Why Headcount Math Lies
In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published and helped cement one of management’s oldest instincts. In simple terms, break work into measurable units, optimize for efficiency, a...
Articles tagged with Prioritization
Posts on choosing what matters now, what waits, and what should be dropped.
Capacity Is the Roadmap
When I was young, I worked in carpentry during the summers. Summer was busy. New buildings had to go up. Stables needed repairs. Barns needed extensions. Sheds had to be built o...
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....
Multi-Horizon Delivery Framework
If you’ve been in leadership for a while, you know the drill: a line manager reports team progress along with the PM, anyone above reviews it in cadence and sees how things are...
Managing Your Manager
Managers change more often than you realize, especially when a company is growing or downsizing. New roles, new org charts, new reporting lines. Other times, you’re shopping aro...
Representing the Business
The other day, someone asked me why we even need managers. What do they actually do? I think it’s a fair question, and honestly, people get it wrong a lot. You can throw usual f...
Simple Task Management
I don’t have the best memory. Hell, I barely remember what I did yesterday. Over the years, I’ve tried countless apps to track my tasks, but most of them are too complex. Signin...
Work-Life Balance as a Manager
As an IC, you close your laptop at 6 PM, log off, and forget about the work unless you are oncall. As a manager, you check Slack at 10 PM because someone might need you. Your ca...
Bridging the Management Disconnect
I’ve seen this happen over and over. A successful engineer . They are eager to build great teams and support their people. They know some of the leaders before didn't do that. T...
Setting Goals
One thing I've learned over the years is that humans naturally don't have a longterm mindset. Without clear goals, it's easy to lose track of what we want to achieve. Defining g...
Estimation Accuracy
Estimating software projects is basically the tech equivalent of arguing about Irish weather. Everyone has an opinion, nobody really knows anything, and the forecast changes all...
Engineering Strategy and Planning
Strategy is a word that's often used but rarely understood. Ask ten people what it means, and you'll get ten different answers. I often see people confuse it with , a quarterly...
Pulling the Plug from a Project
Every project starts with high hopes to deliver one or more business values. The team begins with the requirement analysis and then carries on with design and development. On th...
Addressing Technical Debt
Tech debt occurs when we solve a software problem with our limited understanding of the business at the time. We start building a solution to get feedback as early as possible....
Manager as a Service
What would a manager as a service look like? What kind of systems would a manager resemble? How can you describe a manager’s responsibility through various systems? Here’s my ta...
Minimum Viable Agile
In , I criticized agile frameworks for bringing too much complexity with too little impact. What was meant to make teams more adaptive often ends up doing the opposite. They slo...
How I Work as a Software Engineer
When I started out, I thought productivity meant speed. Ship fast, fix fast, move fast. Working in startups taught me something different. When everything around you changes con...