Empathy has a reputation problem in tech. It’s often sidelined into something you talk about at offsites or sprinkle into slide decks after the real decisions are made.
Not for Mike Gibson, chief technology officer at Planet DDS. He says it’s more like a leadership superpower. “Empathy is a performance driver. I found it's not a sign of softness... it's really understanding the impact of decisions on people.”
In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Mike shares how he intentionally puts empathy at the center of how he communicates, makes decisions, and builds trust. The result? Faster execution. Stronger teams. And a culture where people actually want to grow.

Mike has led distributed engineering teams through some of the most complex transformations a company can face — cloud migrations, AI adoption, and rapid scaling across continents and time zones.
At Planet DDS, which runs business-critical SaaS platforms for dental practices, downtime has immediate consequences. “When we're down, they're down,” Mike explains. “In our case, they can't serve patients.”
In moments like that, it’s easy for engineers to default to technical reflexes — more logging, better alerts, deeper root cause analysis. But Mike starts somewhere else: “What we need to focus on is how can we better impact, in a positive way, the client experience? How do we get back up and running?”
Internally, it works the same way. “Empathy plus clarity builds the trust,” Mike says. “Once you have the trust, you really unlock things like accountability, autonomy, and then speed within the teams.”
Trust doesn’t come from more process. It comes from showing up consistently, transparently, and as a real person. “Employees want to be heard, they want to be protected, and they want to be supported—not just directed or led down a path or off the cliff.”
Mike manages global teams across time zones, cultures, and employment types. The glue holding it all together? Communication.
“Culture really is built through repetition and visibility, being predictable, and being very transparent,” he says. That means using every available channel — email, chat, video calls, all-hands, one-on-ones, and skip-levels — to keep people informed and connected.
But it’s not just about volume. It’s about consistency and tone. “It’s so easy when you’re in a very fast-paced environment to keep moving fast,” he says. “But I think it’s very key to take time, smell the flowers, acknowledge successes. We also acknowledge when there’s an issue. We don’t avoid it. We speak on it, and we address it.”
In fast-moving teams spread across the world, clarity becomes the anchor that keeps everyone aligned. Mike sees his role as a communicator first, someone who reduces ambiguity and helps people feel grounded. “There’s not a decision that should be made that doesn’t have some consideration on how it’s communicated. It’s really change management.”
Change brings uncertainty — and with it, fear. Mike doesn’t sugarcoat that. He creates space for teams to face it, talk about it, and move through it with clarity. “You will make decisions, and some will be wrong. But how do you learn from it, how do you move forward?”
You can see that in action in how he approaches AI adoption: not mandates, but shared learning. Monthly all-hands become a forum for engineers to show how they’re using AI tools in the real world. That peer-driven model builds trust, confidence, and momentum.
But innovation takes more than buy-in. It takes bandwidth. “You really can't innovate if you're always running and trying to catch your breath. Because you've got to breathe when you innovate.”
Mike sees his job as protecting his team's time and giving them what he calls "escape velocity."
"My passion is the triangle," he says. "People, process, technology. And it's really how do I drive that transformation? How can I lead by example? How can I allow them to breathe and be heard?"
Mike Gibson:
When I think about technology and leadership, I think about that classic triangle where you have people, processing, technology. And how do you balance those three elements? And everyone has different strengths and different quadrants within that triangle, but I really do put heavy emphasis, personally, on people management. And with that, I try to lead with empathy, because empathy is a performance driver. I found it's not a sign of softness or being a player-coach as much. It's really understanding the impact of decisions on people.
Gemma Versace:
Hey everyone, and welcome to Keep Moving Forward, the podcast from X-Team for tech professionals who are passionate about growth, leadership, and innovation. I'm your host, Gemma Versace, chief client officer here at X-Team. In every episode, we sit down with leaders who are redefining how technology teams work, grow, and lead — people who understand that performance begins with connection.
Today, I'm joined by Mike Gibson, chief technology officer at Planet DDS. Mike has spent his career leading global technology teams through transformation across industries and continents. He's led organizations through cloud migrations, guided teams through AI adoption, and helped people adapt to new ways of working in fast-changing environments. What stands out in Mike's leadership is how consistently he brings empathy and clarity to complex challenges. He sees empathy not as an abstract idea, but a real performance driver — a way to understand how decisions affect people and how that understanding leads to better outcomes.
In our conversation, Mike talks about leading distributed teams across time zones and cultures, and how communication becomes the bridge that holds everything together. He explains how trust and clarity unlock autonomy, how to help teams move through change instead of resisting it, and why honest communication is the foundation for innovation. We also explore how technology leaders can approach AI with curiosity and balance, using it to empower engineers rather than overwhelm them. And throughout it all, Mike shares a message that feels especially relevant right now: that leadership is about creating conditions where people can succeed, grow, and do their best work.
Let's get started. Hi, Mike. Welcome to the podcast.
Mike Gibson:
Hello, thank you. Thanks for your time.
Gemma Versace:
You've got such a wonderfully diversified background, having worked in small, medium, and also large enterprise businesses across your career journey. It'd be really great if you could just start off with giving us a little bit of background as to what your career journey has looked like and what led you to be CTO at Planet DDS.
Mike Gibson:
Yeah, I'd love to. So, like you mentioned, my journey has been very diverse in experience. I've worked for small startups, PE-backed companies, as well as in the large multinational, publicly traded companies. So it's been the whole spectrum of size and scale. I've worked in numerous verticals, as well, in terms of like manufacturing, utilities, insurance, fintech. And then, for the last six years, in health tech.
Started out as a software developer. My first job out of college was software engineer in an industrial plant, doing plant automation and back-office IT solutions. However, I quickly realized my professional passion and skills are probably more biased towards leadership versus hands-on software development. So I quickly pivoted within leadership positions in a pretty early phase in my career.
I've managed global development teams. I've been all three PMs — being project, program, and product manager. I've built a corporate-wide PMO, being in project management office, held various positions with P&L responsibilities, including a large professional services organization and a global software organization. I've had the opportunity over the last 15 years or so to be an executive leader in various growth companies. Really, to summarize all that, my passion really is around people-process-technology transformations, and they all require empathetic leadership, as well as strong change management skills.
Gemma Versace:
Yeah, fantastic. And you mentioned then that what really has stood out to you, and what gets you out of bed in the morning, is leading teams and leading by example and being a leader. You also just touched on that you believe that empathy is such a differentiator in leadership and particularly tech leadership, which is the teams that you lead, and that it's more than a process or tooling.
What experiences have convinced you of that? What particular experiences or interactions with your teams, whether it be dealing externally with clients or internally with your own internal teams and broader business, what are some experiences that have really solidified that for you?
Mike Gibson:
Yeah. So when I think about technology and leadership, I think about that classy triangle where you have people, process, and technology, and how do you balance those three elements? And everyone has different strengths and different quadrants within that triangle, but I really do put heavy emphasis, personally, on people management, and with that, I try to lead with empathy. Because empathy is a performance driver. I found it's not a sign of softness or being a player-coach as much. It's really understanding the impact of decisions on people.
So I really found that empathy is a strong key change enabler. What that means is empathy starts with listening before you try to solve problems. You really want to understand the human impact before you make the final decisions because, again, you think of it through the lens of the key stakeholder. It really is, how does it impact them?
So you mentioned clients. So I think through a couple examples of technology and leadership. You have your external-facing leadership with clients, as well as your internal teams. And when you deal with clients, it is really understanding their voice, or the voice of the customer's kind of the classic phrase. My company, we have issue-critical, business-critical SaaS platforms. So our ability to keep it high available is key to running their business. When we're down, they're down. In our case, they can't serve patients. And ultimately, they're not a tech consumer as much as they are a patient-facing, patient-providing service.
When there is a production issue, as we call it, an issue with maybe our cloud infrastructure and so forth, it's very common for engineers to get into the problem-solving and try to understand how we can add more logging, add more alerts, and so forth. But really what we need focus on is how can we better impact, in a positive way, the client experience? So how do we get back up and running the service? So it really is teaching the teams how to be empathetic, and take time later on to the root cause analysis and to next steps and action plans to improve processes, but really it is keeping your eye on the clients. So that's one facet.
You also mentioned internal team management and so forth, whether it be teams or individuals. I think empathy plus clarity builds the trust. In my experience, at least, is once you have the trust that you really unlock things like accountability, autonomy, and then speed within the teams. So my job is to really remove friction, it's not to add process. Process is important. I always give an analogy of if you have a headache, you might need two aspirin, but if you take a whole bottle, you have a different problem. So it's how do you balance the need for process and to give the teams the ability to be successful?
I think, finally, in terms of internal teams, empathy, again, it's not always bending to emotions, but I think it's understanding emotions. And then, because really employees want to be heard, they want to be protected, and they want to be supported, and not just directed or led down a path or off the cliff, per se.
Gemma Versace:
Yeah. Thanks for your very detailed answer. I think it really highlighted what you do personally to be able to lead with empathy from a leadership perspective, but also how you are leading with empathy to your team then allows them to provide that to the customer, as well. And I think one of the key points that you also pointed out was leading with empathy. I think also, it allows you to really show your teams and customers your true authentic self that then, as you mentioned, really breeds into wonderful trust that you can then develop.
And when dealing with a dispersed global team across different cultures, across different time zones, across different areas where you might not always be able to address them at the one time. Or there might be some of your comments or some of your directions coming through via different channels.
How do you go about making sure that you can overcome any cultural challenges or challenges that do come up, being part of a leadership with such a diverse and globally situated team? How do you make sure, and how do you really double down on ensuring that leading with empathy and making sure that you are having empathy be at the forefront of all of your communications? How do you make sure that you can overcome some of those potential challenges?
Mike Gibson:
It is a challenge. You acknowledge that, and recognize that it is a challenge, whether it be time zones, whether it be full-time employees versus contractors, whether it be just different cultures of people, how they work and operate. So I think culture really is built through repetition and visibility, being predictable, and being very transparent. And you also need to establish events that create connections because humans at the end of the day — again, I'm not a psychologist by any means — but humans want a sense of belonging and they want to add value.
How do you pull that value from them? I'll probably use the word “communication” a lot in this discussion. I think communication is huge. It's acknowledging that uncertainty causes concern and fear. So how do you communicate in different time zones and different cadences? I think it's really using multiple channels of communication. You can't just send out an email, for example. You can't just use a Teams chat. You really need to find a way to connect with people.
So you really need to build systems where people can see the work, they can get the information. It's so easy when you're in a very fast-paced environment to keep moving fast, but I think it's very key to take time, smell the flowers, acknowledge successes. We also acknowledge when there's an issue and we don't avoid it. We speak on it, and we address it. But also take time to calibrate. I think that in itself really helps build the culture across the different time zones, the different types of environments.
Gemma Versace:
Yeah, I think you're so right in making sure that not only making sure that people feel comfortable in their environment, but their wellbeing and their psychological safety is also at the forefront of their leaders. One of the things that you mentioned, and that it's evident in you, I think you're a really clear communicator and I can see how you would be able to engage and motivate your teams. But give me a little bit of a snapshot as to what percentage of your weeks are more people leadership, communicating, making sure that their voice is getting heard, versus some of the more technical requirements and technical execution that you personally are doing.
How much of your time is really spent specifically on making sure that your leadership communication and your engagement with your team is what it needs to be to continue to promote that clarity in what you want to need from them, but also to encourage that relationship and the engagement between you and your team members?
Mike Gibson:
Yeah, I can't think back to a day where communication wasn't important, whether it be with clients communicating, it could be a very technical topic, it could be going over a posture or a security posture, to talking about product role map or what have you. And then you think internally talking to our executive leadership team about strategic topics, but also having one-on-ones and doing skip one-on-ones. Again, every day, I focus on how to communicate and how to be better at it. I think there’s not a decision should be made that doesn't have some consideration on how it's communicated. It's really change management. Change can be tough on people and clients and so forth, so it's how you manage that change. And again, I think communication is one of the pillars of change management.
Gemma Versace:
Yeah, absolutely. And talking about change and change management, change can often spark resistance, as you've rightly identified already. How do you help and prepare your teams to want to change? Because sometimes there is some change management or some change fatigue that sometimes comes across businesses because people think they constantly have to do something different rather than doing better. How do you really motivate and help them get in the headspace of wanting to change?
And especially during transitions, such as things like AI adoption or cloud migration, which is something that I think more recently you and your team have experienced, moving away from more of the on-presence support to now moving more to the cloud. How have you helped them want to get there, and what are some of the key things that you would suggest for other leaders?
Mike Gibson:
Yeah, I think you have to be very honest. You have to stress that change has to happen. The classic “you don't change, you die” in terms of on the line. But you also have to understand that change is tough, to your point, and the classic leadership, you go to a leadership seminar or you go to the MBA class, and there's this change curve of emotions. And it varies from, it depends on the change and the degree of change, but humans, with uncertainty comes concern, fear. So you first you have this shock phase, and you have this anger phase, and then you move to confusion before you really get to acceptance. And then once you have acceptance is really where you start seeing the problem solving.
So as a leader, whether there's a client or a team or individual, my job is to acknowledge, again, change is tough, there are emotions tied to it, but that you the individual, the company, the client won't be successful unless we do go through that change.
You mentioned AI. AI is in every conversation whether it's political, socially, professionally these days. And so as a software engineer, for example, and I have teams across the globe in software engineering, different levels and so forth, different adoption to AI use. I'm talking about AI, I'm talking about for code generation. So the natural reaction of a human and of that developer is, "I'm going to be replaced by AI." So how do you overcome that fear? That is the reality to some degree, but it doesn't have the endpoint.
So it's about how do you augment use of AI to make you even a stronger engineer? Have very honest conversations. If you want to succeed at my current company, or really, if you decide to leave and go to a different company, you're going to have the same challenges. How do you embrace change, how do you embrace AI, how do you augment your day-to-day activities, and how do you be on the leading edge versus the trailing edge, where you do become more at risk for job security and so forth?
Similarly, you mentioned cloud transformations, it’s similar where, in the past a lot of these — again, my background is to a lot of these enterprise type of solutions. A lot of them have been on-premise solutions where you have an IT staff that either, you have the classic closet in your building or you have a private data center, but you own that hardware, and you have infrastructure engineers that take care of it, network engineers, and that's their job, that's their passion.
Years ago, you get AWS, you get Azure, you get GCP coming to cloud providers, the public cloud provider for cloud hosting, and that became a real risk and jobs concern of legacy IT people.
So again similar, how do you get them the opportunity so they can learn and expand their skills, whether it be for your own company or their next stop along their journey? And how do you communicate that, honest communications, and give them the place to be successful? Because it's not their job to make me successful, it's my job to make them successful. And with their success yields success for myself and the team. So that's why you need to have that approach to how do you help manage people through change?
Gemma Versace:
That's such a refreshing and wonderful leadership style that you do have where it's not, it seems like, a “them” problem, it's a “you” problem. You need to be working as their leader to bring them along on the journey, to be communicating what is necessary, to get them into that psychologically safety area so they can come to you with any fears or concerns or problems or also, at the same point, opportunities, as well.
Switching gears a little bit now, just talking about leadership in general, particularly engineering leadership, technology leadership, what do you think engineering leaders need to stop doing if they want to build high-performing and aligned teams like some of the ones that you've led and are leading today? What are some of those key characteristics that you think are necessary to really be able to promote a high-performing team and culture?
Mike Gibson:
Yeah, I think leadership is a communication job, more than anything. It's not a coding job. I'm a software developer, so I think about coding. And it's classic where you have that really high-achieving software engineer that they think the next step is to be a people manager. Some are very successful, and some are not. And I think sometimes new leaders, especially in the technology space, they overindex on technical direction. And again, you go back to that triangle, people-process-technology, they come from a place of strong technology experience. So they overindex on that and underindex on, again, some of the soft skills about drawing clarity and prioritizing and influence people. Because again, to your earlier question, change can move slow to some people. So how do you influence them to move them along?
So I think really, it’s enabling people to be successful and enabling them to solve problems on their own, and that's within teams. Because as a leader, you can't solve all the problems. I view myself as a strong problem-solver, but I'm not naive to think I can cover all problems to solve. So this really is focusing on delegation and passing down that responsibility and then empowerment. And it's also aligning stakeholders. I think, especially in the technology, you think about engineering organizations, you talk about collaboration across teams and engineers who are thinking about, that means that with the DBAs, the database administrators, or the infrastructure engineers or different scrum teams.
Again, it ties into empathy, as well. It really is collaborating with the support organization and supporting with the account management team, and so forth. So I think that's another asset of leadership that new leaders struggle with or don't recognize as important as anything else they do.
Gemma Versace:
Yeah, I think that's fabulous. You can very much clearly see how well you do communicate internally. I can see just even that you're clearly so passionate about it, with it's been such a key theme through a lot of your answers have really — and you're exactly right that a lot of things can be overcome by clear, honest communication, which I think is just amazing. Just a couple more questions.
One that we did touch on a little bit at the start of the call, but obviously with all of the advancements with AI and agentic AI and all of the wonderful blogs and news out there that AI is coming to take all of our jobs, and there won't be any left, particularly from a software engineer and software developer standpoint. No doubt you have a lot of internal and maybe potentially also outsource resources that there is a little bit of nervousness. There is a little bit of how do I make sure that I am upskilling or cross-skilling, or what potential areas should they be stepping into?
How do you go about either getting the right resources to help your team, or how are you communicating with your team to not only at an individual level talk about some specific things that they could be doing to keep at the forefront or reduce some of the trepidation about their roles? How are you giving some further comfort to them around what they could be doing? Or just in general, any developers listening to the podcast, what is the key three things from an advice perspective that you'd give?
Mike Gibson:
Yeah, embrace the change. AI is here. It's not next year's problem for a developer, it's here. And it's not a problem, it really is truly viewed as augmentation. And I think it's also the responsibility of the leadership to make sure it's communicated up the organization, as well, in terms of what should be expectations in terms of improvements. And there's different, again, software development. You get different outputs and expectations of outputs if it's brand-new development, which we call greenfield, or if it's legacy development, which may be more brownfield. So it's really setting expectations both up the chain, but also with the team.
So we do different formats, and again, multichannel. We do an all-hands meeting once a month where we have a special topic. And this year has been heavily, I would say, influenced by AI topics, new technologies, but also how are individuals throughout the organization using AI, especially in my engineering organization, so they can share their experience. Because I can sit up on the hill and tell the team, "You must use AI and here's how you do it." But when they hear from their peers on, whether it be a small thing in terms of improving unit testing, or it's, again, augmentation, allowing them to move faster with a certain initiative or project, then as they see that their peers are getting that value, they're more open-minded to embrace that journey, as well.
We also provide training. You can't just spray and pray. You can't just say, "Here's AI tools, now pray it's going to work." And that's challenging, because there's so many different AI tools out there, it’s evolving scope quickly. We give boundaries in terms of a tool, A, B, or C for your code generation, try it out. You can't use all three of them, a cost element to it, of course, but pick one and learn from it and again, share your experiences. We have internal channels where we communicate, and again, it's successes and here's one good use of AI, here's my value. So it's just constant repetitive communication via different channels.
Gemma Versace:
That's so fantastic that you're really creating and embracing that environment to be sharing. And I love your pushing of the peer to peer. I think that would be so impactful and so influential to how your teams and other developers are responding to AI, as well. What they're seeing and hearing in their space, but also what they're seeing and hearing from others outside of either their industry or region.
But finally to wrap up, the all-important wonderful question is looking forward. 2026 is way too close to being true than what it should be, it feels like it's only still the start of the year, but how do you keep personally moving forward? What are some of the things that you do when you feel stuck or when you are unsure of what the right step might be for your team, or what the right step might be for your business, or just as a leader in general? And if I can double-end the question, as well, what does 2026 look like for you, and what are the things that are making you so excited to really embrace 2026 and beyond?
Mike Gibson:
Yeah, I think the constant change is exciting. I think innovation is exciting to me personally and for my teams. Innovation can be big or small. Agentic AI is going to be a big initiative for us. We've already started, but really roll out into our client base really pretty cool agentic AI solutions. But really, it’s keeping the focus on innovation. Again, I'm an engineer by education and practice, but it does require capacity to do innovation. So it is really how do you give, either it would be myself or my teams, the capacity to have that escape velocity, meaning opportunity to using the tools?
So it's again, focus. It's allowing the focus of the team, it's protecting their time because you really can't innovate if you're always running and trying catch your breath. Because you’ve got to breathe when you innovate. So how do you do that? It's nothing unique or maybe innovative in itself, but you have to reduce the manual work, you have to automate, you have to find where that pain is. That's why, again, empathy is important because you really need to listen, understand the pain points of people and processes. And you need to simplify, you need to automate, you need to streamline. And with that allows you to have, the ability to have to focus and the bandwidth to innovate.
So for me, it's the constant change, the innovation, and again, my passion is the triangle I go back to: people, process, technology. And it's really, how do I drive that transformation? How can I lead by example? How can I allow them to breathe and be heard?
Gemma Versace:
That's so fantastic. I think as I've mentioned it before, but I think your willingness to communicate, your willingness to listen, it definitely shines through in a lot of the answers, but also experiences that you're giving, which is fantastic.
Last question: If I said to you, “What are the three things 2026 is either what you are hoping to deliver or what you're most looking forward to for 2026?” It can be personally, professionally, specifically to your team. What are the key things that you're really most excited about coming into 2026?
Mike Gibson:
Yeah. It's tough to limit to three. There's so many different things in my head right now in terms of what to share, but it's how do I ever provide more value to my stakeholders? I'm working for a private equity firm — not firm, but backed company — and how do I deliver the growth as well as cost optimization? And it's challenging to do both, but it's also exciting, and it's something that we have criteria initiatives around in 2026. So how do I deliver that? That's one thing of excitement for myself.
It’s, again, I mentioned earlier, but how do we continue to roll out AI internally and to our clients? So you think about AI-powered tooling internally, you think about agentic AI solutions that can help offset some of their labor costs for our clients. You think about embedded AI or integrate AI within your solutions. And we have all those in our roadmap and all those different initiatives, and it's really finding the right balance to do.
And I think, again, it's continuing the journey of leading and teaching my teams “voice of the client” — things that might seem obvious, but when you're in the day-to-day operations, and you focus on getting that one sprint ticket done, you don't always think through, again, it’s the empathy, it’s the voice of the client. Teach them how to make decisions. And don't be frozen by decisions, because you will make decisions, and some will be wrong, but how do you learn from it, how do you move forward? So I get a lot of personal satisfaction of really leading those kind of transformations. I'm fortunate I'm in a very healthy business right now. We're growing very fast and have lots of opportunities to continue to teach and lead in those regards.
Gemma Versace:
That's such a wonderfully refreshing answer that there's so much more to learn, but there's also so much to impart on your teams, as well. You're keeping that level of morale and energy high, as well, coming into some of the initiatives that you're wanting to implement across 2026.
So thank you so much, Mike. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I've learned a lot about not only your teams and what you are doing, but also some really sage advice for either current leaders or emerging leaders out there, that communication is key, that empathy is absolutely a strategy. Hope is not a strategy, but empathy is absolutely a strategy. And that making sure that there is that really wonderful autopsy without blame if something does go wrong, that it's really in a safe, psychologically safe space for your team members that are not only in the office, but also those that are dispersed, as well.
So thank you so much. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and thanks so much for joining us here on X-Team's podcast.
Mike Gibson:
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Gemma Versace:
My conversation with Mike reinforced how powerful empathy can be when it's put into action. He shared what it means to lead through uncertainty, to acknowledge that change can be difficult, and to give people the structure, communication, and trust they need to move forward with confidence.
For Mike, success as a leader comes from removing friction, simplifying what's complex, and protecting the space where teams can innovate. He approaches leadership as a partnership, one where accountability and empathy go hand in hand. His reflections on AI were just as insightful. He doesn't view AI as a threat to human work, but as a tool that expands what people are capable of when they know how to use it responsibly. That mindset, embracing new technology through trust, clarity, and communication is something every organization can learn from.
At X-Team, we share that belief. The best innovation happens when teams feel supported and empowered to grow, when communication is clear, and when leaders make empathy part of every decision. That's how great cultures are built and how lasting transformation takes hold.
And before we wrap up, I want to take a moment to thank Caleb Brown for his incredible hosting over the past year. His curiosity inside and thoughtful conversations have really helped shape Keep Moving Forward into what it is today: a space for honest discussion and real perspective on leadership and growth. Caleb, thank you for everything you've brought to this series and for helping build a platform that continues to challenge and inspire leaders across the tech community.
Join us next time for more conversations with technology leaders who inspire us to grow, lead, and innovate. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Music. And if this episode resonates with you, please share it with your network. We'll see you next time.
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