Hi. I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
I’m a leadership coach, speaker, author, and the CEO of Active Voice, a company dedicated to creating bold leaders and better workplaces in design and tech.
Work with me
Photo credit: Sean Tubridy / Brain Traffic
Speaking
I love to share my perspective on leadership, inclusion, bias, and design with audiences of all types.
Photo credit: Republic of Quality
Coaching + Training
Visit my company Active Voice, which helps organizations build radical, courageous leadership practices.
Books
Technically Wrong
See how tech industry bias and blind spots get baked into digital products—and harm us all. A Wired Top Tech Book and Fast Company Best Business & Leadership Book.
(W.W. Norton, 2017)
Design for Real Life
Learn to identify stress cases and design with compassion, so you can create interfaces that support more of your users, more of the time (coauthored with Eric Meyer).
(A Book Apart, 2016)
Content Everywhere
Design content that's flexible and structured for reuse—so it can go more places, more easily. Perfect for bringing systems thinking into your content strategy toolkit.
(Rosenfeld Media, 2012)
“Sara Wachter-Boettcher is exactly the kind of sharp, informed and deeply compassionate critic of the tech industry that we need right now.”
— Sarah Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic
More about me
I’m the CEO of Active Voice, a leadership development company on a mission to create bold leaders and better workplaces in design and tech. Since 2020, we’ve been helping people understand who they are and how they lead—so they can speak up with confidence, build team resilience, and navigate challenges with ease.
I started Active Voice after leading a content strategy and UX consulting company for nearly a decade, where I saw the messy insides of all kinds of tech, product, and design teams. Now I spend my time coaching, facilitating workshops, and running professional development programs.
I’m the author of three books (so far!): Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, Design for Real Life, and Content Everywhere. I also speak frequently, and have been featured at events like SXSW, Drupalcon, UX Week, Confab, and Lead Dev.
I also cohost Per My Last Email, a podcast about what to do when work gets weird, with my colleague Jen Dionisio. I’m based in Philly, and work with clients anywhere and everywhere.
Drop me a line to learn more!
Experience
I’ve led trainings, workshops, projects, and speaker series for dozens of companies—including these fine folks.
