Panel: “How Leadership Impacts Transformation Success”

Throughout my career as an engineer and engineering leader, the business saw my role and teams as cost centers. Cost control was mainly achieved through reducing the workforce, which had its own challenges. However, my passion lies in aligning software engineering efforts with business outcomes. Product and technology are integral to the business. We can connect engineering work to business outcomes. Today, we have the practices, technology, and data visibility to address this effectively.

My goal is to lead software engineering initiatives that align with business outcomes. We will enhance senior leadership’s understanding and alignment, invest in people, and leverage team design, technology, and modern industry practices. Our ways of delivering software aim to become a benchmark for competitive success.

“The problem is that most of us are working with an outdated playbook: plays that we have been programmed to run from an older paradigm of leadership—the Industrial Revolution.” – David L. Marquet

The leaders of organizations that delivered software in the previous era need to relearn how to deliver it today. To win, you will have to unlearn, relearn, and

Rethink Your Understanding^®

Regardless of the bottom-up or top-down approach, the success of organizational change depends on top leaders’ experience and understanding. Outdated models and a lack of understanding of leadership can lead to conflicts and unsuccessful change attempts.

“It’s not what you know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you think you know.” — Mark Twain.

Become a Relearning Organization: You’re Never Done

Adaptive leaders always look for ways to improve because of today’s rate of change and understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. My goal with this site is to give you an inside look at my leadership style, how I serve and collaborate with others, my view on digital product delivery, and how I recognize success in product and technology.

About Me

Vice President of Technology | Technology Leader | Industry Collaborator | Effective Software Delivery | Embracing AI

Vice President Technology connecting software engineering efforts to business outcomes. Promoting better outcomes and fostering a culture that consistently embraces change.

Board Director Value Stream Management Consortium

I’m a technology executive with 25+ years in software engineering and digital transformation. Currently, I lead Parchment Technology at Instructure, where I oversee global teams across software engineering, quality assurance, and agile leadership. My focus is building high-performing, self-managed teams that deliver with autonomy, clarity, and alignment to business outcomes.

Over the past decade, my journey has been transformative. As the industry evolves rapidly, I’ve come to believe that effective leadership—more than process or tooling—is what unlocks meaningful change. I’ve helped shift organizations toward Agile product operating models, DevOps maturity, and outcome-driven flow metrics. I introduced Value Stream Management (VSM) and modern team-level metrics to improve customer value delivery, reliability, and engagement.

I value my network in the industry, which gives me the chance to share insights on digital product delivery, developer experience, leadership, and aligning software with strategy. I see leadership as a craft that requires curiosity, feedback, unlearning, and reflection.

I founded Rethink Your Understanding to share insights on digital product delivery, developer experience, leadership mindset, and aligning software with strategy. My articles and case studies have been featured in Flow Engineering, Planview Accelerate, and events like Flowtopia, where I presented on AI and metrics adoption. My podcast turns these stories into thoughtful audio learning experiences.

A lifelong learner, I’ve read nearly 200 books since 2018 and regularly study product strategy, systems thinking, organizational design, software engineering and developer workflow. This deliberate, V-shaped growth path fuels how I lead, coach, and influence. I’m proud to serve as a Board Member for the Value Stream Management Consortium and regularly mentor emerging leaders across domains.

My mission is to help others rethink what’s possible in technology—by building better systems, healthier teams, and more connected outcomes between engineering and business.

Learn more from my mission, collaboration, and posts.

Connect or follow:

philclark RYU

Today’s Agile, Lean, and DevOps software delivery communities are one of the most amazing and inspiring resources. While building engineering and product delivery excellence, we want to learn better ways to lead organizational optimizations and improvements. As an advocate for effective software delivery and engaged teams, my goal is to pull from my transformation experience to continue to collaborate with incumbent senior leadership to change behaviors and mindsets and talk about what is possible.

The most significant impact on my career has been working in different eras of software delivery. The shift in mindset, the pace of change, vast community publishing, improvements in culture, capabilities, visibility, automation, and inspiring people have kept me highly engaged. Collaboration in the Agile and DevOps communities has reinforced my passion for what delivering great software looks like.

I appreciate that I have had the opportunity to learn from and share my experiences with some of this generation’s transformation, culture, and delivery thought leaders. I am amazed when I compare our teams’ journeys to the industry journeys. This includes comparing our challenges with the change impact on customer experience, adopting practices that improve flow, delivering complex product technology solutions faster with high quality, and providing an engaging employee experience.

Much work needs to happen to help organizations deliver digital products efficiently. Sharing experiences helps. Let’s talk.

Stay curious, learn to unlearn and relearn, and rethink your understanding.

What I talk about

It takes a Team

“Let me be clear, you only get things done through committed teams” – Mark Fields, former Ford Motor company CEO

Great people at all levels and great teams help drive the journey together.

I am grateful for the variety of talented teams, leaders, mentors (personal and virtual), coaches, peers, industry collaborators, publishing’s, and my experiences that have helped me to shape my understandings. The journey thus far has been a very challenging and rewarding one.

“You’re either a learning organization or you’re losing to someone who is.” ~Andrew Clay Shafer

Incredible Conversation

Conversations can help you and your team learn how others are framing their journey, identify what to amplify, and sparking questions to find unexpected sources of inspiration to succeed within their own context.

I have participated in discussions about digital transformations, contexts, and practices with thought leaders and participants from various organizations.

Non-Affiliation Disclaimer: This web site is not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by any organization. All company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.