“Sorry, can’t talk on Friday, it’s really tight. We have our sprint planning.” How often have you said that to someone? The sprint planning and wrapping up ceremonies at many companies end up taking almost a full day every couple of weeks. That’s 10% of your time! Despite that huge investment, after all of that […]
We’re obsessed with amassing more and more senior engineers. I don’t think I’ve talked to a single tech executive in the past year (and I’ve spoken with hundreds) that wasn’t bemoaning the lack of senior talent. I get it: when you onboard someone that already masters the tools and stack that you’re using, it can […]
I’m guessing you’ve heard the story about Sheryl Sandberg and PowerPoint before. She was getting tired of meeting after meeting with slides and said she wanted “no more PowerPoint.” She naturally meant this just for internal meetings with her, not an overarching ban, but her team understood her wrong. They grew frustrated as they tried […]
We cannot always agree on everything. I’d be the first to vouch for the importance of speaking up, candor, and chutzpah for the formation of a healthy culture. Nevertheless, there are disagreements, and then there are disagreements. How should you tackle the different situations? To develop a mental model for handling disagreement, I refer to […]
There’s virtually no chance that you’re reading this and don’t already know that the key to unlocking your team’s effectiveness is empowering them. I don’t see many tech executives who need to be told this. You can directly see that when you don’t empower them and don’t delegate, you end up micromanaging them, and they […]
Let me share one of the open secrets of consultants: sometimes, a big part of our work relies merely on listening to people in the company and what they have to say. I routinely hear from CEOs and executives that the situation is “great” and that there are no issues regarding X. Then, I sit […]
Every time I bring my car to the shop for its yearly checkup, I get nervous. I’m completely clueless. They’d tell me that I need to replace the thingamabob and the whatchamacallit, it costs like a new MacBook Pro, and I’d just stare blankly. I have no way of knowing if that makes sense or […]
A typical issue I see for first-timer CTOs/VPEs is that they do not fully comprehend the meaning of being executives. Tech executives that have the tech part nailed down, but not the exec part. In my upcoming book, The Tech Executive Operating System, I call these glorified managers. They have a fancier title, but, at […]
Do you ever wonder what makes certain teams gain momentum while others seem to be at a standstill? I’ve written about floating leaders in the past. They seem to drift without purpose, and when that’s the case, the team rarely has any chance of being any different. Leadership has a lot of parts to it, […]
A phenomenon that I have witnessed occurring to tech executives in all sizes of companies and with varying degrees of experience is that they trigger increased scrutiny and meddling. I find that most CEOs out there do not default to micromanagement—they genuinely are interested in entrusting the R&D organization to an executive that they rely […]