Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Photo credit: Sean Tubridy / Brain Traffic
I love to share my perspective on leadership, inclusion, bias, and design with audiences of all types.
Photo credit: Republic of Quality
Visit my company Active Voice, which helps organizations build radical, courageous leadership practices.
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.
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)
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)
— Sarah Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic
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 (co-authored with Eric Meyer), 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!
I’ve led trainings, workshops, projects, and speaker series for dozens of companies—including these fine folks.
It’s a biweekly-ish newsletter of no-BS leadership tools, self-reflection activities, and links. We’ll also send occasional emails about new Active Voice workshops and courses.
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Made in South Philadelphia. Making change everywhere.
© 2025 Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Active VoiceCoaching and training for tech leaders
Per My Last EmailThe podcast about what to do when work gets weird