Introducing Noodle Labs 🎉
Embedded leadership offering for startup teams.
After working together across three early-stage startups (and one newsletter), we are excited to officially launch Noodle Labs.
Noodle Labs is embedded leadership for startup teams.
We join as an extension of your leadership team to drive strategy and execution — not as advisors who dole out advice over a monthly phone call, but as operators who roll up our sleeves and get sh*t done.
Over the past year, we’ve both been working as fractional leaders. In separate companies, we kept seeing the same patterns: execution friction, leadership gaps, strategy that didn’t quite translate into results.
So we decided to join forces.
With Noodle Labs, you get both of our expertise — engineering leadership and strategic operations — working together in one package.
If this sounds like something your team might need, email us at hi@noodlelabs.ai. We’re happy to chat and see if it’s a fit.
When We Step In
We work with founders and leadership teams who need experienced operators who can step in and own real outcomes.
Common situations where we’re brought in:
A founder needs more capacity and needs to hands things off to someone to own end-to-end
A team is scaling rapidly but execution is very messy. Too many meetings and unclear priorities distract from the work at hand.
Hiring, leveling, compensation, and performance systems need to mature to meet a growing team’s needs.
The team wants to adopt AI meaningfully — but needs guardrails, training, and operational clarity to do it well.
Emerging leaders need real-time coaching and guidance in their work context to unlock their leadership potential.
There’s a leadership gap to fill, and you need experienced team-builders to interview, vet, and de-risk the hire.
How We Work
We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all playbooks. There are some best practices, but every team is different, and people and context matters.
We start with a conversation to align on what your team needs most and check for mutual fit. We’ll tell you honestly if we’re not the right people for the problem.
Then we start with one focused, high-leverage challenge — typically a 6–8 week engagement designed to deliver visible momentum and measurable progress.
That might look like:
Rolling out AI adoption initiatives and practical trainings that actually change how teams work
Building an operating rhythm that drives accountability and follow-through across teams
Recruiting and coaching a new leader through their first 90 days so they ramp with clarity and confidence
Debugging why strategy isn’t translating into execution and fixing the root cause
This gives your team immediate wins while allowing us to deeply understand your context.
From there, we move into embedded fractional support (typically ~2 days per week for 3-6 months). Depending on your needs, one of us may be more embedded, or we may work in tandem.
Our embedded leadership looks like:
Attending meetings and 1:1s to understand what’s actually happening
Spending hands-on time in the work (code, planning docs, financial models, customer calls)
Coaching leaders and give direct, in-context feedback
Building minimum viable operations — enough process to unlock velocity, not so much to slow you down
Being responsive on email and slack when you need us
Why Noodle Labs
Between us, we have 20+ years building and scaling early-stage startups — Jean in engineering leadership, Jen in strategic operations and people systems.
We’ve worked closely in our cross-functional roles, and we know that most execution problems aren’t purely technical or purely organizational.
They’re both.
We bring complementary expertise across:
Engineering team health and velocity
Product × engineering alignment
Strategy-to-execution gaps
Leadership development
Operating cadence and accountability
Transitional and interim support
If you’ve been following along with Startup Soup, you already have a good sense for how we think and work. We believe in minimum viable operations — practical stage-appropriate systems that support velocity, and the judgement to know when to iterate on them.
What’s Not Changing
Startup Soup will keep sharing practical frameworks and operational wisdom.
We love writing about the patterns we see. That work is for everyone, whether you need hands-on support or not.
But if you’re feeling stretched thin — carrying vision, fundraising, product decisions, and internal team dynamics all at once — you don’t have to hold all of it alone.
We step in so you can focus on the work that energizes you and moves the company forward.
We’d love to hear from you! hi@noodlelabs.ai
— Jean & Jen