About
← BackThe Person
Joel Vandenberg - Builder. Leader. Perpetual tinkerer.
I've spent most of my career navigating the gap between business and engineering. What executives want, what's actually buildable, and how quickly you can move before things start breaking in ways that matter. That gap is where I'm most comfortable, and I've come to believe that comfort with ambiguity is one of the more useful traits a senior engineering leader can bring to the table. It's not glamorous, but it works.
Most consultants hand over a framework and wish you luck. I'm still building applications in my spare time by choice, which is either a sign of genuine passion or a problem my family has learned to tolerate. Either way, it means when I sit down with your engineering team, I'm not parachuting in from 30,000 feet. I understand the work, I respect the craft, and engineers tend to pick up on that pretty quickly. That matters more than most people think.
I also studied psychology, which sounds like a strange pivot until you've spent enough time watching technically brilliant teams completely fall apart for entirely human reasons. Organizational dynamics, trust, the unspoken story a roadmap tells about what leadership actually values: I pay attention to this stuff. It has saved me more times than any architecture decision ever has.
Contact
Connect on LinkedIn
joeltvandenberg ↗Find me on GitHub
jtvberg ↗
Background
My path here wasn't exactly a straight line. I studied mechanical engineering and political science at the University of California, Irvine, which is an unusual combination. One, however, teaches you how technical systems work, and the other teaches you why organizations operate the way they do. I later studied applied psychology at Colorado State, which rounded things out in ways I didn't fully appreciate until I was a few years into managing large teams. Somewhere in all of that, I ended up in software engineering leadership, which I genuinely did not plan, and which has turned out to be a surprisingly good fit for someone who just likes figuring out how complex things work.
I live in Minnesota with my wife and daughter, which keeps me appropriately humble. I still spend a good chunk of my free time building things and experimenting with different tech stacks, mostly because the curiosity that got me into this hasn't worn off. That probably tells you more about what you'll actually get when you work with me than anything else on this page.