Keith Johnson

Author • Speaker • Leadership Consultant

Keith Johnson has spent his career leading across more functions than most executives touch in an entire career. He has built and run product and engineering organizations, expanded enterprise software businesses into European markets, managed global accounts, and served in chief solutions and chief operating roles across technology and digital health companies. His customers have been organizations building safety-critical systems — medical device companies, automotive programs, aerospace and defense contractors, life sciences firms, financial institutions — where the cost of misalignment between teams isn't a missed deadline but a regulatory failure or a product that harms someone. That context shapes how Keith thinks about leadership and about AI.

What those years made clear is that the hardest problems in complex organizations are almost never technical. They're coordination problems. They're alignment problems. They happen when the people responsible for an outcome don't share a precise enough understanding of what that outcome actually means — and they compound quickly when AI systems are added to the work before that understanding exists. Intent Management™ is Keith's response to that problem: a structured leadership discipline that gives leaders a way to make their intent explicit enough that both humans and AI can act on it consistently.

He now consults through two practices: NextPeak Studio, focused on SaaS product and go-to-market strategy for early-stage and investor-backed companies, and Dolce Consulting, a leadership development and executive coaching practice he leads alongside co-author Rebecca Johnson.

Keith is the author of two books in the Leadership Shift series. Shifting Into Leadership, co-authored with Rebecca Johnson, addresses the transition from individual contributor to team leader. Alignment at Speed: Leading AI-Enabled Teams introduces the Intent Management™ framework and is written for leaders navigating AI adoption in real organizations. He is based in Carlsbad, California.

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Background

The Work Behind the Framework

25+

Years in Enterprise Software

Led product, engineering, global accounts, European expansion, and solutions across a single enterprise software platform — working with customers in regulated industries including medical devices, automotive, aerospace, life sciences, and finance.

Books Published

Shifting Into Leadership and Alignment at Speed: Leading AI-Enabled Teams — both built from real implementation experience and written for leaders who need practical guidance, not theory.

SaaS

Consulting Focus

Works primarily with early-stage and investor-backed SaaS companies across product, engineering, sales, implementation, and account management — the functions where AI adoption creates the most coordination risk.

The Origin

Why Intent Management™?

Most leadership tools are built for a world where humans produce every output. Evaluate the work, give feedback, adjust. The feedback loop is slow enough that ambiguity gets resolved along the way.

AI breaks that loop. The volume of output increases, the speed increases, and the cost of unclear intent compounds faster than any team can correct for manually. What used to be a manageable gap becomes a systemic problem — and it shows up first in the functions that are closest to the work: product, engineering, implementation, account management.

Intent Management™ exists because that problem needed a leadership response, not a technology one. The four elements — Outcome Definition, Evaluation Criteria, Decision Authority, and Constraint Boundaries — address the specific places where human-AI collaboration breaks down when the intent behind the work hasn't been made explicit.

It's not a technology discipline. It's a leadership discipline that applies wherever humans and AI work together on consequential tasks.

"AI doesn't fail
because it's wrong.
It fails because
no one told it
what right looks like."

— Keith Johnson

Consulting Practices

Two Ways to Work Together

NextPeak Studio

SaaS Product & Go-to-Market

NextPeak works with early-stage and investor-backed SaaS companies on product strategy, go-to-market alignment, and the organizational structures that allow fast-moving teams to scale without losing coherence. Engagements focus on the functions where misalignment is most expensive: product, engineering, sales, implementation, and customer success. Intent Management™ is the operating framework for this work.

Dolce Consulting

Leadership Development & Executive Coaching

Dolce Consulting, led by Rebecca Johnson, focuses on leadership development and executive coaching for individuals and teams navigating high-growth environments. Rebecca co-authored Shifting Into Leadership with Keith, and the two practices share a foundational belief: that the quality of leadership in an organization determines whether its people and tools produce anything worth having.