Leaders of teams of all sizes often find it problematic to make their people operate with urgency. By “urgency,” I don’t mean stress, nervousness, or anxiety, but a general sense of striving to achieve their goals earlier rather than later. While it is commonly attributed to growth—more people means that things move slower—I’ve seen this […]
Many managers and leaders have become addicted to productivity porn. Everywhere I look, I see teams discussing time wasted, optimizing processes, and squeezing out some more time to work (remember Soylent?). As someone who regularly talks about tripling impact-per-engineer, I want to stress the difference between chasing productivity and focusing on efficacy. You cannot create […]
There are two scenarios that are frequent in my day-to-day. The first is where a company approaches me because its leaders feel like they do not have enough processes in place to accommodate their growth. The second is the opposite: an executive might feel like things are slowly grinding to a halt because too many […]
The current “way of doing things” in startup-land seems to revolve around hiring engineers in droves the second the company has secured funding. However, just because it has become a norm doesn’t mean it makes sense. Could you be actually doing better with smaller teams around? First, I’ll state that this is chiefly directed at […]
Tech executives often come to me and share their disappointment about the role they seem to be taking in their companies. They feel that they are not being utilized correctly or are not viewed as real executives. I’d say that more often than not, when someone feels like this, it’s true. Nevertheless, the real question […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]