Engineering Leadership
10 essays on Engineering Leadership, from 25 years at the seam between the boardroom and the codebase.
Grow Leaders, Not Just Headcount
Scaling a team by hiring more bodies buys you headcount, not leverage. The durable move is to build leaders and make yourself replaceable.
Read →Leading Technology as a Remote Executive Across Time Zones
Remote technology leadership isn't a downgrade of the in-person version. Done deliberately, distance forces the clarity that good organizations need anyway.
Read →Owning the Whole Stack: Dev, Platform Ops, Support, and Data
Splitting dev, platform ops, support, and data into separate fiefdoms feels organized. It manufactures the worst failures. Single ownership fixes that.
Read →From Data Chaos to Visibility
Most companies don't have a data problem. They have a trust problem. Turning scattered, untrusted data into visibility people act on is platform work, not a dashboard.
Read →Managing People When Everything Is Growing at Once
In high growth the org chart, the product, and the headcount all move at once. Managing people through that is a different job than steady state.
Read →Running Internal and External Engineering as One Team
Internal product teams and external developers can ship as one accountable unit, or fail at the seam. The difference is who owns delivery.
Read →The Multi-Year Roadmap That Survives Contact With Reality
A three-year roadmap that locks every quarter is fiction. One with no direction is chaos. The job is building the version that holds a line while reality keeps moving it.
Read →Scaling a SaaS Engineering Org Without Breaking What Works
Scaling a SaaS org breaks more from added process than added people. The job is to grow capacity without grinding down the trust and speed that got you here.
Read →The Kind of CTO You Need at Each Stage
The CTO who takes you from zero to one is rarely the one who scales you to a hundred. A field guide to matching the leader to the moment.
Read →On-Prem to Cloud-Native With Under an Hour of Downtime
Big-bang migrations fail loudly. Here's the incremental, reversible approach I use to move legacy systems to the cloud while the business keeps running.
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