Marco Poletto

When a team runs out of room, the instinct is to make it bigger.

From train driver to developer to engineering manager.

Everybody can drive a train when everything goes smoothly.

Office teams bond by osmosis, just from sharing a room.

This site was built with an AI coding agent.

A strategy that says yes to everything is just a to-do list with ambitions.

The skills that made you a great engineering manager quietly become liabilities the day you start leading other managers.

Teams are hiring fewer juniors because AI does the grunt work now.

A struggling manager rarely announces it - the team does, quietly, months before it hits a dashboard.

Promoting your best engineer into management as a reward is how you lose a great engineer and gain a struggling manager in one move.

Hiring engineering managers is the highest-leverage decision a leader makes - and the easiest to get wrong.

Two of the hardest things an engineering leader does are grow a team fast and restructure one that already exists - without breaking either.

The books I'd actually hand to someone stepping into engineering leadership - grouped by the problem they solve, not by fame.

Most orgs try to make delivery predictable by adding process on top of teams.

Most engineering strategy documents die in a shared drive because they're written in engineering, not in the language that gets things funded.

Management debt - poorly structured organisations and bloated process - cripples engineering velocity the same way technical debt cripples a codebase.

AI assistants promised to make developers 10x more productive.

A guide for engineering managers navigating reorgs, strategic pivots, and layoffs while protecting team focus and morale.

How to use engineering metrics without crushing developer agency, burning out your team, or falling into the Goodhart's Law trap.

A structured, phased onboarding guide to set up new software engineering hires for long-term success, autonomy, and early wins.

How you handle the first few hours of a production outage determines team trust for months.

When output becomes the only lens for measuring engineering success, something critical erodes beneath the surface - and it rarely shows up until it's already a crisis.

In the Dutch tech market, hybrid tech-lead-manager roles don't survive contact with scale - you're expected to choose a lane and own it.

Ten lessons from the one engineering-management book I'd actually hand a first-time manager who doesn't want jargon, just what to do on Monday.

You don't stay technically sharp as a manager by finding more solo coding time you don't have - you stay sharp by using the job itself differently.

The technical skills that made you a great engineer don't automatically transfer to management - here's what actually does, and what to build from scratch.