Refactoring Podcast How to Own Your Career 🦝 — with Jean Hsu and Cate Huston
43 snips
May 1, 2026 
Cate Huston, engineering leader and coach who’s led teams at DuckDuckGo and Automattic. Jean Hsu, fractional engineering leader and coach who builds career programs for startups. They talk about owning your career intentionally, making coaching scalable and affordable, using journaling and cohort structures to sustain growth, mapping personal goals to workplace realities, and how AI changes tools but not core career work.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Make Coaching Affordable With Text Based Cohorts
- Make coaching benefits accessible through scalable formats instead of only expensive one-on-one sessions.
- Jean and Cate built DRI Your Career as an affordable, text-based course plus limited one-on-one feedback to replicate common coaching arcs.
Use Peak Moment Questions To Find Career Values
- Use simple reflective questions to surface career values and motivations.
- Jean's "peak moment" and "what makes you thrive" questions revealed Luca's preference for growth-through-people and glue work, more useful than job titles.
Luca Finds Purpose In Growing Others
- Luca's peak moments were team growth and seeing junior hires become senior engineers.
- He values glue work connecting product, technical strategy, and people over titles, which coaching revealed quickly.