No matter how awesome you used to be at your previous roles, doing technical work, pushing out code or adjusting pixels, you should always remember that that’s not what you should be focusing on as your position changes. Drive-by-architecting can be even worse than drive-by-management. It’s one thing to be told to change priorities because […]
In my day-to-day, I happen across a lot of whining in two main scenarios. One is when I’m with my 3 kids. The other is listening to leaders vent. Only one of these is ok. And don’t get me wrong, venting can be helpful, but too often it becomes the default and only action taken. […]
In viticulture it is known that even if you take the best vine from your vineyard, no matter how much awards it has already received, and put it in a vineyard someplace else, you will not get the same results. I think the clearest example is the stark difference between the wines made on the […]
Many leaders, be it CTOs, VPs, or directors, are drowning in their day-to-day work. Often, one of the reasons is that they are busy constantly providing answers and decisions to their teams. It might feel appropriate, as you are a decision maker after all, right? Yet, you should not be trigger happy with that power. […]
… is not that it is executed flawlessly every single time. Following processes religiously without the team understanding the reasoning behind them is akin to the monkeys learning to avoid a ladder without understanding why. If you don’t know why you’re doing it, how can you know when you shouldn’t? Are your teams doing daily […]
Having helped many companies with their architectural decisions, both big and small, I have in my bags a few tricks to make things go smoother and more effectively for everyone. One of the major issues is that no one team is the same. I don’t have in my bag 3 solutions that I simply hand […]
Just because you never had proper mentoring when you became a leader, doesn’t mean your team can or should do it too. It doesn’t matter if you were a genius, all self-taught quickly and efficiently, or if you had to struggle to get where you are today. Simply because something was done that way doesn’t […]
If you never invest time in improving yourself, how will your team learn it’s OK to invest in improving themselves? Remember that you are a role model, whether you want to be one or not. When your team sees you invest time in your personal and professional improvement, they learn that it is welcomed and […]
In my work I’ve come across clients that seem to have decided not to make a decision when it comes to their organizational chart and defined roles. This comes in many forms, such as the Co-CTOs, two VPs with overlapping responsibilities, the flat team with no designated leader, etc. This might have been the easier […]
When working on improving a team’s efficacy and execution, it’s often clear that the norm nowadays has become total disregard of managing schedules and decreasing interruptions to a minimum. Where a couple of years ago you could see managers and engineers say they only check their email every X hours, Slack has completely stopped that […]