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 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
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?