About
I'm Ben Price, a Canadian software engineer, technology leader, and father of two based in Tokyo, Japan.
I've spent the last decade or so working across the full spectrum of tech leadership, from individual contributor to Head of Engineering at Mercari (Japan's largest marketplace), to building teams from scratch at consulting firm Slalom, to now serving as CTO at DeepX. Along the way I picked up an MBA from GLOBIS University, not because I wanted to stop being technical, but because I wanted to get better at the parts of the job that don't involve code.
Outside of work, I'm the founder and co-organizer of Tokyo Tech Leads Circle, the largest English-speaking community in Tokyo for people in tech leadership or anyone curious about what that path looks like. We bring together engineers, managers, and leaders across the Tokyo tech scene to share experiences, swap hard-won lessons, and build the kind of connections that don't happen inside a single company.
These days I also split my time building things I wish existed. Kiboh is a workforce intelligence platform I started because every performance management tool I'd ever used reduced human relationships to scores and treated 1:1s as isolated events. I wanted something that treated the manager-report relationship as the actual unit of work. Flags.md is a feature flag platform I'm building for developers who are tired of paying LaunchDarkly prices. It runs natively at the edge on Cloudflare and keeps things simple without sacrificing power.
I write here about engineering, leadership, building products, and whatever else is rattling around in my head.