About Peter Kappus

I help teams to get clear on what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how to get better at doing it – all while enjoying the journey.

For more than 25 years, I’ve been an engineer, project, programme, portfolio manager, facilitator, trainer, coach and transformation consultant helping teams in world-leading organisations to improve how they work, achieve better outcomes, and maximise their joy along the way.

I started writing code with my parents’ Macintosh Plus in the 1980s and still love to build things with Perl, Java, JavaScript, C++, Ruby on Rails, and more although these days, I get even more pleasure from helping entire teams to improve how they deliver.

Using powerful goal-science frameworks like Objectives & Key Results – OKRs, lean/agile methods, and inclusive facilitation tools like Liberating Structures, I help teams continuously push the status quo and redefine their peak performance.

Clients include the UK Government, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Wikimedia Foundation, multiple global banks and life sciences organisations, and countless start-ups and scale-ups. Check out my CV for more about my experience.

A short video with What Matters

Since 2019 I’ve been a collaborator with John Doerr’s What Matters organisation. Here’s a short video about how different kinds of teams can use OKRs.

My life story (in brief)

My parents were living just outside London in Surrey in the 1970s when I was born and we moved “back” to St. Louis MO (USA) when I was about three. We lived in University City between The Loop and Wash U. As my middle school became more violent, my parents found a way to send me to the wonderful John Burroughs School until we moved to Denver in the mid-90s where I had a diverse group of friends including skaters, punks, goths, stoners, mormons, theatre geeks, and fellow members of the International Baccalaureate programme.

After graduating high school, I went to CU Boulder where I studied computer science but later moved into architecture where I finished my degree. After university, I moved to New York City where my first job was working for Kimble Musk who was dating my friend and former teacher Jen Lewin.

I slept on their couch in Tribeca when I first arrived in NYC before moving out to Park Slope in Brooklyn.

I got fired from “FunkyTalk.com” after about two months. After what felt like weeks of near panic that I would have to move back home to live with my parents, I found a job at “The Stock Market”. I was expecting Wall Street but it turned out to be a wonderful family owned stock photography agency and great place to hone my technical skills and learn about rapidly building mission critical e-commerce services selling tens of thousands of digital assets.

I sat in a windowless room in the back of the office on Park Avenue South with a bunch of Ukrainian engineers. We took customer support calls, applied a pretty cavalier approach to engineering with Active Server Pages and Perl and went out after work to places like the Russian Vodka Room where we made many toasts and punished our livers and brain cells.

In 2001 the Stock Market got bought by Bill Gates who moved a bunch of people, including me, to Seattle. I was happy to move out west after September 11th. My girlfriend and I promptly broke up, I learned to snowboard and started hiking. I met a couple of terrific designers David Conrad and Jay Dokken and later became a technical director and partner in their interactive design & development agency called “Design Commission”. We grew the business from 2 people to 12 and opened an art gallery in our downtown Seattle space.

We worked for clients including Microsoft and a very young Twilio and welcomed some wonderful artists including Matthew Carter to exhibit in our gallery space over the years.

In 2006, in Seattle, I started dating the woman who would become my wife. In 2009 she got a job in London and asked how I felt about moving “back” to the UK. We figured we’d try it for a year or two. We got married in 2010 and had a chid in 2012 and, 17+ years later, we’re still enjoying London.

London is an amazing place full of surprises, a terrific hub for international travel and a great place for professional development.

Read my CV for more of my professional work. Check out what I’m doing right now, read my weeknotes or subscribe to my newsletter.