Leadership, technology, organizational design, and what AI is doing to all of it.
Reorgs are cheap. Rebuilding the decision rights, metrics, and systems around them isn't. That speed mismatch, not bad planning, is why ownership and architecture keep drifting from the org chart, long after the reorg that caused it.
Many people are betting taste is the human moat against AI. But taste is just inarticulation with good PR. If you can't define your quality bar, you can't hire for it, develop toward it, or scale it.
It's always been useful to understand how work flows: handoffs, constraints, dependencies. When execution was slow, you had time to respond. At the speed of AI, that lag is gone. If you haven't built infrastructure to keep the system healthy, you'll find out what's wrong when customers do.
Self-service tools aren't speed solutions, they're infrastructure investments that shift costs rather than eliminate them. They require stable requirements, sustained high volume, organizational maturity, and acceptance of ongoing support burden.
Requests don't exist in isolation. They have upstream causes and downstream effects. They affect multiple stakeholders in ways that aren't always obvious from the description. And they often represent symptoms of larger problems. If your team is working tickets, you're solving the wrong problem.
Stop chasing updates. Start building systems that bring information to you.
Career ladders aren’t just HR checklists — they’re the hidden systems shaping who grows, leads, and stays in your company. When these frameworks are vague or broken, chaos follows. Here’s why getting them right is essential for influence, equity, and organizational health.
The moment you stop thinking about technical investment as something separate from business investment is the moment you start making much better decisions about both.
In nearly every organization, predictions about how others will respond to our ideas have become a form of corporate fortune-telling. We devote hours to anticipating objections, preparing counterarguments, and even shelving initiatives based on assumptions about what someone else might think.
The polymer professional — adaptable, integrative, and perpetually evolving — represents not just a new approach to career development, but a fundamental rethinking of the professional identity itself.
Every company should be looking for ways to grow and nurture their people. However, when companies introduce “mentorship,” it usually takes the form of an internal matching service. But, a mentorship program is different from a mentorship culture, and the latter is where the real impact can happen.
There is a lot that you can do to ensure that you are bringing fairness and objectivity to the way you are leading and managing your organization. Hiring, performance management, and promotions are three main areas to start.
As leaders, we're told that transparency with our teams builds trust and that our values should guide our actions. However, organizational reality often puts these principles in tension, if not conflict.
As leaders, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that we must always be “on” — constantly driving forward, putting out fires, and supporting our teams. But one of the most important skills for any manager or leader is knowing when it’s time to step back and prioritize our own well-being.
If there's a single piece of advice I would give to anyone starting out on their leadership journey, it's this: become unabashedly curious. This single trait, if genuinely approached, will have a profound and emergent effect over the course of one's career.
Realistically speaking, most systems we design and operate are more accountable to Darwin than they are to Newton. But we don't always think to build them that way. Recently, I had an opportunity to write an article for Built In to explore this very topic.
The debate about the importance of technical or “hard skills” versus “soft skills” for managers seems to be a never-ending one, especially in engineering circles.
One of the best ways to stretch yourself into new growth opportunities and demonstrate value is to tackle a known issue in a new way. However no matter what you come up with, driving change within an organization always starts with getting people to do something different than they’re used to.
This week, I’d like to share with you a handful of articles I came across over the past few weeks that I found particularly interesting and wanted to pass along to you.
As a leader, our teams look to us to guide them through turbulent times, even when we don’t necessarily have all the answers.
Good communication is often hailed as a cornerstone of effective teamwork and organizational success.
For the longest time, we’ve been taught to “Assume Positive Intent,” a mantra that encourages us to believe others act in good faith and to suppress the reflexivity of judgment of others when they act in a way that is counter to our own behaviors or values.
Meetings are necessary in all businesses, but by taking some guidance from systems thinking and Lean manufacturing, you can make sure you only hold those that are important and effective.
To make space for new leaders to grow, although it may seem counterintuitive and even a bit scary, you must start employing strategies to make yourself obsolete. Finding yourself solving the same problems over and over again is an indication your team isn’t growing to solve these problems.
When tech leads and product managers work as one, avenues for compromise, pushback, and the emergence of creative strategies are opened. Diverse perspectives and out-of-the-box thinking will be welcomed as everyone feels comfortable to participate, and problem-solving becomes a true team effort.
In the age of the “knowledge worker” so much of our ability to succeed is dependent on the active exchange of ideas. This is similar to having a “sparring partner” in martial arts or boxing — and being good in that role takes discipline and practice even if you are not landing any kicks or punches.
While learning about job candidates’ capabilities is certainly important, so, too, is providing them with a glimpse into who you are, as well as what it’s like to be a member of the team and what the company is all about. This style of communication is apt to be a boon to your hiring efforts.
The demo is a quintessential component for enabling a team to tell their story and outwardly represent their team’s culture and achievements. Yet, so many teams approach their demo reactively and lose this valuable opportunity.
Beneath the pressure all engineering leaders face to “move faster” are a set of assumptions held by others. These assumptions are instinctive and based on an intuition that is deeply personal to every individual. As leaders, it is our responsibility to bridge this gap.
There’s a concept in motorcycling, specifically on group rides, known as “the Sweep,” the last rider in the pack. This role offers a compelling metaphor in organizational leadership, especially when contrasted with the more visible Road Captain.
"Proposals and Braintrusts" is a systematic approach to collaborative problem solving involving the identification of a problem statement, the clarity and self-introspection of writing, a feedback and revision process, and real-time group discourse.
Each week, I carve out time to write my “Week in Review.” This ritual affords me space and time to step back from the fire-of-the-week to rebuild my mental model about the strategic, long-term vision of what we’re trying to accomplish.
There’s a lot in common between leadership and the improvisation that you find in music and comedy. Improvisers aren’t just “making it up.” They are crafting a story in real-time that represents everything they’ve learned over years of honing their skills.
Hiring for your team comes down to being able to effectively describe your ideal candidate. Adding rigor to and removing bias from the interview process involves a great deal of introspection, peer review, and iteration. This post provides a guide you can follow.
Time is a finite resource. Our responsibilities and expectations, however, are not. To ensure we are able to make the best use of our time, it is valuable to analyze the work that we take on, the attention we’re able to devote to it, and the context switching that is required throughout the day.
For those who struggle to get meaningful feedback from their manager or peers, there is hope. The way we ask for feedback can help influence how it is delivered and improve the odds of it being constructive and actionable now and in the future.
As an organization grows in size and complexity, process and structure will be introduced to make sense and codify that complexity. However, it carries with it the risk that these systems will begin to interfere with the type of collaboration that breeds creativity.
Having team members organized in different cross-functional Product Teams or Scrum Teams can bring a tremendous amount of value to an organization. Unfortunately, the role of the manager of those team members can be ambiguous if not deliberately established.
The root cause of the frustrations that many teams experience adopting Agile or Scrum is that they embrace the ceremonies, rather than the communication framework that it offers. If teams focus on the types of conversations available to them, they will more effectively be able to operate as a team.
As increasing emphasis is put on developing leaders, an often-overlooked aspect is if the employee actually has the right manager for them.
Companies of a certain size — that is, somewhere after “hmmm, we really should get some managers…” and before “crap, our managers don’t have time to manage people because they’ve got too much work to do!” — start to encounter growing pains.
Affecting change in an organization is possibly one of the most mysterious and baffling parts about professional life.
Escape Rooms have been growing in popularity over the past few years, and interestingly, these activities are a great case study in team dynamics.
The core tenet of my leadership philosophy is that it is not about authority or titles, but about influence, trust, and the ability to bring out the best in those around you.
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