I help engineers become the leaders their teams deserve.

Twenty years building software and leading the teams that build it, across financial services, media and cloud infrastructure.

This is where I write about the part that is hardest to hand over: the judgment. Mostly for engineers becoming leaders, sometimes for the leaders they report to.

Latest

All writing
  • Growing engineers

    A calendar block is not a boundary

    As a tech lead my time was largely my own. As a manager it was not, and the blocks I put in my calendar to get it back were honoured by nobody.

    · 6 min read · Series part 6

  • Growing engineers

    Feedback without evidence is just doubt

    I told someone their approach worried me. I had not done the work to say why. The concern may well have been right, and that turned out not to matter at all.

    · 5 min read · Series part 5

  • Growing engineers

    Leading people you used to sit beside

    They went quiet, and I read it as the relationship cooling. It was the org chart arriving. I was the last person on that team to notice my job had changed.

    · 5 min read · Series part 4

  • Growing engineers

    Trust was not the hard part of delegating

    I handed over a monthly report to someone I trusted completely, and it still nearly went out wrong. The task went across. Everything I knew about it stayed with me.

    · 5 min read · Series part 3

  • Growing engineers

    What a one-on-one is actually for

    The most useful thing anyone ever told me came in a meeting I had designed to prevent it. What changed afterwards was not the agenda. It was who owns it.

    · 5 min read · Series part 2