Leadership Garden
AI Is Not Just A Tool
“Just a tool” lets AI rollouts skip the hard question: what will your engineers stop learning?
Leadership Garden
Actionable guides and mental models for engineering leaders who believe management can be people-first, humane, and a real enabler.
Latest
Recent essays
You’ll Know in Two Quarters
Why “just ship faster” stops working when feedback takes months, and what engineering directors should measure instead.
Get Really Good at Navigating Change
Advice for engineering leaders on reorgs, AI churn, and change: respond to fewer things and prove you adapted by shipping.
Everyone Has a Recipe Now
AI lowered the barrier to building software, not to understanding it. Why spec-first AI recipes look right in week one and fail by month nine.
The Cost of an Objection Went to Zero
AI lets you produce work you can’t evaluate. Worse, it lets everyone else critique yours. What engineering leaders should actually do about it.
You Get What You Reward
Telling your team quality matters changes nothing. Here is what actually moves engineering culture, and the test for whether your fix is real.
Specs Don’t Drive Anything
Spec-driven development’s defenders describe a loop. Its diagrams draw a pipeline. An engineering leader on where the spec actually belongs.
Start here
Managers
Start here if you already manage people or just moved out of the IC track. These posts focus on one-on-ones, feedback, accountability, and building healthier team habits.
- How To Start Managing People – The First 3 One-on-Ones
- Good Managers Clear Paths
- Thoughts on giving feedback
- Bad Managers Hide From Accountability
Tech Leads
This path is for people leading through architecture, delivery, coordination, and influence. The emphasis is execution, alignment, and helping a team move without brute force.
- Every Team Problem Is Ultimately A Leadership Problem
- Communication skills for successful software engineers
- Your Team Knows More Than You Do
- On-Call Done Right
ICs
This path is for engineers who want stronger communication, sharper career judgment, and a better read on how the role is changing around them.
- Communication skills for successful software engineers
- An Intro To Career Frameworks
- Acing your technical interview – a hiring manager’s guide
- How to Get Your Work Recognized — 6 Strategies
Most read
Topics
Leading Yourself
Judgment, resilience, motivation, self-awareness, and the habits that make leadership sustainable.
Leading People
Coaching, one-on-ones, feedback, mentoring, and the everyday work of helping people grow.
Leading Teams
Trust, conflict, onboarding, retrospectives, meetings, and the patterns that shape team dynamics.
Execution & Delivery
Prioritization, process, estimation, metrics, reliability, and getting real work shipped without chaos.
Influence & Organizations
Management, communication, accountability, politics, and how to move work through larger systems.
Career & Craft
Hiring, seniority, technical judgment, and what long-term growth looks like in engineering.
Series
AI
How AI is changing engineering work, team design, and the quality bar leaders need to maintain.