Leadership•
What new hires notice
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.
Leadership articles
Hiring, onboarding, and the tensions between a good team, a good product, and a good manager.
Leadership•
Remote teams and the 2/3 pattern
A remote team looked healthy until its manager left and half the team followed. The conversations that explained it had been happening in private.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
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.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
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.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
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.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
Why two strong pillars can weaken the third
A fintech team ignored customer requests. A SaaS company shipped through burnout. In both, success gave people a reason to keep going.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
Why good leaders don't always build great teams
Before a two-week vacation, a leader asked the team to choose between two approaches. They wanted to know what the leader would choose.
Leadership••Good team, good product, good manager
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.
Leadership•
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.
Leadership•
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.