Guided by people who've already made the leap

Penelope Barr brings 25+ years of experience in senior global roles across some of Australia’s most complex organisations. She spent 18 years in financial services at NAB, ANZ, and SuperPartners, before moving into professional services at Allens Linklaters, Sensis, and Tourism Victoria. More recently she has taken on interim executive roles at PEXA, the VicRoads/Macquarie Joint Venture, Ampol, and Civica.

That breadth — spanning corporate, financial services, legal, and government — gives Penelope an unusually clear-eyed view of how organisations work and what it actually takes to build a career and lead within them.

She coaches leaders across career direction, confidence, influence, and performance — with a particular strength in helping people navigate the moments that matter most: a promotion, a shift in scope, a difficult team dynamic, or the quiet loss of direction that can come even at senior levels.

Coaching focus areas

• Career Development & Direction — building and executing personal career plans, navigating promotions and role changes, exploring portfolio careers
• Confidence, Clarity & Personal Effectiveness — building confidence in high-stakes situations, improving decision-making under pressure, managing workload and boundaries
• Visibility at Work — becoming known for the right things, increasing presence without self-promotion fatigue
• Influence & Organisational Navigation — managing up, communicating across technical and non-technical audiences, navigating complex organisational dynamics
• Leadership Transitions & Identity — moving from peer to manager, stepping into senior leadership, building authority without losing trust
• Performance, Feedback & Team Dynamics — handling performance and feedback conversations, managing underperformance, navigating team conflict

Puja Currer-Ganguli is a Sustainability and Innovation Strategist, founder, and ecosystem builder working at the intersection of climate, technology, storytelling, and global collaboration. She has over a decade of interdisciplinary experience spanning climate tech, energy transition, higher education, ESG advisory, start-ups, and cross-border ecosystem development across the Asia-Pacific region.

She is Co-Founder of APAC Innovation Hub — connecting start-ups, investors, operators, and ecosystem leaders across APAC to unlock cross-border collaboration — and of Hype Man Media, a storytelling and brand amplification agency helping innovators communicate their impact.

Previously, Puja led Strategic Partnerships within the Electrification and Innovation team at AGL, building cross-sector collaborations to accelerate the energy transition. She co-founded climate tech start-up Consult Urth and has advised corporates, governments, and scale-ups on sustainability technology, partnerships, and market strategy. As a former Lecturer at Monash University, she designed and delivered impact-driven programs equipping the next generation of leaders with the mindset and tools to drive innovation.

She currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Australia India Youth Dialogue, mentors through CSIRO, Hex and BrainSTEM, and is a 2026 Entrepreneur in Residence at the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship, an Airtree Explorer, and an HEA Fellow.

Puja’s coaching philosophy is rooted in empowerment — helping people unlock confidence they already have, think beyond conventional paths, and show up with clarity and intention. The best coaching doesn’t hand people answers; it helps them find their own voice and build the self-belief to act on it.

Coaching focus areas

• Influence & Organisational Navigation — building credibility, managing up effectively, navigating complex workplace dynamics across start-ups and large organisations, with a distinctive edge from her background in storytelling and partnerships
• Career Development & Direction — moving beyond generic frameworks to build development plans that are honest, ambitious, and grounded in who you actually are, including portfolio and non-linear paths
• Confidence, Clarity & Personal Effectiveness — helping people who know what they’re capable of but struggle to back themselves when it counts; articulating your value, setting boundaries, shifting from reactive to intentional

Susan Brander is the co-founding CTO of Kaleida, and a co-founder and organiser of Tech Leading Ladies — a community of nearly 2,000 people bridging the gender gap in technical leadership across ANZ. She has led engineering through the full arc: early-stage start-ups, scale-ups, and established corporates, across multiple time zones and cultural contexts.

As Kaleida’s sole technical founder, Susan has lived the whole founder journey. She architected a SaaS product on serverless AWS and led the lean team that built it end-to-end — idea to MVP at minimal cost, an entire data-architecture change mid-flight on a live product, and the constant build-versus-buy, pivot-versus-persist calls that come with a small company and a big ambition. She works AI-first, with AI as a daily collaborator in how she designs, builds, and runs the company — and brings that practice directly into how she mentors.

Before Kaleida, Susan spent a decade leading teams and teams of teams in organisations with 5 to 15 development teams, building products in Legal, HR, and Energy. She has guided legacy transformations, uplifting technology, practices, and people along the way, and led delivery of API ecosystems enabling partners across regions to integrate rapidly. Technically, she is a full-stack developer across .NET, TypeScript, and cloud-native AWS, with stints in mobile, platform, and data engineering.

Susan is a regular speaker, workshop facilitator, and MC across the ANZ conference circuit (YOW!, DDD, ADAConf, ServerlessDays), and mentors with a simple conviction: nobody should be written off as “not technical enough.”

Coaching focus areas

• Technical Strategy & Architecture — shaping technical direction, architectural design and build strategies, systems design decisions, and making them hold up when requirements shift
• Leading in the AI Era — adopting AI-first ways of working, rethinking delegation, review, and team growth when AI does the typing, and staying confident while the ground moves
• Founder & Start-up Journeys — technical co-founder life, idea to MVP on a budget, pragmatic architecture for small teams, and navigating pivots with a live product
• Engineering Leadership — leading teams and teams of teams, building high-performing cultures, operating across time zones and cultural backgrounds
• Transformation & Change — leading legacy modernisation, uplifting technology and practices, guiding people through organisational change
• Career Development & Visibility — navigating technical career paths, moving into leadership, public speaking and conference talks, and building your professional presence
• Hiring & Team Building — hiring practices, building diverse teams, creating communities of learning and continuous improvement
• Communication & Feedback — giving and receiving feedback effectively, communicating across technical and non-technical stakeholders

Vanisha Rathod is founder of P3 Studio and author of The Briefcase Effect. With 18+ years across corporate, government, tech, and scale-ups (Australia, UK, Middle East), she specialises in helping leaders navigate identity shifts and translate clarity into commercial advantage.

She works with founders, executives, and emerging leaders at inflection points — particularly those stepping into new levels of authority and influence.

Her core method centres on the intersection of personal brand, leadership identity, and organisational impact. She’s particularly strong with leaders who need to build credibility and influence without losing authenticity.

Coaching focus areas

• Leadership Transitions & Identity — stepping into new levels of authority, building a sustainable leadership identity, and managing the identity gap when you move into a bigger role
• Influence & Organisational Navigation — communicating with clarity across audiences, building visibility and authority, managing stakeholder dynamics
• Confidence & Personal Effectiveness — decision-making under pressure, moving from reactive to intentional, building authority without self-promotion fatigue

Justin Gould has spent 20+ years running technology and platform functions at Seek, Toll, Australia Post, ME Bank, and MLC Life Insurance/Acenda. On paper that reads as cloud, DevOps, quality, service management, and enterprise infrastructure. In practice it has been something narrower and more useful: across five organisations, the same pattern. A manager brings him in to run platforms or DevOps, and what actually needs fixing is how the engineering team works, trusts each other, and gets things done. He studied genetics at university rather than computer science — which may explain why he has always been more interested in the system than the switch.

Most recently he was Head of Cloud, Platforms, Networks, Workplace & Corporate Systems at MLC Life Insurance/Acenda, running a 50+ FTE function on a ~$40M budget. Before that, Head of DevOps & Quality at ME Bank, and five years at Australia Post, working up from Development Centre Manager to Head of Product Engineering Practice. He started out in QA — testing, test leadership, and performance testing — all the way back to Tesco in 1997.

The track record is substantial: 300+ servers migrated to native AWS and delivered $1.6M under budget, P1/P2 restoration times brought under two hours, CPS230-aligned governance across major service providers, and a bank’s first end-to-end core banking disaster recovery exercise. The most telling number is a quieter one — 80+ promotions facilitated across the teams he has led. None of the rest happened because he is good at wrangling AWS accounts. It happened because he is good at getting people to trust the process and each other.

His Gallup CliftonStrengths are Empathy, Harmony, Developer, and Relator, with Positivity alongside them — the actual mechanism behind every culture turnaround he has run. He notices when a team has stopped trusting each other before the metrics catch up, and he knows what to do about it.

Melbourne based. Still curious about the system, not just the switch.

Coaching focus areas

• Leadership Transitions & Identity — moving from peer to manager, stepping into senior and technical leadership, building authority without losing trust
• Technical Leadership Challenges — balancing technical depth with leadership responsibility, resisting the retreat back into the code, leading through ambiguity and scale
• Performance, Feedback & Team Dynamics — handling underperformance, navigating team conflict, setting expectations that actually stick
• Culture & Trust Repair — diagnosing and rebuilding trust in engineering teams, with a track record across five organisations
• Regulated-Industry Context — banking, insurance, and enterprise infrastructure, including CPS230, governance, and disaster recovery
• Career Development & Direction — portfolio careers, promotions, and role transitions for technical leaders
• Strengths-Based Coaching — Gallup CliftonStrengths (Empathy, Harmony, Developer, Relator, Positivity)