The person behind the product.

Dadlife comes quick

My daughter was born during my senior year of college, so fatherhood arrived before I had much of anything figured out.

I was finishing school, becoming a dad, and learning in real time how to be responsible for someone other than myself. There wasn't a moment when I suddenly felt ready. I just kept showing up, making mistakes, learning, and trying to do a little better the next day.

My kids are adults now, and watching them become their own people is the accomplishment I'm proudest of. They grew up while I was growing up too. Somewhere along the way, we figured a lot of it out together.

In the kitchen

As a single dad, I realized that a surprising amount of my time with my kids happened around meals. So I learned to make the kitchen count.

I involved them in whatever I was doing. When they were little, that might mean stirring something or carrying napkins to the table. As they got older, they could measure, chop, season, and eventually take responsibility for parts of the meal themselves. There was always something age-appropriate they could own.

Then we would sit down to eat, and I'd ask questions that couldn't be answered with “yes,” “no,” or “fine.” Mostly, I tried to stay quiet and let them talk their little hearts out.

Those meals became some of our best time together, not because the food was always great, but because the kitchen gave us something to do side by side, and the table gave us space to talk.

That experience eventually led to the Mens Philanthropy Foundation, a 501(c)(3) I founded to strengthen fatherhood through cooking and conversation. Dad's Kitchen is its public face: cooking videos, conversation starters, and a community for dads who want to show up. Our cooking videos have received more than 20,000 views on Instagram over the past two years, organic growth from dads who saw something real and wanted to share it.

Staying physically sharp

I started lifting in 1999, and I've never really stopped. I spent twelve of those years coaching strength and conditioning, but long before it became part of my work, the gym had already become a staple of my life.

Training is one of the ways I've stayed healthy, but it has also helped keep me steady. During some of the hardest periods of my life, the gym gave me somewhere to go, something constructive to focus on, and a familiar routine when other parts of life felt anything but stable.

As we get older, opportunities to challenge ourselves physically become easier to avoid, and more important to seek out. That's one of the things I value most about training. The gym is a constant reminder that challenge matters.

A difficult lift forces you to be honest. You assess what's in front of you, respect the weight, decide how you're going to approach it, and commit. Sometimes you succeed. Sometimes you don't. Either way, you learn something, adjust, and come back.

After all these years, the gym still keeps me healthy, clears my head, and reminds me that difficult things become manageable when you learn how to approach them.

If you're interested in the coaching side of that story, it's under My Path.

Staying mentally sharp

I read for a lot of reasons: to learn, to reset, and sometimes just to disappear into another world for a while.

For fiction, I'm a Brandon Sanderson devotee. I love the scale of his world-building, but what really hooks me is the structure underneath it. His approach to magic often feels science-first: there are rules, limitations, costs, and consequences. The worlds are imaginative, but they never feel arbitrary.

I'm just as invested in the characters. Sanderson lets people develop over the course of a story, and often across an entire series. They struggle, make mistakes, carry their history with them, and change gradually. Their growth feels earned.

Outside of fiction, I return often to Resilient Leadership: Navigating the Hidden Chemistry of Organizations by Bob Duggan and Jim Moyer, along with the writing of Timothy Keller.

Different shelves, but apparently I have a type: strong internal logic, thoughtful ideas, and people who develop over time.

A little more of who I am

I'm a father, a former Army officer, a longtime coach and teacher, a product owner, and someone who still enjoys making a meal with his kids whenever everyone's schedules cooperate.

Those parts of my life overlap more than they stay separate. But this page isn't here to turn every hobby or life experience into a professional qualification.

It's simply a little more of who I am when I'm not working.

Get in touch

I'm interested in senior Product Owner roles where I can stay close to users, product decisions, and delivery. Email me at perry@perrywolfe.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.