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.
Vibe Coding Risks: Why AI Cannot Own Architectural Decisions
AI is a powerful accelerator when problems are well defined and bounded, but in complex greenfield systems vague intent hardens into architecture and creates long term risk that no amount of automation can undo. 1. What Vibe Coding Really Is Vibe coding is the practice of describing intent in natural language and allowing AI to […]
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Naked Teams: How to Strip Away Defensive Process
1. The Uncomfortable Silence After the Music Stops Every organisation that runs on defensive process has a soundtrack. Standups hum at 9am. Sprint reviews crackle on Fridays. Retros generate their familiar low frequency guilt. Planning ceremonies fill the gaps. Remove all of it and the first thing you hear is silence, and silence in a […]
Read more →7 Corporate Culture Sins Destroying Your Organisation
An ancient taxonomy for very modern dysfunction The original seven deadly sins endure because they describe human failure modes, not theology. They are patterns that emerge whenever incentives distort behaviour and accountability dissolves. That makes them an uncomfortably precise model for corporate culture. Below, each sin is paired with its mirrored virtue. Not as moral […]
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AI First Mover Finality: Why Reaction Becomes Impossible
1. The Physics Makes the Point Brutal Here is the uncomfortable physics problem. If two Death Stars come into existence at the same time, and one fires first, the other never gets to respond. Not because it is slower.Not because its sensors are worse.But because causality itself prevents reaction. A weapon travelling at the speed […]
Read more →Why Least Privilege Security Is a Lie: 3 Root Causes
In technology, there is a tendency to solve a problem badly by using gross simplification, then come up with a catchy one liner and then broadcast this as doctrine or a principle. Nothing ticks more boxes in this regard, than the principle of least privileges. The ensuing enterprise scale deadlocks created by a crippling implementation […]
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Toxic Ownership Models: How Corporate Culture Fails Clients
1. Ownership Has Been Turned Into a Moral Shortcut Ownership has become one of the most lazily celebrated concepts in modern organisations. Leaders demand it reflexively, teams chase it performatively, and entire operating models are justified by invoking it as if ownership itself produces outcomes. It does not. Ownership is merely a structural choice, and […]
Read more →The Triplication Paradigm: Why Removing Duplication Fails
Introduction In most large corporates technology will typically report into either finance or operations. This means that it will tend to be subject to cultural inheritance, which is not always a good thing. One example of where the cultural default should be challenged is when managing IP duplication. In finance or operations duplication rarely yields any benefits […]
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Enterprise Software Tiering: Why Bundle Pricing Fails
By Andrew Baker, CIO at Capitec Bank There is a category of enterprise technology vendor whose approach to pricing is so fundamentally at odds with how purchasing decisions actually get made that it borders on self-defeating. Their commercial model is built on access gates, bundled tiers, and a deeply held belief that controlling what a […]
Read more →Stop Asking for Requirements: Think Like a Technologist
I think you’re a genius! You found this blog and your reading it – what more evidence do I need?! So why do you keep asking others to think for you? There is a harmful bias built into most technology projects that assumes “the customer knows best” and this is simply a lie. The customer […]
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Technology Leadership Assessment for Business Heads
This is an assessment exists to surface how you actually think about leadership of technologists. Answer honestly. Not as the executive you present in interviews. As the leader you become when the deadline is real, the team is pushing back, and someone senior is asking you for certainty you do not have. Every option is […]
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Not Everything Is a Product: Why Confusing Products and Capabilities Quietly Wrecks Your Organization
One of the more expensive mistakes I have watched organizations make, again and again, is assuming that anything worth building must automatically be a product, and that assumption alone has spawned more unnecessary teams, more artificial ownership structures and more bloated roadmaps than almost any other single habit of thought in technology leadership. Here is […]
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Sinking Car Syndrome: When Bad Architecture Is Terminal
There are two types of post incident review in technology. The first is genuinely useful, since you learn something, fix something, and sleep better afterward. The second is an elaborate ritual in which intelligent adults spend considerable time and money working out why a car sank, before commissioning a study on how to make the […]
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