I’ve seen these patterns repeat across every engineering organization I’ve worked with—from fast-moving startups to massive, multi-cloud systems. The fundamentals don’t change, no matter the scale. Stability is invisible when it works and unforgettable when it fails. Great engineering teams know this, which is why they treat fundamentals as their operating system—not a side project. Availability, security, quality, and performance aren’t checkboxes. They’re the disciplines that keep teams fast, customers confident, and innovation moving.
Category: Leadership
When You Inherit a Struggling Team
You inherit a team mid-flight. You didn’t hire them. You didn’t set the culture. But now it’s yours—and the results are on you. Some leaders react with frustration. Others get to work. In this piece, I break down a practical playbook for turning around a low-performing team: how to listen, diagnose what’s broken (people, product, or process), land early wins, and sustain momentum. It’s not glamorous work—but it’s some of the most meaningful leadership you’ll ever do.
5 Useful Aphorisms to Elevate Your Leadership Game
Whether you’re managing a group or facing challenges solo, these aphorisms offer a way to streamline your thinking and create a culture that thrives on problem-solving.
Finding the Goldilocks Zone: Just the right amount of process
All the struggling organizations I have worked in shared one common characteristic. They had process deficiencies: some did too little, while some did too much. The best-performing orgs? They did just right.
Leadership Strategies for Product Maturity Phases
This post delves into crucial challenges at each product maturity phase. Senior engineering managers and high-level executives will benefit significantly from examining their portfolios and applying applicable strategies.
BCE: A structured approach to prioritizing work and allocating resources
Do you struggle to balance your urgent tactical needs with important strategic goals? Do you wonder how to handle the boatload of important customer requests by prioritizing and allocating resources? The BCE framework is for you.
Incident Response doesn’t have to be painful: Common pitfalls and recommendations
This post challenges misconceptions about chaotic on-call and livesite practices, offering lessons from extensive experience. It introduces common red flags like call hell, hero worship, and the wild west, and provides solutions. These include customer-focused monitoring, monitoring pruning, 1-2-3 troubleshooting rule, follow-the-sun schedules, and repair item deadlines. As services mature, standardized incident response and efficient toil control practices become crucial.
Turning Tension into Triumph: Techniques for Tough Conversations
This article distills some hard-learned lessons into reusable playbooks for tense situations and is for everyone trying to improve their conflict resolution skills.
The cow and the chicken: overcoming resistance to change
The Cow and Chicken are journeying through the countryside and see a diner with a sign that reads "Steak and Eggs". The chicken nudges the cow and cackles delightfully: "Look! Look, Cow!! We're famous!!!". Whereupon, the cow looks at the same sign and snorts derisively: you're involved! I am committed!!
Help! I’m stuck! I want to get to the next level!!
This article clarifies how promotions work and highlights potential pitfalls. It describes a career-growth framework based on technical skills, interpersonal relationships, and influence. As one becomes more senior, the balance between these skills shifts, demanding more focus on relationships and influence.
Keep calm and carry on: Taming the siren call of overwhelm and overwork
If you are constantly overwhelmed and too busy - something somewhere somehow is wrong. Read on to learn more about my journey from an overwhelmed, feisty, flustered newbie to an equanimous, calm, collected professional with arguably more impact.
A 3-step strategy for experienced professionals starting new jobs
My last manager commended my rapid ramp-up and steady progress throughout my onboarding phase. I chuckled silently - if only he knew my many mistakes in my past 6 attempts. This post shares some techniques for rapidly making a difference in a new domain.
The complicated parts of leadership: Eliminate chaos
Introduction "How can I trust you? You keep telling me about a new direction every other month" My report after the 3rd organizational pivot within three months. Background I was dumbstruck – there was nothing I could say. As a line manager, I was responsible for delivering the message even though I didn't make some … Continue reading The complicated parts of leadership: Eliminate chaos
The complicated parts of leadership: Trust and Verify
In this series of short stories, I share tricky situations I've encountered while leading teams. These experiences have taught me invaluable leadership lessons and greatly influenced my management style. I hope to help others become more effective leaders by sharing these anecdotes.
The complicated parts of leadership: Betting on people
In this series of short stories, I share tricky situations I've encountered while leading teams. These experiences have taught me invaluable leadership lessons and greatly influenced my management style. I hope to help others become more effective leaders by sharing these anecdotes.
10x your feedback game: Choose kindness over niceness
What if I told you there was a way to overcome that sinking feeling associated with delivering feedback? Yes! You can learn to deliver great feedback with deliberate practice. Read on to learn some useful techniques.
Evaluating Managers: 5 heuristics to measure managerial impact
Measuring a manager's impact is hard since outcomes take time. The manager takes full responsibility for the team - be it stagnation, execution woes, poor collaboration, churn, or a lack of focus. This post provides early evaluation metrics as well as tips for course correction.
Why most monitoring strategies fail
A team without proven observability and on-call strategies will invariably suffer from reactive disruptions; mitigating outages will be painful, like finding a needle in a haystack while blindfolded.
Book Review: Slack, Getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency
Leaders (managers, directors, VPs, etc.) should read this book if they want to create teams that execute predictably; the book also covers culture and other subtle elements that make teams work efficiently.
Defense-in-depth: a strategy for leading understaffed teams
Leading an underfunded team is a challenge most managers will face over their careers. This blog post provides techniques and a framework for delivering impact under such conditions.
3 quick tips for leading through uncertain times
This post offers three tips for leading teams going through a difficult period. It could be attrition, product changes, reorgs, uncertainty, etc. It is a playbook of 3 key things to keep in mind and includes a FAQ list of likely questions.
Using Systems Thinking to craft high-leverage strategies
Most teams struggle with removing friction because they concentrate on surface-level reactionary fixes instead of addressing the fundamental causes of inefficiency.
Four mistakes I made as a new manager
This article relates hard-learned lessons as a newbie engineering manager. It targets new leads by clarifying leadership pitfalls to avoid.
9 multipliers for boosting your team’s productivity
Multipliers make or mar engineering organizations - teams that invest in boosting the right capabilities at the right time will get more done with less. Teams that neglect these capabilities will eventually get bogged down – they’ll get less done with more.
Leading through difficult times: Put on your oxygen mask first
The story of the most challenging stretch of my career so far and how I acquired years of leadership experience within months.
