McKinsey Partner · CTO · CPTO

Product. Designer. Engineer. Builder of technology organizations.

Twenty-plus years from hands-on design and code to leading a 400+ person technology organization — the team behind products reaching 1,700+ organizations a year, and the technology behind the national movement for skills-first hiring.

Carolyn PierceLos Angeles · Salt Lake City

400+

Engineers, data scientists & product leaders — grown from a team of five, over a decade

1,700+

Client organizations served per year

20+

Years from hands-on code to the C-suite

80+

Partner organizations integrated for skills-first hiring

1M+

Job commitments opened to workers without four-year degrees, across 33 states

The through-line

I built my career the way STARs do — and then built for them.

I never finished my degree. For the first decade of my career I built the alternative way — self-taught front-end engineer, designer, product manager, skill by skill, shipped project by shipped project. And through most of that decade, I was afraid to apply for jobs. I knew what happened to a resume without a bachelor’s degree on it: a filter reads it, and a person never does.

So when my role at McKinsey put me in a position to work on that screen itself, it was personal. With our people analytics team, we built tools that help organizations make talent decisions on skills rather than proxies. With clients, we worked on the transition to skills-based hiring directly. And with the Ad Council and 80+ partner organizations, we built the technology behind Tear the Paper Ceiling — the national movement for STARs — workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes: the 70+ million Americans who have the skills for higher-wage work but no bachelor’s degree.

I was one of them. Building technology that helps employers see skills — instead of screening them out — is the through-line of everything I do.

Carolyn Pierce interviewed by NBC's Jacob Ward on the Today Show

Today Show · 2023Watch the segment — the story of the degree screen, told on national TV.

What I build

From first prototype to national platform

Product · 0 → scale

OrgLab & People Analytics

Designed and built the original organizational-design platform, then led the teams that grew it to 250+ clients a year and created its machine-learning companion — built explicitly to reduce bias in talent decisions, to enterprise-grade security and privacy standards.

AI for good

Tear the Paper Ceiling

From 2019, our team built the technology for nonprofit Opportunity@Work, whose work became the Ad Council's national skills-first hiring campaign: data platform, AI tooling, and integrations with Workday, Indeed, Jobcase, and 80+ partners. Before there was budget for data scientists, I dusted off my own rusty Python and wrote the first skills-matching analysis myself.

Generative AI

The SaaS → AI pivot

Guided my team's 2023–2025 pivot to generative AI — a product organization that rebuilt its portfolio around Data-as-a-Service, AI governance for talent use cases, and tooling for agentic builds.

Career Arc

Design → engineering → executive leadership

2007 – 2014

Builder — LA startups & consultancies

Engineer, designer, and product manager at Affinity Labs (acquired by Monster Worldwide), RightsLine, NTT Data, and XCentium. Scrum eng and product lead for projects including Fandango and the build of the software that became McKinsey's OrgLab.

2015 – 2021

Product leader — McKinsey

Built the Organization practice's technology from a blank page into a 150+ person product organization. Led product strategy and design for OrgLab — grown with its team to 250+ client organizations a year — and created the Org Data Platform and the People Analytics offering, applying machine learning to talent data to reduce bias.

2022 – present

Partner & Chief Technology Officer — McKinsey

Elected Partner on an unusual path for McKinsey — a builder's resume, not a consultant's. Full P&L accountability for the practice's technology and product businesses: a 400+ person organization of engineers, data scientists, and product leaders, 1,700+ client organizations served each year, the annual technology budget and vendor portfolio, and the turnaround of two underperforming businesses. Led the portfolio's 2023–2025 pivot to generative and agentic AI.