Leadership Without a Title
The Starting Point
My path into leadership didn't begin in data engineering. It began years earlier, managing people and campaigns in marketing, long before I ever touched a data pipeline.
When I transitioned into software and data engineering, I brought something with me that isn't always common in technical careers: an instinct for people, communication, and organizational dynamics. I quickly noticed that the hardest problems in data platforms were rarely the technology itself. They were the human ones — alignment, trust, and clarity.
That realization has shaped every leadership role I've taken on since, whether or not the title said "manager."
Taking Ownership Where No One Had
At Svedea, I was promoted from Junior Data Engineer into a role where, in practice, no one owned the Snowflake platform. There was no governance model, no clear picture of who was responsible for cost, access, or reliability, and no one had been tracking how spend was accumulating across teams.
I could have waited for someone above me to define the mandate. Instead, I treated ownership as something to claim through action rather than wait for through a title.
I started by simply making the invisible visible: tracking usage patterns, identifying which warehouses were oversized for their workloads, and mapping who actually had access to what and why. What I found wasn't a technology problem so much as an accountability gap. Departments had spun up their own usage patterns with no shared standard, and no one had felt it was their place to intervene.
Building the governance model meant having a series of uncomfortable conversations, telling teams that practices they'd relied on for months needed to change, without the authority of a manager title behind me. What made those conversations work was leading with data rather than directives. When I could show a team precisely what their usage was costing and what a better pattern looked like, the conversation shifted from "why should I listen to you" to "how do we fix this together."
The result was a 30% reduction in Snowflake spend, but the more lasting outcome was cultural: platform ownership became a shared responsibility rather than something that happened by accident.
Leading Through Influence, Not Authority
Consulting sharpened this further, because the stakes of leading without authority were higher, and the trust had to be built from zero every time.
Walking into a new organization as an external consultant, I had no organizational history, no existing relationships, and no formal standing to make anyone listen to me. On projects like the ScandiStandard financial data warehouse initiative, I was working alongside a CFO and CTO who each had their own priorities, their own language, and, at times, their own preferred solutions already in mind before I arrived.
The moment that tested this most was a technology platform decision where finance and engineering had already begun to diverge, each side quietly convinced they were right. It would have been easy, and faster, to let the more senior or more vocal stakeholder win the argument. Instead, I stepped back from the disagreement itself and built an objective comparison across scalability, cost, complexity, and long-term flexibility, one that didn't belong to either side.
Presenting that analysis wasn't about being clever. It was about giving both teams a way to change their minds without losing face, evidence they could stand behind together, rather than a decision imposed on them. When the organization ultimately moved forward with the direction I'd recommended, it wasn't because I outranked anyone. It was because I'd made it possible for two teams with different instincts to arrive at the same conclusion.
Leading People Who Don't Have To Follow
Founding Data & AI Stockholm took this even further, because volunteers can walk away at any moment, and often do, if a mission doesn't hold their genuine interest.
In the early days, there was no brand, no track record, and no way to compel anyone's involvement. The only tool I had was the vision itself, and whether it was strong enough for people to choose to spend their evenings and weekends building it with me. I learned quickly that leading volunteers meant leading almost entirely on trust and shared purpose. Every deadline missed, every unclear responsibility, every moment where someone felt unseen was a moment where the whole structure could quietly unravel.
What held it together was building real ownership rather than simply delegating tasks. Rather than assigning volunteers narrow jobs, I involved them in shaping the direction of partnerships, events, and community strategy, so that the mission became something they were building, not something they were helping me build. That distinction turned out to matter more than any process or tool I introduced.
As the community grew past 2,000 members, with monthly technical events and partnerships with organizations like Google and Omni, the team held together not because of contracts, but because people felt genuine ownership over what we were creating.
What I've Learned
A few principles have held true across every one of these contexts:
Leadership is earned, not assigned. None of my most meaningful leadership moments came from a title. They came from consistently showing up, listening, and following through, at Svedea, in consulting rooms, and with volunteers who had every reason to walk away.
Data builds trust faster than authority does. Whether it was Snowflake usage patterns or a technology comparison for a CFO and CTO, leading with evidence let people change direction without feeling overruled.
Structure is a leadership act. Creating governance where there was none, alignment where there was division, and ownership where there was only enthusiasm has consistently been where I've added the most value.
Different people need different things from a leader. Employees, external stakeholders, and volunteers all respond to different motivators. Recognizing that, rather than applying one leadership style everywhere, has been essential to earning trust in each context.
Looking Ahead
These experiences have shaped what I want to bring into a formal management role: the ability to build trust quickly, create structure in ambiguity, and lead people, technical or non-technical, employed or volunteer, toward a shared outcome.
Leadership, to me, was never about waiting for the title. It was about practicing it everywhere I could, in a platform no one owned, in rooms where I had no formal standing, and with a team that showed up because they wanted to, until the title simply became a formal recognition of what I was already doing.
