Executive Coaching

Cut through the noise.
Find your signal.

For tech leaders, open source professionals, and ambitious managers ready to lead with clarity, confidence and conviction. In a space built on trust, not performance.

Eleni Katsoula speaking at Open Source Summit Europe
12+ Years Tech Leadership
🎙
Linux Foundation Speaker Open Source Summit
12+
Years in Tech Leadership
6+
Years in Open Source
Linux Foundation Speaker
EMEA
Based, Globally Active
Why True Signal?

In engineering, signal-to-noise ratio is everything.

The signal is the real, meaningful information — the thing that actually matters beneath the static, the interference, and the noise. True Signal Coaching is built on that same principle.

Our work together is about finding your authentic leadership voice — the real you, beneath the doubt, the imposter syndrome, the invisible barriers — and amplifying it. No fluff. No performance. Just true signal.

Authentic No fluff Real results Tech-credible
Eleni Katsoula
About Eleni

From Engineering Operations to Executive Coaching — nothing lost in translation.

I know…

And I built a coaching practice specifically for leaders living in at least one of those gaps.

Imagine… leading without the weight of managing how you're perceived. Walking into a room not as a more polished version of yourself — but as simply, fully yourself. Your ideas received with the same weight as your expertise. Your voice trusted as readily as your work.

The foundation of that work is trust. The kind that allows you to say the thing you have not said in any other room.
The change is real.

Not just stronger performance — but a fundamentally better experience of being at work. A workplace where the technically brilliant are also the most heard. Where authenticity is a leadership asset, not a liability. Where you don't just survive the rooms that matter — you flourish in them. That's what becomes possible with the True Signal methodology.

I'm an ICF Member, PRINCE2 certified, and hold an MSc in International Technology Management from the University of Warwick. I've spent 12+ years across tech, including 6+ years deep inside the open source ecosystem.

Engineering Operations Open Source Community Cross-Cultural Leadership Women in Tech Executive Presence

Technical excellence got you here. Presence and influence will take you further.

Work With Me

Three ways to work together

Leadership, business, and career coaching — delivered in three formats. Choose what fits where you are.

1:1 Coaching Group Programme Team Workshops
01
1:1 Private Coaching

Signal Sessions

Private, bi-weekly coaching for leaders who want a dedicated thinking partner. We work on what's live for you — a decision, a dynamic, a direction — in a space where nothing has to be performed.

  • 60-minute sessions, bi-weekly cadence
  • Typical engagement: 3–6 months
  • Individual and 360 assessments
  • A coaching relationship built on genuine trust and openness
Book a discovery call →
02
Group Coaching

The Cohort

A structured coaching programme for a group of peers navigating similar territory. Psychological safety is the foundation — what makes group coaching work is the trust built between people who recognise each other's challenges.

  • Minimum 6 participants
  • Fixed-duration programme
  • Peer learning + expert coaching
  • Ideal for leadership cohorts
Enquire about a cohort →
03
Half & Full Day · Teams

Team Workshops

Facilitated half-day or full-day experiences for leadership and management teams. Designed to shift something — a culture, a dynamic, a shared understanding.

  • Half-day or full-day format
  • On-site or virtual delivery
  • Custom-designed per team context
  • Leadership culture, team dynamics
Enquire about a workshop →
Open Source Leadership

The True Signal Open Source Leadership Practice

Open source powers the digital world — and yet the people who build and sustain it remain one of the most underserved segments when it comes to leadership development. By its inherent volunteer nature, the ecosystem has always run on intrinsic motivation, technical excellence, and goodwill. But as open source adoption continues to grow exponentially, so do the leadership challenges that come with it.

Maintainers carrying entire communities alone. Contributors struggling to find their voice in established spaces. Corporate engineers navigating dual accountability between employer and ecosystem. These are not niche problems — they are universal leadership challenges, concentrated in an environment that strips away every usual support structure and asks people to navigate them without training, without a manager, and often without pay.

The benefits of coaching in this space are significant. And largely untapped.

Open source maintainers hold one of the most complex leadership roles in tech — full accountability for a community, a codebase, and the trust of thousands, often with no formal authority, no management support, and no pay. These are the challenges coaching addresses.

Burnout and sustainable leadership
The skills that make a great maintainer — thoroughness, ownership, high standards — are the same ones that accelerate burnout. Coaching helps you identify what only you can do, and build the clarity to let everything else wait, be delegated, or be dropped.
Leading without authority
Every contributor is a volunteer. Every decision is up for debate. Influence-based leadership in its purest form — and one of the hardest things to develop without someone explicitly teaching it.
Conflict in public
Conflict in open source happens in front of the whole community — permanently, searchably, linkably. Coaching develops the skills to navigate hard conversations without eroding community trust.
The identity transition
The moment you stopped spending most of your time on code and started spending it on people. Nobody told you this was coming. Coaching helps you expand your identity rather than abandon it.
Making invisible work visible
Five years stewarding a project used by hundreds of thousands of developers — and your CV says Senior Software Engineer. The skills are there. The gap is in how you articulate them.
Governance and decision-making
Making consequential architectural and community decisions with no precedent and no manager to escalate to. Coaching builds the frameworks and the confidence to lead with clarity under pressure.

Open source is technically open to everyone. In practice, it can feel like the most exclusive club in tech — with histories, norms, and unwritten rules that take years to accumulate. These are the challenges coaching addresses for contributors at every level.

The lurker problem
Technically ready, with something real to contribute — but the community has a history you weren't part of, and the thread moves fast. The first contribution is never really about code. It's about learning that you're allowed to be here before you're an expert.
Navigating public rejection
"My contribution wasn't ready" is a technical statement. "I am not good enough" is an identity statement. The contributors who persist learn to separate the two. Coaching makes that distinction concrete.
Cross-cultural communication
Open source communities run on communication norms built in specific cultural contexts. Thoughtfulness that reads as hesitation. Disagreement expressed indirectly. Your voice isn't missing — it's being lost in translation.
Building visible reputation
Visibility in open source doesn't automatically follow contribution. It follows strategic contribution — work that is visible, credited, discussed, and connected to a name people recognise. Coaching helps you work more intentionally, not more.

Corporate open source contributors navigate one of the most politically complex roles in tech — accountable to a manager who measures ROI, and to a community that measures trust. These are the challenges coaching addresses for those working at this intersection.

Serving two masters
Your employer wants ROI. The community wants authentic participation. The contributors who succeed treat the community as a place they genuinely belong — not a market to be influenced. That requires a specific kind of self-awareness.
Translating corporate priorities upstream
The feature is technically sound. It keeps stalling. The issue isn't technical — it's framing. Coaching develops the skill of leading with community value rather than company need, without being dishonest about where the priority came from.
Justifying OSS investment internally
Open source value accrues slowly, through reputation and relationships — none of which fits in a quarterly slide. Coaching develops the executive communication skills to translate long-term community value into the language your organisation actually uses.
Technical credibility, no executive audience
You understand the project's trajectory, the upstream risks, the architectural debates that will shape the ecosystem for five years. And you cannot get a meeting. Technical depth and executive communication are two completely different skills.
Upstream said no — roadmap still depends on it
Standing between a product team that needs a resolution and a community that doesn't owe you one. Coaching builds the clarity, communication strategy, and personal resilience to hold that tension without letting it collapse.
Being the bridge
The best corporate OSS contributors don't represent either side — they translate between two genuinely different sets of values, honestly, while maintaining their own integrity. One of the most sophisticated leadership capabilities that exists. Almost entirely invisible from the outside.
Client Voices

What clients say

FAQ

Questions senior leaders actually ask

Most executive coaches come from HR, psychology or general management. True Signal comes from inside the technology world — 12+ years in tech, 6+ in open source, leading distributed global teams and navigating the specific dynamics of engineering-led organisations. The result is a coaching practice where you never have to translate your world. But technical fluency alone does not make a coach. What distinguishes this practice is empathy — the kind that sees what others miss — combined with a deep instinct for patterns that allows me to reflect back what you could not yet see in yourself. The work is not to fix you, reshape you, or make you into someone else's version of a leader. It is to help you experience the clarity and confidence of leading as who you truly are — bringing your unique value to the work that matters most to you, and excelling on your own terms.

True Signal Coaching works primarily with senior leaders in technology — CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Heads of Product, Engineering Directors and senior managers at a significant inflection point. The common thread is not job title — it is a specific challenge: they are technically credible, often highly regarded, but not yet leading with the full weight of their authority. They come for different reasons — a new role, a stalled promotion, a team dynamic that is not working, or simply a sense that they are capable of more than their current context allows.

Every engagement begins with a free 30-minute discovery session — a no-commitment conversation to explore what you are working on and whether coaching is the right fit. From there, a typical engagement runs three to six months, with bi-weekly 60-minute sessions over video call. The work is grounded in individual and 360 assessments at the outset, providing a clear baseline and direction. Between sessions, you have access to brief check-ins for when something urgent arises. The pace, focus and depth are shaped entirely by what you bring — there is no fixed curriculum.

Progress in coaching is rarely linear, but it is observable. The True Signal methodology uses individual and 360 assessments at the start of each engagement to establish a clear baseline — what others see, what you see, and where the gaps lie. From there, progress is measured against the specific outcomes you set at the beginning: a promotion secured, a team dynamic shifted, a pattern changed, decisions made with greater confidence. Most clients report visible changes within the first two months — in how they show up in meetings, how they handle conflict, and how they are perceived by their teams and peers.

Yes — corporate-sponsored coaching is common and straightforward. Many organisations fund executive coaching as part of their leadership development budget, and True Signal Coaching works with both individually-funded and organisationally-funded engagements. Where your organisation is sponsoring the coaching, the engagement is contracted through Blue Horizon Consulting GP trading as True Signal Coaching, with full invoicing provided. The coaching relationship itself remains between coach and client — your employer receives no session content, notes or progress reports without your explicit consent.

Yes, completely. Confidentiality is the foundation of the coaching relationship, and it does not change based on who is funding the engagement. True Signal Coaching operates under the ICF Code of Ethics, which places confidentiality at its core. If your organisation is sponsoring the coaching, they may know that sessions are taking place — but they receive no content, no notes and no progress information without your explicit consent. The only exception would be a situation involving genuine risk to safety, which would always be discussed with you directly.

Credentials & Speaking

Recognised beyond this page

Credentials

MSc International Technology ManagementUniversity of Warwick
Official ICF MemberInternational Coaching Federation
PRINCE2 Certified PractitionerProject & Programme Management
12+ Years in Tech, 6+ in Open SourceCollabora & global distributed teams

Speaking Appearances

2025
Navigating Uncertainty: Operational Risk Management in the Open-Source Sector
2022
It All Starts With a Smile: How To Foster a Sense of Belonging in Remote Teams

Interested in having me speak? Get in touch →

Work Together

Ready to find
your signal?

The first conversation is free. No pitch. No pressure. Just a genuine conversation to explore whether this is the right fit — for both of us.