Pat Kua on Leadership, Culture and Growth

Technical leadership is less about issuing mandates and more about creating an environment where people can thrive. Pat Kua frames this as gardening- you can't force growth, but you can prepare the soil, set clear vision, and give teams the autonomy they need within well-defined boundaries. He stresses that culture emerges from the behaviours you allow, encourage, or stop, not just from written values.

At hyper-growing companies like N26, scaling from a few hundred to over a thousand engineers creates unique pressure points. Rapid hiring, uneven skill ratios, and the need for clear operating models force leaders to articulate a target operating model (TOM) that aligns capacity with strategic goals. Kua shows how a shared TOM helps everyone understand roles, from individual contributors to senior technical leaders, and prevents title inflation that obscures responsibility.

A core insight is the "trident" model: three parallel tracks for career growth-individual contributor, management, and technical leadership. This structure lets engineers pivot toward people-focused or technology-focused paths without penalty, but it requires deliberate training and support. Kua backs the model with concrete book recommendations (The Manager's Path, Resilient Management, Elegant Puzzle, Leading Snowflakes) and his own "Talking with Tech Leads" for those making the jump.

Finally, Kua argues that influence is a trust bank: leaders must continuously deposit reliable actions to earn credit when they need to ask for change. Balancing autonomy with alignment, defining outcomes over methods, and letting teams choose practices like TDD or pair programming illustrate how trust translates into high-performing, self-organizing teams.