This document is designed to answer your most pressing questions about our personalized coaching services for software engineers and adjacent tech professionals. Whether you're looking to advance your career, navigate job transitions or role changes, or enhance your technical leadership, we’re here to guide you every step of the way.

You can read this document in its entirety or jump to the question that is the most relevant to you.

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How does your coaching engagement work?

As of September 15th, 2024, here are the details of our engagement:

Package length: 3 months or 6 months
Session length: 50 minutes
Session frequency: Every 2 weeks
Total number of sessions: 6 in the 3-month package or 12 in 6-month
Email support: Unlimited, with a turnaround time of 48 hours on business days. See details below.
Add-ons: Two 30-minutes laser calls with full payment in the 6-month package only. See details below.

Email support

The email support is used to get your questions answered and make continuous progress throughout your engagement. Here are some concrete examples of how clients have used email support:

Collaborate on their promotion doc or an upcoming presentation deck.
- In this case, the client would narrate their story in a Google doc, share it with me for review, I would provide feedback and suggestions and we’d iterate until it’s fully polished. Doing this offline saves valuable session time for actual coaching.
Prepare for behavioral interviews.
1. Here, the client would pick some behavioral questions and write their corresponding answers in a Google doc. I’d review, provide feedback, and we’d iterate until the answers are solid. Once again, doing this offline saves valuable session time for actual coaching. You can read all our success stories here.

Laser calls

Laser calls can be scheduled on demand to get any time-sensitive topics covered. These are typically leveraged for situations like discussing a performance review just received, preparing for an important meeting with a skip-level manager, doing some final polishing on a high-stakes presentation, preparing for a critical interview, etc.

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What happens in the coaching sessions?

We recommend that you send your agenda items to the coach 1-2 days before your coaching session. You are also welcome to include any updates since the last session.

The coaching session begins with your top-of-mind items, and then transitions into coaching on the agenda items you provided earlier.

The coaching conversation consists of diving deeper into your agenda items, gauging how things are going, answering your questions, and having a dialogue about situations you need help with. The goal is to learn from the progress of your execution in-between the sessions, course-correct (if needed), and keep building up on the growth, much like the build-measure-learn loop in software development.

Your coach also keeps track of your overarching coaching plan along the way and weaves those topics in the coaching conversations.

We note down the action items that emerge from the coaching conversation to discuss them in the following session(s). Sometimes, your coach gives you homework at the end of the session. The homework is typically lightweight and takes 30-60 minutes in total to complete until the next session.

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How can I get started with your program?

Please fill out the Interest Form to express your interest. Based on your responses and the availability of spots, I will contact you for the next steps.

The high level steps to get started with us are:

Schedule a complimentary discovery call when invited.
- See this question on what a discovery call is.
Once to decide to work with us, the coach writes an initial personalized coaching plan.
- See this question for more details.
You sign the coaching agreement.
You make the investment.
Your sessions are scheduled!

Steps 3-5 are described in detail in this question.

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Why is personalized coaching crucial for software engineers and adjacent professionals?

Personalized coaching provides individuals with the guidance and support they need to unlock their full potential. Software engineers aspire to unlock their full potential through their code, problem solving, and technical leadership.

Engineering careers ladders do a very good job laying out the what of the software engineering career path—what competencies need to be exhibited at what level. But they provide little to no help on the how. Yet, how–and how quickly–you acquire and exhibit the next level of competencies has huge implications on your career trajectory, financial future, and sense of fulfillment in your life!

Today, most of you rely on your manager and one-off mentors to get personalized help on your career journey. However, most managers are either not in your shoes or too far removed to guide you after you reach a certain career level. Senior engineers often don’t have the time to mentor you: the incentives at their job generally do not recognize the effort spent on this work. Often, both of these relationships are also just one reorg away from running their course!

Personalized coaching is abundantly available for engineering leaders (people leaders) through executive coaching. But an analogous ecosystem is sorely lacking for software engineers and adjacent professionals. Uncharted Path Breakthroughs aims to be the steady coach who software engineers can turn to for individualized guidance at key junctures in their careers.

Just imagine how much smoother your career journey would be–and how much further you’d go–if you could turn to someone who has already traveled the path you are on, and has gotten to know you and your aspirations over time! This model is similar to the long-term relationships engineering leaders develop with key executive coaches.

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About Personalized Coaching

Why is the process of coaching so effective?

See the dedicated Why Coaching? page for answers to these questions.

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How does coaching work in general?

See the dedicated Why Coaching? page for answers to these questions.

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What are some concrete benefits of career coaching?

See the dedicated Why Coaching? page for answers to these questions.

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Why should I get help when I have been successful on my own so far?

Conversations and dialogue are crucial for software development, helping engineers solve problems and ship software efficiently. The same principle applies to career development, where professional coaching can accelerate growth and success.

As software engineers progress from junior to senior levels, they need to complement their technical skills with project management, leadership, and strategic vision.

For senior to staff promotions, you need strategic vision, influence, and the ability to provide an engineering perspective.

At every career level, you also need to differentiate yourself and advocate for your hard work to get promoted.

While self-reliance is valuable, guidance from experienced mentors and coaches can save time, reduce frustration, and lead to more rewarding careers.

There is no trophy for doing it by yourself. But there are real rewards for accelerated success! Do you want to spend your life making mistakes or do you want to thrive doing right?

Even heroes in movies have mentors, so why shouldn’t we?

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Do you offer shorter coaching packages or one-off sessions?

Developing effective solutions through a coaching plan requires time and consistent effort. Our three- and six-month packages support clients as they practice new skills, allow for timely course-corrections, and answer ongoing questions, facilitating continuous personal and professional growth. This structured approach is similar to the iterative 'build-measure-learn' loop in software development, where each phase is crucial for achieving a significant shift in mindset and behavior.

Unlike one-off sessions, which might provide immediate but isolated insights, our method ensures sustainable development and real progress based on a client's specific needs over time. This is why we do not offer one-off sessions or coaching packages shorter than 3 months.

Below are more detailed reasons behind why longer coaching packages are more effective.

Depth of engagement:

Effective coaching often requires a deeper engagement with the client to truly understand their needs, challenges, and goals. This depth is hard to achieve in very short or one-off sessions, which may only scratch the surface of what's necessary for meaningful progress.

Building trust and rapport:

Trust and rapport are foundational to the coaching relationship. These elements take time to develop and are crucial for clients to feel comfortable sharing personal or sensitive information. A single session often isn't enough to establish the level of trust required for effective coaching.

Sustainable change takes time:

Meaningful and lasting change usually doesn't happen overnight. It involves exploring behaviors, testing new strategies, and reflecting on outcomes. This process is iterative and requires time, making longer engagements more effective.

Follow-through and accountability:

Longer coaching engagements allow coaches to hold clients accountable over time, which is a key component of coaching effectiveness. This ongoing support helps ensure that clients continue to apply what they learn, adjust their actions, and reflect on their progress.

Customization and adaptation:

Over multiple sessions, coaches have the opportunity to tailor their approach as they learn more about the client. This customization is less feasible in a one-off or very brief package, where there is limited scope to adapt strategies based on real-time feedback and results.

Value perception:

Clients may find that short sessions or one-offs can lead to a transactional relationship rather than one perceived as a valuable, ongoing investment in personal or professional development. Longer packages can help clients see coaching as a substantial commitment to growth, which aligns better with the coach’s goals of providing impactful, lasting change.

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Our Coaching Packages

What coaching packages do you offer?

Uncharted Path Breakthroughs currently offers two different coaching packages:

The SWE Coaching Package
The Job Search Coaching Package

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What is the SWE Coaching Package?

This package is focused on the career growth and advancement of software engineers and adjacent professionals. Uncharted Path Breakthroughs believes that every engineering career ladder requires developing and honing skills in the following five essential areas:

Clear Purpose and High Psychological Safety
Technical Excellence
Thriving Relationships
Proven Leadership Skills
Skillful Self-Advocacy

Detailed information about these foundations can be found on the My Five Foundations Framework page.

Note that “SWE” in this coaching package name refers to the umbrella of roles under software development. Professionals such as Software engineers, Data Scientists, Applied Scientists, Data Engineers, ML engineers, Mobile developers, Frontend engineers, Security professionals, SREs, QA, and Project managers are ideal clients for this coaching program.

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What is the Job Search Coaching Package?

As the name implies, this package is targeted toward professionals seeking a new job. It includes a host of services:

Clarity on strengths and long-term career aspirations
- Every job can steer us toward or away from our strengths and long-term career aspirations. Rather than let the next available job determine the client’s career trajectory, Uncharted Path Breakthroughs first guides its clients in deeply understanding their strengths and long-term career aspirations before embarking on their job search.
Resume preparation
- Our time-proven resume writing and editing will not only help your resume get picked up by automated systems but also catch the attention of hiring managers for potential interview calls.
Strategizing on companies and interview loop sequencing
- Every company has a slightly different interview loop and they move through the loop at a different pace. The level of preparation required for every company is also different.
- Likewise, our clients also have different interests, timelines, and levels of preparation.
- In our extensive experience, a solid strategy to select the right companies for interviewing and the order of these interview loops has huge implications on receiving strong offers clustered around the same time for effective evaluation and negotiation.
Preparation for recruiter and hiring manager screens
- We coach our clients to tell a compelling story for their work experience and career this far. This gives them an edge over other candidates and helps them move to later interview rounds.
Preparation for coding, system design, project deep-dive, and behavioral rounds
- For coding interviews, we coach our clients on a host of strategies to determine the right algorithms and data structures for any given problem and write clean code from the get go. We also coach them on retaining the solutions they’ve already visited and identifying the right problem solving techniques when they encounter new problems.
- While doing well on the coding and system design rounds is essential, in this difficult job market, a recurring differentiator for candidates is their strong performance in the project deep-dive and behavioral rounds. We share time-proven question banks and strategies with our clients to ace these interviews and maximize their chance of receiving strong job offers.
Offer evaluation and negotiation
- When a client receives job offer(s) during the coaching engagement, we guide them through offer negotiation and help them select the most suitable position that would also be aligned with their long term career aspirations.
- If no job offer is received yet, we share time-proven tips and strategies to empower the client to negotiate on their own later.
Mindset work and accountability
- Throughout the job search coaching engagement, we coach our clients to maintain a positive mindset necessary for focused preparation and overcoming temporary setbacks. We also hold them accountable to their job search timeline and their interests and long term career aspirations as they zero-in on specific offers.

In addition to these services, Uncharted Path Breakthroughs shares numerous templates with its clients to organize and streamline their job search and maintain long term records of key learnings for future interview loops.

A note on mock interviews: We recognize that the 1:1 coaching time is very valuable for our clients. So, we encourage them to mock interview with peers on free sites like pramp.com and revisit the most challenging areas in our 1:1 sessions. This enables our clients to leverage our expertise in mock interviews while making the best use of their coaching sessions with us. We take a similar approach for coding and system design interviews as well.

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About the Waitlist

How can I join your waitlist and what are the next steps?

See the question on How can I get started with your program?

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When will you have an open spot?

We expect a handful of spots to open up in December 2024 to January 2025, assuming some of the current clients take a break from coaching at the end of their engagement.

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What is my position in the waitlist?

Unfortunately, we do not have automation at this time to keep you updated on your position in the waitlist. Feel free to contact us on LinkedIn for more information.

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How many active coaching clients do you have at any time?

The maximum number of active clients in our practice at any given time is 15.

The actual number of active clients varies between 12 and 15 depending on what other projects, speaking engagements, etc. we have on the calendar.

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Logistics of Our Coaching Engagements

What is a discovery call?

A discovery call is a complimentary 45-minute meeting between you and the coach. There are three parts to it:

Covering your current challenges in depth
Providing you with tactical coaching pertaining to your challenges
Crafting an outline of your personalized coaching plan

The coach also shares the package structure in this call, and helps you understand the investment involved in your coaching engagement.

This is also the time when you and the coach determine if the two of you will work well together for the coaching engagement.

You book your complimentary discovery call when invited. It’s very helpful to provide meaningful answers to the questions in the sign up form. Taking the time to write a few sentences for each question goes a long way in getting quality complimentary coaching for during the discovery call. It also enables the coach to craft an effective outline of your personalized coaching plan within the discovery call.

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What are the next steps after the discovery call?

After the discovery call, your coach will write up an initial personalized coaching plan for you and share via email in the next 5 business days. If you have a professional development budget at your workplace, the coach will also share an employer sponsorship template that you can fill out to pursue full or partial sponsorship through your workplace.

If you have any questions about your personalized coaching plan, you can either email coach or schedule a 20-minute call with them.

If there are no more questions, clients usually decide to move forward with the coaching engagement.

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Investment and Payment

How affordable is the investment in your coaching programs?

As highlighted in the question on the importance of personalized coaching for software engineers, our goal is to support our clients' careers over the long term, similar to how engineering leaders rely on executive coaches at critical career junctures.

Affordability is crucial, especially since individual contributors often lack the corporate development support that leaders receive. With the average software engineer earning a net monthly income of about $6,000 after taxes, as of September ‘24, all our coaching packages are priced within one month's salary. This makes our program accessible and ensures that investing in our coaching is feasible for most tech professionals.

Considering the potential for higher salaries, bonuses, and other financial benefits that typically result from enhanced skills, the return on investment for our coaching can be significant. We are committed to providing a transformational experience that not only fits your budget but also propels your career forward significantly.

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Why is it called ‘investment’ instead of ‘cost’?

The decision to get coaching is a commitment to one’s continued professional and personal growth. It’s a wise and strategic decision that yields significant returns over time since the benefits extend beyond the immediate sessions and provide lasting results. This is why it’s an investment and not a cost.

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What payment plans are available for the investment?

See your investment for payment plans. We encourage our clients to pay in full to reduce accounting overhead and avoid recurring payment processing fees.

For job search packages, we understand that budgeting can get in the way of making an upfront investment in coaching. Therefore, in addition to the monthly payment plan, we also offer a delayed payment plan where the client pays a percentage of their investment at sign up and the remainder later. The delayed portion of the payment is due in nine months from the date of signing the coaching agreement or getting a new job, whichever comes first. In our experience, nine months are enough for our clients to find a new job and pay down the reminder of their investment without stretching themselves. If this does not seem possible for your situation, we can discuss alternative payment plans.

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What payment methods do you accept for the investment?

Stripe is the online payment processor for Uncharted Path Breakthroughs LLC. The two payment methods we accept are:

Bank transfer
Credit card

As noted in the pricing table, paying via a bank transfer comes with a discount. This is because Stripe charges a low, flat fee of $5 for every bank transfer. We cover this fee for our clients.

Clients paying via a credit card do not get the bank transfer discount because Stripe charges a fee of ~3% for every credit card transaction. The credit card investment was determined using this Stripe Fee Calculator: https://weareindy.com/stripe-fee-calculator.

Clients select their payment methods after they decide to work with us. We include their preferred payment method in their invoice (see details below).

As of August 2024, we also accept payments using Zelle for the US clients. This Bank Transfer method does not use Stripe.

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Getting Started

What are the next steps for me to get started with your coaching?

Here are the next three steps:

Sign the coaching agreement.
This is a contract between you and Uncharted Path Breakthroughs to work together during your coaching engagement.
It includes details on coach and client responsibilities, the logistics of the engagement (as described above), and the investment involved.
E-signatures for both parties are handled by SignWell. Your coach will send this agreement to you after you decide to work with us.
Make the investment.
After the coaching agreement is signed, your coach will generate and send an invoice via Zoho Books.
See the question above on available payment methods. Payment via either channel typically takes up to five business days to process. You will get a receipt after your payment is successfully processed.
Your coaching sessions are scheduled!
Your first session is scheduled soon after the full payment (or the first installment) is received.
In between the time of payment processing and the first coaching session, your coach will write up a detailed coaching plan implementation for the duration of the engagement. This plan provides the session-by-session breakdown of the initial plan provided to you after the discovery call. You will be able to review this document before your first coaching session.
The full cadence of the coaching sessions is scheduled after the first coaching call.

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When is the first coaching session scheduled?

For most clients, the first coaching session can be scheduled within two weeks of your decision to work with us. We can discuss other options if you want to be scheduled sooner!

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How long do I have to finish all my sessions?

Individual clients have one extra month on top of their package length to finish all their sessions. So the 3-month package must be completed in 4 months and the 6-month in 7 months.

You can avail email support throughout the four or seven months.

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What if I don’t use my laser call(s) during the engagement?

Unused laser calls lapse. Multiple laser calls cannot be combined into additional coaching sessions.

That said, we want you to use your laser calls. So, we proactively remind you to use them as you enter the second half of your coaching engagement with us.

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What is the coaching plan implementation exactly?

The initial personalized coaching plan is the design document for your coaching engagement with us. This is the plan that you and your coach agree to work on after the discovery call.

The implementation document contains the execution details for the initial coaching plan for the next 3 or 6 months. It contains information on what areas we will work on in a session-by-session or month-by-month break down.

While the exact execution is subject to change as situations evolve during the coaching engagement, the implementation document nevertheless serves as a valuable guide for both you and your coach to make continual, measurable progress toward your goals.

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Client Satisfaction

How do you track client satisfaction during the coaching engagement?

We make time to reflect on the following questions with our clients every 2-3 sessions:

What have been your biggest takeaways since we last checked-in?
What difference do you feel while being in this coaching engagement compared to before?
What’s working well or great?
What would you like to tweak or change?

We have found that these questions work incredibly well to track satisfaction of both the client and the coach throughout the coaching engagement. These questions also facilitate course-correction early and often.

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Do you offer any money-back guarantees?

We firmly believe that we have the experience and skill to effectively coach our clients toward a lasting transformation in their careers and lives. The testimonials we have received speak to this confidence. You can read all our success stories here.

As the launch post of our coaching practice shared, we started this work with our highest intention to offer personalized guidance to tech professionals to help them grow quickly and make their career journeys easier. We take this commitment very seriously and operate with the highest possible integrity. When we are not sure that we would be best able to help a specific client, we actively encourage them to consider other coaches after their discovery call with us.

If a client encounters unexpected work or life situations during their coaching engagement with us, we work with them cooperatively on the optimal path forward for their continued growth and enrichment.

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