Why We Started Chief of Mom Life
Chief of Mom Life began with a shared belief: Motherhood Is Leadership. But we did not arrive at that belief the same way.
We are sisters. But our careers, our experiences of becoming Moms, and the paths that led us here were different. Somewhere along the way, from two different directions, we realized we were seeing the same thing.
Here is how it happened, in our own words.
Learning to See Leadership Differently
I was already a Mom by the time my own understanding of leadership started to change.
Early in my career, I assumed leadership was simply what happened once you got good enough at your work. Do the job well, and more responsibility would follow. That was the only model I had for a long time.
As I moved from managing tasks to leading at an organizational level, executive coaching became the catalyst that expanded my thinking. My coach kept asking questions that had little to do with output: What are you actually prioritizing? What decisions are you avoiding? What structure supports the people around you? Leadership, I started to see, was not about doing more. It was about creating clarity when priorities competed, setting direction before everyone got busy, and building systems that held up under pressure.
That shift did not just change how I worked. It changed how I saw everything, including my own home.
I started noticing that the work I had been doing all along as a Mom, making decisions, setting priorities, shaping the way our family operated, was not simply management. It was leadership. I had just never had the language for it.
So I started applying some of what I had learned. Not by running my household like a company, but by asking the same kinds of questions I had learned to ask at work: What are we actually prioritizing right now? What would make this decision easier the next ten times, not just this once?
It helped. Genuinely.
But the more I leaned into it, the more I realized something that mattered more than any single tool. Workplace leadership does not simply transplant into motherhood. Moms deserve leadership development built for the realities of Mom Life, not borrowed wholesale from a boardroom.
The volume of decisions at home was just as high as it was at work. The responsibility was just as real. But the structure to support it was often missing.
Your time and attention are finite. Leadership means investing your limited time where you can make the greatest impact.
That is the belief I brought to this work.
Rebuilding One System at a Time
There was a period where I felt like I had lost most of my agency. I was not choosing how I spent my time, when I slept, when I saw my friends, or even what I ate. I was surviving. I was not leading my life, it was leading me.
I did not fix that all at once. I changed one thing at a time.
I started meditating for a few minutes most days. A few months later, I noticed I had more energy, so I started exercising. A few months after that, I had the motivation to start cooking healthier meals. Alongside those changes, I became more present, and I started recognizing what I actually enjoyed again. From there, I picked one point of friction with my kids and addressed it. Then another. That instinct, to solve a problem once rather than manage it over and over, was not new to me. It was how I had worked for fifteen years at a large tech company, and it turned out to be exactly what Mom Life needed too. Each one built a little more confidence, and a little more sense of agency.
I want to be clear about something: none of this made life perfect. I still get stressed. I still make mistakes. What changed is that I now trust I can find my way back to myself, even in the middle of a demanding job and two tweens.
What has made the real difference for me is having a small group of people who offer support, accountability, and thought partnership.
Connection has always mattered to me. I spent years in a male-dominated engineering school and then a male-dominated industry, and I know what it feels like to be isolated. It is one of the worst feelings there is. That is why my favorite thing in the world is to connect women with each other. Watching women support each other, and knowing I helped make that connection possible, brings me genuine happiness. It is a large part of why community sits at the center of what we are building.
My desire is for Moms to feel more intentional and more supported, because I believe that leads to a more fulfilling life and less isolation. The frameworks we build are guides for personal reflection, so Moms can lead their lives the way they want. They are not meant to tell anyone how to parent or how to live.
Two Paths, One Belief
We did not start Chief of Mom Life because we had figured out motherhood. We started it because, from two different directions, we had both experienced what changed when greater clarity, stronger systems, and meaningful community supported the way we led our lives.
Abby found it through coaching and a career that taught her to see leadership everywhere, including at home. Jessica found it by rebuilding her sense of agency one small system at a time, and by leaning into community when isolation felt heaviest. Different paths. Same conviction.
Why is leadership development common in so many other parts of life, but rarely designed specifically for motherhood? Chief of Mom Life grew out of our desire to help build that missing practice.
To read the essay that started this work, see Motherhood Is Leadership.
Read the essay →