Everyone’s acting like AI rewrote the leadership playbook. It didn’t. Some tactics have shifted, but the core practice of leadership remains. Here are some axioms for effective tech leaders I’ve collected over the years. They’ve stood the test of time and are well worth your attention. How well do you have them sorted? Executive Leadership […]
Larry Wall, creator of Perl, famously said that laziness is one of the three main virtues of a programmer. Being effectively lazy is highly useful for ICs as well as for leaders. An organization with a culture of healthy laziness can actually cover ground faster. The Danger of Not Being Lazy People who aren’t lazy […]
Remember the software craftsmanship movement? I used to walk around with those green “Clean Code” wristbands. Those were the days. But trying to hang on to a world that’s no longer there is futile. You and your senior engineers ought to come to terms with the new world. Yeah, we’re talking about AI again. The […]
Do you find yourself huffing and puffing as a tech leader? Not sure how to keep all of those plates spinning? You, my friend, need to let go of your main character syndrome. The answer to the overwhelming load many tech executives report is rarely to work harder. Rather than piling ever more things on […]
A major point of contention that often arises in relationships between tech executives and their CEOs is that the latter does not understand what the former are actually doing and where their time is going. They wonder whether things are doing fine and whether they ought to be doing better. They hear you describing a […]
Teams that are working at 100% capacity might feel like top “hustle mode.” Unfortunately, they are just racing towards a wall. When a surprise eventually happens—and they always do—they’re going to get everything crashing down. Rather than getting marginalized, let’s get some margin (pun kinda intended). Disaster Waiting to Happen Someone gets sick, quits, or […]
Unfortunately, tech leaders don’t really have version control for their work. Months of hard work pass, and yet you cannot easily show the “release notes” for it. How can you stay on course when you don’t have in front of you what you’ve already achieved? Without it, you’re bound to continue fighting fires constantly. What […]
Leaders fixated on outcomes treat the path as just friction, a hassle. In reality, the journey is where compounding growth lives: in the errors, corrections, and patterns you either notice or don’t. To help your team grow, stop focusing on avoiding a specific mistake. Aim to make those mistakes count. What “Net-Positive” Actually Means Every […]
As the person who keeps telling tech leaders to stop being so negative and shoot down everything (the infamous “CT-No”), I feel obliged to address the other extreme. The VP of Engineering who tries to accept everything eventually reaches the same dead end from the opposite direction. Learning how to push back effectively is a […]
When a CTO tells me they just barely saved the day, I annoyingly don’t pat them on their backs. Instead, I walk them back to why they were ever in that position. The hero moment is usually evidence of a prior failure. The impressive thing isn’t rescuing the team. It’s building a team that doesn’t […]