The Engineer-to-Lead Transition
The most consequential promotion of my career was also the one I was least prepared for. I had spent years getting good at writing systems that settled...
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Leadership — Page 3
Setting Goals That Do Not Become Theater
Every leadership team I have worked in eventually discovers the same uncomfortable truth: the goals you write down quietly become the goals you optimize for,...
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The Cost of Always Being Available
Somewhere along the way, availability stopped being a courtesy and became an expectation. I noticed it in myself first: the reflexive glance at a phone during...
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Making Skip-Level 1-on-1s Useful
Skip-level 1-on-1s are one of those practices that sound obviously good and usually deliver almost nothing. You block thirty minutes with someone two layers...
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The Underrated Skill of Writing Good Tickets
I have spent a fair amount of my career watching brilliant engineers ship the wrong thing. Not because they were careless, and not because they lacked the...
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Why Great Engineers Sometimes Make Poor Managers
Over the years I have promoted more engineers into management than I can easily count, and I have watched a meaningful fraction of those promotions struggle....
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Leading Through Uncertainty
Every leader claims to thrive under pressure, but uncertainty is a different beast than pressure. Pressure has a shape: a deadline, a launch, an audit you can...
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Career Ladders That Actually Motivate
Every few years I rediscover the same uncomfortable truth: the career ladder I inherited was built to satisfy HR and finance, not to motivate engineers. It...
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The Meeting Audit Every Team Needs
Every engineering organization I have worked in has a quiet, expensive problem hiding in plain sight: the calendar. Meetings accrete like sediment. A standup...
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Handling a Production Incident Calmly
Every engineering leader remembers their first real production incident. Mine was a payment authorization gateway that started timing out at the worst possible...
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Delegation Is a Skill, Not a Reflex
For years I treated delegation as something that happened automatically once I had enough people. Hire competent engineers, point them at problems, and the...
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The First Team Principle for Leaders
Most leaders, when asked to name their team, point downward. They describe the engineers, the product managers, the analysts who report to them. That answer...
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