The Mirror Is Part of the Machine
The worst telemetry problems I have seen did not start with waste. They started when an incident happened. We could not see enough, and the missing field became the villain of t...
Articles tagged with Organizational Design
Writing on team structure, ownership boundaries, and scaling coordination.
When Too Many Maps Overlap on One Person
You have a proposal. And someone suggested checking with Mike. It does not sound like a problem. It sounds like due diligence, like someone being careful, like a team that knows...
The Work Runs on Different Maps
A project can be obviously important, technically sound, budgeted, and still go nowhere. I don’t mean slowness. I mean the weird kind of stalled where everyone involved can poin...
Trial By Fire
Teams spend months hiring a strong candidate. Sourcing, interviews, debriefs, approvals, compensation, notice period. Everyone treats the hire like a serious investment. Then th...
The Roadmap Is Not the System
A few years ago, my father decided to build a house in the . On the surface, it was easy to like the idea. A quiet place. A porch. A garden. Somewhere to disappear for a while....
Incentives Drive Everything
In early modern France, the monarchy kept running into the same problem. Wars were expensive, revenue was not steady, and every obvious solution came with a political price. New...
Scaling Culture Without Dilution
As organizations grow across geographies, one thing becomes disproportionately important. Culture. We, engineers, often dismiss culture as soft and cushy. This is until you see...
Climbing No More
Engineers have been reaching a common ceiling in their careers for decades. The pattern goes like this: an individual contributor gets promoted to a senior software engineer, an...
Building Remote Teams
You've probably heard stories of big tech companies in US and hiring double that number in India, blaming AI for the shift. Everyone's first thought is likely cheap labor. While...
Subteam Tenets
Over the years, working across multiple organizations, I developed the concept of subteam tenets. I’ve tweaked it along the way to fit each company's unique quirks, but I still...
Losing a Top Performer
Over time, I had to manage and help to manage many times when a top performer quits. It sucks but we need to be reasonable. Imagine you’re on a winning streak, your top striker,...
Ideal Number of Direct Reports
Amazon’s likely comes from a closer look at ratios. Were there too many managers with only 23 direct reports? That’s entirely possible. From my time at AWS, I didn’t see this mu...
Working with Dependencies
If you are part of a large organization, the term "dependencies” probably means more than . In a big organization, when we talk about "dependencies," we're diving into more than...
Hiring Harmony
Hiring is drag. Every open role slows the people around it, creates coverage gaps, and pulls your best performers into interviews instead of work. The instinct is to close that...
Engineering Roles and Responsibilities
Engineering roles exist whether you define them or not. In some teams, ownership is explicit. People know who drives incident management, who keeps an eye on risk, who pushes on...