Engineering Leadership: Hard Truths for Tech Leaders
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Why your best engineers leave, how bad org structures quietly destroy teams, and what separates engineering leaders who scale from those who stall.
How to Lead Engineering Teams Without Technical Knowledge
Health warning: This article may not make you feel happy, it may not suit you to read this article. I am not even sure I necessarily believe everything I am saying here – but I do believe in personally reflecting on the challenging questions being posed in this article to try make myself a better […]
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The Hidden Cost of a Toxic Workplace: When Your Job Changes Who You Are
Why the gap between who you really are and who you need to be at work may be one of the clearest signs that it is time to leave. I grew up on a farm, and a lot of the things that are fundamental to who I am were probably formed there. I like quiet, […]
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Why Bolting AI onto Existing Org Structures Always Fails
There is an old urban legend, immortalised as one of the original Darwin Award nominations, about a man who bolted a JATO unit to a 1967 Chevrolet Impala. JATO stands for Jet Assisted Take Off. It is a solid fuel rocket designed to give heavy military transport aircraft the extra thrust they need to leave […]
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You Are Not a CIO. And That Is Fine.
Title inflation is not a strategy. It is a symptom. 1. The room I once sat in a meeting with six people, all of whom had Chief in their title. One owned infrastructure. One owned digital. One owned security. One owned data. One owned platforms. One owned what the agenda described as enterprise technology, which […]
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The Message Mangler: Why Leaders Make Decisions on Fiction
There’s a silent killer sitting in most large organisations. It doesn’t appear on any risk register, it doesn’t show up in your sprint velocity charts, and it certainly won’t announce itself in your next all-hands. It operates quietly, in the gap between what actually happened and what gets reported upward. Meet the Message Mangler. 1. […]
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The Full Context Product: How Agentic AI Redefines the Relationship Between Teams and the Software They Own
A variation on the dark factory thesis. Humans remain, humans are accountable, and what changes is everything else. 1. The Team That Memory Built There is a certain kind of organisational structure that forms not by design but by accumulated necessity. Take a low code onboarding system. It changes twice a year. It breaks twice […]
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Corporate Heckling: Why Low-Context Oversight Fails Teams
There is a peculiar sport played in large organisations. It looks like leadership and sounds like governance, hiding behind frameworks, maturity models, and operating rhythms. But in reality it is something far less noble. It is corporate heckling. Corporate heckling is what happens when a function narrates from the sidelines with low context and high […]
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Decision Debt: Why Good Teams Become Approval Factories
1. The Symptoms Come First Start with the experience rather than the diagnosis, because the diagnosis only lands once the pain is familiar. A feature that two people could decide in an afternoon now requires six, and none of them can say with certainty who actually owns the call. Nobody in the building can tell […]
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How Product Team Structures Inflate Engineer Performance Ratings
There is a product team performance bias hiding in plain sight inside every organisation that has moved to product aligned engineering, except that it does not show up as a number on a dashboard, a flag in a talent calibration session, or a red line in an engagement survey. It accumulates quietly, year on year, […]
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Why AI Pilots Fail to Reach Production (And How to Fix It)
Gartner says 40% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2027. I think they’re being optimistic. Walk into almost any large enterprise right now and you’ll find the same scene: a glossy AI pilot, a proud press release, a steering committee meeting monthly to “track progress,” and an absolutely zero percent chance that any of […]
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The Antidote: How to Be Kind, Be Funny, and Still Tell the Truth
Or: What to do after you have spent years writing posts that scare people. There is a pattern in my writing that I have only recently started to see clearly. The Handoff post was about how leaders abdicate. The 10 Nil post was about a team getting thrashed and not knowing why. The heckling post […]
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AI and Organisational Design: When Capability Belongs to Opportunity and Purpose, Not the Org Chart
1. What I saw in Kruger I was walking through Kruger National Park recently when I noticed small pieces of metal sticking out of the ground, the remains of old fence posts. I asked the ranger what they were, and he explained that Kruger had not always been the enormous open ecosystem we see today. […]
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