Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
An exploration of the concept of strategic nihilism, warning that it can be delusional and destructive for leaders making long-term decisions.
When managing a growing organization, it can be useful to have certain document templates on hand. Here's a collection of documents I find useful.
Google Cloud announces the release of the 2025 State of DevOps (DORA) Report, providing fresh insights into software delivery performance and best practices.
Framing is the secret to leadership communication. Explore proven strategies to influence, build trust, and make your message stick.
Why "big-reveal" architecture pitches stall-and how Staff+ engineers can apply the Japanese practice of Nemawashi to quietly build consensus and ship transformational change.
How can I influence others without manipulating them? I explore five doors of influence: rationalising, asserting, negotiating, inspiring and bridging, to persuade with respect.
The article explains why simply being good at your job is insufficient for career advancement, emphasizing the need for strategic visibility, influence, and continuous growth.
Questions of who we are or what we're worth can send us into a tailspin. But the very same processes that pull us down can propel us up, too.
An article explaining what high agency is, why it matters for technical leaders, and how to cultivate it.
A deep dive into the psychology of motivation.
The article explores why accountability alone cannot solve deep-rooted organizational challenges and offers alternative approaches for technical leaders.
Discover how a simple construction mishap reveals a powerful lesson about reducing unnecessary stress in software development and how clear communication and realistic expectations can help teams thrive.
The post explains how confusing time allocation with capacity allocation leads to costly mistakes and wasted effort in organizations.
Modernize legacy systems through expert refactoring and rewrites. Solve digital transformation fails, optimize DevOps infrastructure, and remediate complex legacy code for lasting impact.
One of the most consistent observations I've had in my time in startups, scale-ups, and public companies is that smart people with context on a tricky situation almost always know exactly what they need to do.
A concise guide on managing expert teams when you cannot perform their specialized tasks, offering practical strategies for technical leaders.
A senior leader shares key insights from a private fireside chat with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, covering problem-driven development, reliability, decision frameworks, security, AI, and build-versus-buy strategies.
The article presents a systems design perspective on prompt engineering, introducing attention as a core concept for creating more effective prompts.
A guide for leaders who inherit a newly reorganized department, outlining five critical areas to assess such as goals, team effectiveness, and culture to accelerate success.
Mental models that might be useful for technical leaders and managers.
I think this might be the meanest thing I've ever written.
The org chart does not control the flow of communication. In fact, you're faster if you ignore it entirely.
Discover why employees complain and how leaders can turn workplace negativity into ownership, accountability, and stronger team engagement.
This post is about understanding why your company is organized and designed the way it is.
An article examining how staying in one's comfort zone can limit growth and impact performance, especially for leaders and teams.
The article shares the author's approach to discussing salary, promotion, or compensation requests with team members, providing practical language and mindset tips for technical leaders.
The article examines whether performance challenges stem from individual behavior or from the underlying systems, offering managers guidance on diagnosing and improving team effectiveness.
An article that explores how technical leaders can turn mistakes into valuable learning opportunities and improve team performance.
What to say when you're frustrated at work but still need to lead. Skip the outburst or avoidance-use the Third Response instead.
A reflection on two decades in tech, the tribalism of corporate life, and the difficulty of recognizing when you're part of the problem.
The article explains why effective communication is a core responsibility for technical leaders and provides practical guidance for improving it.
This article discusses an often overlooked management skill essential for technical leaders, explaining why it matters and how to develop it.
Why people second guess their effectiveness
Learn how to get unstuck at work (and life). Transform overwhelm into action, gain clarity, and move forward with confidence with these two questions.
Fear and futility are two silent killers of improvement in healthcare. In this post, Mark Graban explains how these barriers keep staff from speaking up, undermine safety and quality, and offers ways leaders can replace them with trust and engagement.
A concise guide to implementing the Outbox pattern in distributed systems, outlining common pitfalls and practical recommendations for reliable message delivery.
Hype tends to be, well, hyperbolic. If you read headlines and social media posts about the use of AI in software development, then you would be forgiven for thinking that is the end of everything.
Every engineering organization faces the challenge of justifying work that does not directly result in new features, such as addressing technical debt and improving engineering processes.
Three mistakes new Engineering Managers make while managing highly experienced engineers.
An article that explains the distinction between glue teams and back-office teams and why getting this right is critical for engineering leadership.
Explores how leaders can avoid overextension, set healthier boundaries, and model sustainable performance for their teams.
We waste a lot of time (and money) due to the absence of fast feedback loops.
This blog post discusses how partnering with product teams can help reduce technical debt and increase software engineering velocity.
An article that debunks common career myths, showing how misconceptions about leadership also shape personal career paths.
Rather than cascade OKRs, use collaborative alignment.
The author reflects on a decade of software engineering experience, sharing insights and practical tips for conducting effective sprint retrospectives.
Like Soylent Green, the difficulty of people working together is people. It's PEEE-PUHLLL!
The article argues that while employees desire visionary leadership and democratic input, the most successful companies often operate under a dictatorial style to achieve results.
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.