Leadership GardenAll posts
151 essays since 2017, newest first.
Prefer a year-by-year list? See the archive.
AI Is Not Just A Tool
“Just a tool” lets AI rollouts skip the hard question: what will your engineers stop learning?
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.
The Same Feature, Twice
The same feature took a weekend on a laptop and a quarter in the product. The model was identical both times. Everything around it was not.
How I Decide Whether to Split a Team
Most advice on splitting teams answers “is this team too big?” That’s the wrong question when you’re splitting into a strategy.
A hard job attached to an easy idea
Most engineering orgs run a hard job attached to an easy idea. How to tell the difference, and what to do about it.