Work without a clear outcome, finish line, appetite, or milestones expands until it consumes the quarter. “Why isn’t it live yet?” “It turned out to be more complicated,” the CTO says. Or another priority got in the way. The conversation quickly becomes about urgency. Nobody said what outcome the feature should create, what that outcome […]
It’s sprint review. A team “pulls out” work finished a couple of weeks ago, presented as fresh. Everyone in the room half-knows. That’s how teams deteriorate fast, and startups become political. Let’s create a healthier org. Fake It Till You Break It Startups run on promising things that don’t exist yet. CEOs sell features that […]
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 […]