What Do You Do?

As a tech exec advisor, I’ve had the pleasure of working with people with all sorts of titles. The most common tech exec titles include CTO, CIO, VP Engineering, VP R&D, and Head of Engineering. These are a bunch of titles, and if you’re just making your first steps in leadership roles, you might be […]

What Are You Optimizing For?

How often do you catch yourself in the middle of some fight only to realize it doesn’t really matter? Or, how many of your opinions are “strongly held” even though they’re no longer serving you (if they ever have)? A prevalent leadership fallacy I come across is seeing clients who are optimizing the wrong metric. […]

Miscommunication Plan

It’s funny, I expected geeks-turned-managers to be better at communicating changes to their teams. After all, they often have years of experience thinking about meticulous database migrations, feature rollout plans, and just thinking about how things will play out. Frequently enough, though, we don’t seem to apply these skills to how we talk to our […]

Permission to Take the Lead

For many, a nontrivial leap has to occur when transitioning to senior leadership roles. Most of the formal education and prior work experience people have inculcates a necessity to follow directions, being told what to do, getting permission. If you continue waiting to be permitted to do what needs to be done in your new […]

Preventive Plans and Contingencies

If there’s one thing that you can count on most tech executives being very attuned to, it is the risk management of the different product engineering work in their organizations. They are often equipped with years of experience as technical ICs and have become calloused enough to think about all the different things that can […]