Rachel Miller

Much of my leadership experience has come without formal authority. During five years at Reddit, I led complex product work across engineering, design, data, and partner teams, and learned early in my career how to create momentum even when I did not control the people or resources needed to get something done. I operated through repeated organizational and leadership changes, including periods with limited direct management support, which pushed me to become highly independent and deliberate about building alignment. Outside my formal product role, I repeatedly created and led initiatives from scratch. I formed and led groups of employees and volunteers, negotiated directly with senior executives including CEOs, built support across VP and C-suite stakeholders, and helped secure more than $250K in budgets and resources for intrapreneurial, mentorship, and tech-for-good initiatives. Doing that required understanding what different stakeholders actually cared about, reframing ideas around their incentives, recruiting supporters, handling objections, and turning projects with no obvious owner into real programs. I’m especially useful for people trying to lead cross-functional work, win executive buy-in, build an initiative outside their formal remit, influence stakeholders they don’t manage, or increase their impact before they have a senior title. My approach is practical: identify the real constraint, understand the incentives in the system, build the coalition you need, and create enough alignment to move the work forward.