mills Keeps All the Job Titles
He studied signals, managed aerospace programs and eventually gave himself a title long enough to require its own org chart. The constant is simpler: Randall Mills likes turning difficult work into work a team can do.
The Tiny Company Behind NASA's Very Large Voice
PCI Productions was five years old when it became one of NASA's communications nerve centers. The trick was starting new without starting over.
The Studio That Learned to Run the Mission
Media Fusion began by making an invisible spacecraft visible. Thirty years later, its more revealing trick is making the invisible work around America’s technical missions run smoothly.
The Small Firm Translating Big Government
Kaptivate built a business around an unglamorous but valuable trick: making sprawling public programs legible enough to act on. Its best work begins where the memo, the dataset and the community meeting stop agreeing.
The Small Firm That Makes Bureaucracy Legible
Cities do not merely need money. They need someone who can find it, win it, account for it, and explain to residents what happens next. Global Urban Strategies built one small firm around that entire chain.
Before the concrete: VSCE’s other construction work
A bus depot needs somewhere to park the buses. It also needs a closed street, a public hearing, and people who can keep the paperwork moving. Oakland’s VSCE has made a business of connecting those jobs.
Capitol Impact and the business of getting people unstuck
A hospital needs builders. A student needs work boots. Capitol Impact makes a business of connecting the institutions that can help them both.
Kendra Seaman Makes Ambiguity Behave
Across PTC, Toast and Calix, Kendra Seaman has built a career in the consequential space between a strategy and the people expected to carry it out.
Kendra Canton Has Been Building a Seat at the Table Since College
Before the degree and the policy roundtables, there was a Spokane teenager doing homework first and everything else second. A decade later, Kendra Canton's work still follows the same practical rule: earn your place, then use it to bring more people into the room.
Jim Evans Built a Company for the Unflashy Work That Makes Everything Else Work
A West Point engineer moved from airborne operations to Wall Street, military housing and global retail programs. Then he built Sevan around a durable idea: complicated work gets easier when one team owns the handoffs.
Core States Group Built a Quiet Machine for Making 1,000 Construction Projects Feel Like One
The West Chester firm turned the least glamorous part of construction - coordinating dozens of disciplines across hundreds of sites - into a growth engine for Fortune 500 clients. Its next test is whether $210 million of patient capital can scale that playbook without sanding off the local expertise that makes it work.
The Firm That Remodels America 3,000 Stores at a Time
McDonald's, Starbucks and Walgreens don't remodel one store at a time - they hire a Downers Grove firm run by a former Green Beret to do thousands at once, on schedule, on brand.
AMTI
AMTI rarely appears in the passenger journey, yet its engineers have spent decades inside the systems that guide aircraft and turn federal data into public facts. The company’s story is a lesson in the durable, unglamorous technology that government cannot simply switch off.
Alignment Theatre Is Expensive
Alignment theatre is the term Hanadi Usman, a PMO director with more than 15 years in enterprise transformation, uses for the gap between what teams say in the steering committee and what they admit in the corridor afterward. The dashboards are green, the sponsors nod, the minutes record consensus, and the program bleeds quietly for six more weeks. Her argument: the fix is not a better reporting framework but psychological safety built into governance design, so surfacing the real picture is safer than protecting the performed one.
Trilyon, Inc.
Trilyon, Inc. is a Cupertino-based, women-owned global workforce and consulting firm that has spent more than 15 years matching skilled technology talent to Fortune 500 and enterprise clients. Built on an 'outcome over output' philosophy, Trilyon delivers SOW-based consulting, contingent and direct-hire staffing, RPO, and managed services across AI/ML, cloud, Salesforce, healthcare IT, life sciences, and technical writing, with delivery teams spanning the US, Canada, LATAM, India, and Europe.
Erin Wieland
Erin Russell Wieland is a Program & Communications Lead at Microsoft, serving in the Office of the EVP & CRO for Global Enterprise Sales in Seattle. With over a decade at the intersection of consulting and technology, she built her career from Bridge Partners Consulting - where she rose from Consultant to Manager over seven years - to Microsoft, where she has led readiness, communications, and social strategy for some of the company's largest commercial partner and sales organizations. Her work on the first-ever digital Microsoft Inspire conference earned her a Delivering Success Award, and she has also received the Microsoft Gold Club Award for extraordinary individual performance. She operates at the nerve center of Microsoft's enterprise revenue engine, translating complex organizational priorities into programs and communications that land across thousands of field sellers and partners worldwide.
Sarah Wood
Sarah Wood is a Senior Executive Business Partner at GoFundMe and the founder of Easy Living Collective, a household management company supporting working women and caregivers. A 15-year veteran of Google across roles in learning & development, program management, people operations, and Google.org, she brings operational depth and a people-first philosophy to everything she touches. Based in Los Angeles, she has been instrumental in GoFundMe's partnerships supporting women-owned businesses recovering from the 2025 LA wildfires.
Vu Pham
Vu Pham is an Operations Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. As a deal operations partner supporting the Venture teams, he bridges strategy and execution at a firm that has backed companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, GitHub, and Roblox. His career traces a methodical rise through fintech and enterprise tech - from being the second support agent at WePay to leading product programs at Chime, technical programs at Palantir, and operations at Stripe - before landing at a16z where he helps portfolio companies scale and operationalize their ambitions.