Engineering Leadership: Hard Truths for Tech Leaders
Why your best engineers leave, how bad org structures quietly destroy teams, and what separates engineering leaders who scale from those who stall.
Keep Your Heart Open: The Leadership Discipline of Delaying Judgement
In my earlier article on harshness and firmness in leadership, I argued that you can hold people accountable without being cruel to them. There’s a related discipline that I think matters just as much: holding off on judgement about who someone is for as long as you possibly can. That isn’t the same as holding […]
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Centralization vs Decentralization: Why Recentralizing Teams Fixes the Wrong Problem
1. Two arguments that sound contradictory and are not Most organisations end up holding two opposite opinions about centralisation at the same time, often within a few weeks of each other. 1.1 The case for pulling a function back together Somewhere, a function that used to sit centrally has been pushed out into the business […]
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The Trophy Case Is a Marketing Budget, Not a Scoreboard
1. The pitch that arrives every week If you run a technology function at any size of company, you will eventually receive an email that follows a familiar and well rehearsed pattern, one that opens warmly and almost personally, as though a magazine or a research boutique or an awards body had noticed your work […]
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