Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
A stale Cloudflare routing rule and a blocked telemetry lock created a latency surge, a thundering-herd cache miss, and OOM-killer cascades that overwhelmed Canva's API, illustrating how saturation and decompensation can cripple even well-architected services.
Effective coaching hinges on asking the right questions, not giving advice; managers influence perception and reality more through inquiry than correction.
Metrics and incentives can backfire, turning good intentions into harmful outcomes; counterbalancing measures keep teams aligned with true goals.
Boards fix known knowns like SOX compliance while ignoring strategic unknowns; using the Rumsfeld matrix and WWHTBT framing moves risks toward actionable knowns and protects strategy.
Leaders must position themselves as the bottleneck for cross-team dirty work-compliance, onboarding, procurement-to keep it small, visible and under control, preventing creeping organizational debt.
Engineers rise or fall in status through a ratchet effect where early project successes lock in reputation, making it hard to gain or lose senior visibility.
Career growth mirrors Pokemon evolution: Charmander masters fundamentals, Charmeleon expands team impact, Charizard shapes organizational strategy—each stage requires deliberate expansion of influence
A VP of Engineering shares six categories-People, Internal Quality, Lovability, Visibility, Agility, Profitability-to define the ideal product engineering org and practical tactics for leaders to improve culture and performance.
Eliminating fun and positive workplace rituals is a self-defeating strategy; the piece shows how joy, hack weeks, and slack time actually boost morale, knowledge sharing, and business outcomes, contrary to toxic leadership.
XP can bring joy and higher productivity, but developers, managers, and tooling often resist it; leaders must give teams control, address misconceptions, and align incentives to adopt XP practices.
Leaders must shift from structural to content-level transparency, giving teams full context so they can make decisions quickly without bottlenecks.
You can deliver high-quality feedback in just 1-2 hours per week by focusing on high-impact points, starting with structural guidance, then line edits, and using async tools like Loom to keep the process fast and sustainable.
Interruptions cut engineers' productivity and raise stress, yet in-person interruptions lower physiological stress while feeling more stressful, so leaders should prioritize perception data and curb urgent, high-dominance interruptions.
Skipping nano teams, hackathons, rigid engineering time, over-protecting engineers, stagnant turnover, and over-specialization lets tech leaders build autonomous, innovative, high-performing organizations.
Agile is only one of three dimensions in the product model; the model adds strategy and discovery to delivery, showing why coaches need product-focused experience, not just certification.
Treating internal platforms as products and using a Thinnest Viable Platform approach lets teams balance common tooling with unique business needs, reducing waste and scaling efficiently.
Three books that teach tech leaders how to run better meetings, make inclusive decisions, and turn facilitation into a competitive advantage.
Good leaders cut through uncertainty, turning vague situations into clear direction so teams can act, even if the chosen path later needs correction.
Engineers who boost emotional intelligence turn collaboration bottlenecks into growth opportunities, making teams more productive and leaders more influential.
Three product development methodologies beyond Scrum: ShapeUp's 6-week cycles with betting tables, Plan>Build>Ship's focused ownership, and Shopify's GSD framework
Stories masquerade as facts, skewing reactions; learning to separate fact from meaning with a simple T-chart restores clarity and better decision-making.
Unnecessary apologies for reasonable decisions erode a leader's authority and trust; the piece shows how to frame hard news with clear rationale instead of defaulting to sorry.
The Startup Drake Equation shows that a single weak link-whether product, market, funding, team or luck-can doom a startup, so leaders must pinpoint and shore up the riskiest factors to boost success odds.
Teams waste money and morale by keeping failing products alive; the article shows a kill-or-commit framework that forces leaders to measure opportunity cost and cut loss quickly.
Generative AI will cut product team size by up to two-thirds, shifting focus to discovery while automating delivery, forcing managers, designers, and engineers to upskill or risk displacement.
Leaders should stop trying to fix or replace people and instead overhaul the broken system-culture, workflow, and interactions-to let teams deliver their best work.
Targeted environmental tweaks, understanding referred pain, and mental framing can cut chronic shoulder, wrist, and arm pain for developers more effectively than ergonomics alone.
Effective strategy fails without a solid diagnosis; this piece shows how a structured, data-backed diagnosis and honest perspectives prevent lazy assumptions and drive successful execution.
Distinguish capable (can do now) from capability (potential to do) and use individual-focused coaching to turn potential into performance, avoiding overload and misaligned expectations.
Google secures its own cloud by applying internal organization policies, IAM deny rules, threat modeling, and infrastructure-as-code, showing how massive-scale security can be baked into development.
True ownership means being accountable for outcomes you can control, and urgency drives you to fix sub-optimal work fast; together they create high-impact leaders who deliver without blame-shifting.
Strategic leaders learn five substitution contexts and the distinct growth imperatives for each, from unpaid-to-paid tasks to incumbent-driven substitutes, enabling faster, cost-effective market capture.
Entrepreneurs succeed by starting with what they have and letting goals emerge, a contrast to causal planning; the piece shows how affordable loss, partnership and surprise-driven pivots can guide leaders to innovate faster.
Engineering managers can stay technically effective by adopting five practical roles-friction logging, KTLO analysis, on-call participation, archivist, and engineerication-each delivering concrete value while avoiding burnout.
Identifies five tough employee archetypes and gives concrete tactics to coach each, turning disruptive behavior into reliable performance.
Engineers should own product decisions, merging design and PM perspectives into a Product Engineer role that drives accountability, cross-functional debate, and better products.
AI lets startups achieve ten times the impact with one-tenth the people, forcing leaders to prioritize strategic moats over raw speed or short-term value.
Sharing a decade-old engineering ladder shows why detailed, prescriptive career ladders matter and offers practical advice to avoid common pitfalls when building your own.
The LinkedIn article is no longer available, so its content cannot be analyzed.
Cory Miller breaks his day into three work buckets-Conversation, Execution, and Thinking-to manage energy, avoid burnout, and stay productive across time zones.
Product managers forced on-call expose how distrust creates costly inspection loops and why starting with trust is the only sustainable fix.
Most leaders miss the slow-burning time bombs in their organizations - here's a systematic way to spot problems before they explode
Busy signals hide the real bottleneck; protect the critical path resource and stop non-essential work to prevent team collapse.
Effective leadership needs purpose-built information models and rituals that surface the right level of detail, avoiding deep cascades and universal dashboards that drown decision-making.
Engineering strategy succeeds when you follow a repeatable five-step process-explore, diagnose, refine, set policy, and operate-preventing common skips that cause failed strategies.
A leadership CV should narrate your impact with concrete metrics, company context, and ownership, using clear formatting and ATS-friendly language to stand out to hiring managers.
GitClear cuts code review time 30% by recognizing moves and refactors instead of treating them as additions and deletions like every other diff tool
Severance shows work becoming a person's identity, and the article links that fiction to Meta's over-work culture, warning leaders that endless perks and forced compliance erode morale and purpose.
The stdlib collection is a community-curated library of practical, immediately useful, battle-tested resources for technical leadership. Each resource is designed to be immediately applicable to your role. New resources are added based on community feedback and emerging best practices.