If you want to be happy in leadership—and help your team thrive—learn to set expectations and match them. That’s it. That’s the formula. It’s not glamorous, but it works. And most leaders either skip it entirely or do it halfway. When you set expectations too high or unrealistic, you create anxiety and burnout. When you […]
Work Through Your Team, Not Around Them If you’re stepping into engineering leadership—or already there—you’ll eventually face a hard truth: you can’t do it all yourself. Not even close. The Shift From Doer to Enabler Early on, you can juggle both. You’re hands-on, reviewing PRs, cranking out fixes, shipping features and managing your small team.
If there’s one trait that defines strong engineering leadership—whether you’re a team lead, EM, or CTO—it’s this: Follow-through You could call it consistency, dependability, ownership or trust. But at its core, it means this: When you say you’ll do something, people can count on it getting done. Period. That doesn’t just mean writing code or
If your alerts don’t have direct links to runbooks, you’re burning time. Every minute someone spends hunting through Confluence or Notion during an incident is time they could’ve spent fixing the actual problem. Let’s fix that. Two easy wins: These two changes will save your on-call engineers (and your sanity) more than you think. Runbook
Writing reviews used to be a grind. Blank screens. Foggy memory. Wasted hours staring at clunky HR systems that feel like they were built to make the process harder, not easier. Now? I knock out reviews in record time using the ChatGPT app and the talk-to-text feature on my phone. It’s personal, fast, and actually
Kanban teams aren’t “chaotic” by nature. But without a good intake process, they can feel like a support line with no hold music—just a bunch of interruptions and mystery tickets. Here’s how we handle it in real life. Designate a Gatekeeper—We Use Our On-Call Person On our team, the designated intake person is whoever’s on
Hiring engineers is tough. Resumes all start to sound the same. Everyone “thrives in fast-paced environments.” And somehow every candidate is both a “team player” and a “self-starter.” Neat. So how do you actually spot someone who will make your life easier—not harder—once they join? I’ve hired a lot of engineers, and this is what
The basics every engineering team should know (but few actually follow) If you have a website, web app, or mobile app, incidents aren’t a matter of if—they’re a matter of when. Outages, degraded performance, broken deploys, third-party failures… it’s all coming for you. The only question is: Will your team be ready when it happens?
The fastest feedback loop you’re not using enough. Most of us like to believe we write good code—maybe even great code. We test as we build. We poke around in Postman. We check the happy path. We tell ourselves: “Yeah, this is solid.” But then something happens. You push your beautiful, handcrafted update to production…
How to make your team faster without wasting time on the wrong kind of “efficiency.“ There’s always too much work. Always. Backlogs never end, deadlines don’t care, and some of the stuff you’re dealing with is so old and clunky it should come with a warning label. In infrastructure, DevOps, product, or frankly any team,