Leadership•
Onboarding is a feedback loop for organizational health
A new hire notices the problems everyone else has learned to step around. Their first month is organizational feedback, if anyone is willing to hear it.
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Essays, observations, and field notes from Nicklas K. Frank.
Leadership•
Remote teams and the 2/3 pattern
Feedback loops that happen naturally in an office have to be deliberately built when you're not in the same room.
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The 2/3 pattern appears at more than one scale
I thought the 2/3 cycle followed company growth. Then I started seeing it inside teams, departments, and individual projects.
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Good boss, good product, good team: pick two
The same joke kept turning up: good boss, good product, good team. Pick two. I started looking for the pattern behind it.
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The three pillars: leadership, product, and team
Leadership, strategy, and team health can each look convincing until the work puts them under pressure. These are the tests I use.
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Why two strong pillars can weaken the third
Across three combinations, visible success made a growing weakness easier to dismiss. The context changed, but that pattern kept returning.
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Why good leaders don't always build great teams
A successful team went silent when its leader took a holiday. Years of clear direction had taught everyone to wait for the answer.
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Why organizational focus keeps moving
One organization tried to repair leadership, strategy, and team at the same time. The transition was more than the system could absorb.
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How engineers and business people handle uncertainty
A word as ordinary as customer can expose how differently engineers and business colleagues handle uncertainty. Architects have to work inside that gap.
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Show me your codebase
Ten years ago, I declined a whiteboard exercise and asked to see the company's code. I've used real code in interviews ever since.
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