Leaders who chase the dopamine hit of shipping become bottlenecks; the article shows how swapping short-term execution for system design lets teams decide, ship, and recover without you.
I built my career on being the person who delivers, equating output with value and chasing the dopamine hit of shipping. That mindset let me excel at quick fixes but left me stuck when promotion required more than output. The core argument is that execution gives fast feedback, while system design demands patience and offers leverage that scales beyond any individual.
Designing systems isn't about architecture diagrams; it's about the decision interfaces that shape how work gets planned, who makes calls, and how failures are handled. Discipline means letting those interfaces converge without heroic intervention, allowing the organization to surface flaws and improve on its own. The author describes a personal relapse into heroics when a last-minute tooling fix satisfied a customer but merely created a repeatable workaround, highlighting how helping can become a bottleneck.
The piece provides a concrete example: moving approvals from ad-hoc Slack emoji reactions to a weekly forum with named decision owners and SLAs. This added process reduced overall time investment and made decisions happen without the leader's direct involvement. The author suggests measuring success by whether the team can operate effectively when you're absent, such as taking three months off without a dip in performance.
Ultimately, the article calls for changing incentives: evaluate leaders on team throughput, decision quality, and eliminated dependencies rather than personal output. Celebrate recurring fires that disappear and embed system fixes into performance reviews. By shifting from execution addiction to building sustainable systems, leaders become multipliers instead of bottlenecks.
Check out the full stdlib collection for more frameworks, templates, and guides to accelerate your technical leadership journey.