Luca Sartoni

Luca Sartoni is a leadership coach specializing in remote team management, distributed leadership, and executive development. Former Director of Product Engineering at Automattic, he led teams of more than thirty people across four continents. Today, he works with managers, founders, and CEOs through leadership training, executive coaching, and strategic consulting.

Luca Sartoni knows what it means to lead distributed teams across time zones that never overlap. He spent nearly a decade at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, and Tumblr, one of the world’s best-known fully remote and asynchronous organizations.

Difficult conversations, delegation, performance management, asynchronous communication, feedback culture, and managerial accountability are the areas where he has developed deep expertise.

He joined Automattic as a Growth Engineer working on Akismet and advanced to the role of Director of Product Engineering, managing teams distributed across Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. During those years, he built a practical and field-tested approach to leadership development, trust building, and team accountability in fully remote environments.

His personal story is central to his leadership philosophy. Luca was promoted into management without formal preparation or support and had to learn how to lead through direct experience. That challenge became the foundation of his mission: helping managers develop the tools, frameworks, and communication skills he wished he had when he started leading teams.

Today, he designs leadership development programs for large organizations through Wibo and advises CEOs and senior executives through Remote Leadership Works, the company he co-founded. He is also the author of Leadership Efficace – Strumenti per manager alla prima esperienza, a practical guide for first-time managers focused on effective leadership, communication, and people management in modern organizations.

Books

Luca is the author of the Italian book Leadership Efficace – Strumenti per manager alla prima esperienza, published by Avanscoperta and available in all digital formats on Leanpub (soon on Amazon as a paperback).

He’s guided global software engineering teams with over 30 people spread over four continents all over the world, and he’s been specializing in managing long-distance processes and leadership development.

Articles

Diventare manager migliori: Our interview with Luca Sartoni (part 1 – part 2).

Videos

Small Talk: An informal chat with Luca Sartoni (in Italian) (YouTube – Spotify).

Collaborative Asynchronous Communication: Panel in English with Luca Sartoni, Alberto Brandolini, Emanuela Damiani and Wojtek Ptak (YouTube – Spotify).