Leadership Garden

Last week I asked an agent to read about 260 comments for me.

Last quarter I nearly sent my manager a slide I'm still slightly embarrassed by.

Every few months someone on one of my teams asks me how I keep up.

Everyone has a recipe now.

A staff engineer on my platform team spent the better part of three weeks on a design document.

You get the behavior you reward.

One of my principal engineers sent me a link to spec-kit with the message, "Should we standardize on this?"

I watched the same feature get built twice this year.

The product vision landed with three strategic streams in it, each on a multi-year horizon.

A team of mine shipped clean for four months.

I was sitting in a quarterly review when an engineering director looked at a slide saying a migration was 72 percent complete and asked, "Which of the assumptions behind this are still true?"

Engineering management careers often begin through accumulation.

I caught myself feeling good about a dashboard last quarter.

Stay in the Room The first time I had to end someone's job, I rehearsed the sentence in the elevator.

The hard parts of software engineering are still hard.

I once sat through a quarterly review where engineering looked, on paper, excellent.

The debrief was going sideways.

... they were already broken...

A senior engineer pinged me a couple of years back.

The question everyone is asking is: who will be the senior engineers in 10 years?