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Leadership Lighthouse. Written, not generated.

One article a week on leading technology teams: hiring, AI, capacity, and the parts of the job nobody trains you for. Every article comes with a video version if you would rather watch.

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2026-10-21I Stopped Hedging in Interviews. It Cost Me Some Jobs.Early in my leadership career, every interview eventually got to the same question. What kind of leader are you? What’s your culture? I knew the answer. I’m a team-first leader, and I have been for as long as I’ve led…READ2026-10-14Your AI Tokens Need to Earn 4X. Here’s How.A few weeks ago I sat down with a VP who is advising everyone he can about what he calls “The Great Token Teckoning of 2027.” His finance team has started asking about the AI bill and the associated/expected ROI. The…READ2026-10-07We Spent 25 Years Getting Out of the FactoryAt one of my first jobs in North Carolina, there were stacks of 3-inch binders on a shelf with a layer of dust on them. I asked what they were, and why there was a shelf full of them in everyone’s cube. The answer was…READ2026-10-01Define Great Before You Hire for ItPhoto by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash Early in my career, I had to hire 1 new squad every quarter. That’s 6 to 8 engineers every 3 months, and I knew early on that the whole thing couldn’t rest on my shoulders. If the…READ2026-09-23Building a Personal Brand - My ApproachPhoto by Bagzhan Sadvakassov on Unsplash Somewhere in the corner of a closet or jammed in the back of a “junk drawer,” there’s an iPod with my voice on it. That’s how early we were to podcasting. We recorded an episode…READ2026-09-16I Argued My Boss Out of a Rule Once. Now It's My Turn.Early in my career, I was building products in Visual Basic 6, and every variable I wrote started with a 3-letter prefix. strName. intCount. dtmStart. Hungarian notation, if you’re old enough to remember it. It wasn’t a…READ2026-09-09Being A Player-Coach Failed Me Once. I'm Not Sure It Would Now.Photo by Mark König on Unsplash 30 years ago, I walked into my college weight room on a testing day. It was the off-season, and we were deep into our strength training. About 100 of us were there, and the day’s test was…READ2026-09-02Don’t Spend 40 Minutes Trying Prove 6 Months of WorkFor a long stretch of my career, I did good work and kept it to myself. Not deliberately. My teams were always improving something. Cutting a deploy from an hour down to 10 minutes. Killing a manual step that ate…READ2026-08-26Just AskPhoto by Annie Spratt on Unsplash Years ago I went to Bob Galen and told him I needed help. I was doing “fine” on paper. Teams shipped, numbers landed, customers were happy, and nobody was worried about me. But I KNEW I…READ2026-08-19Most Hills Are Just FurnitureI was standing in the corner of our large, open office watching my team push their own desks across the floor, and I could see it landing on them one at a time. We were growing fast. I’d built out the space myself, and…READ2026-08-12My Number One Rule for 1-on-1sLong before I managed anybody, I could have told you EXACTLY where I stood with every boss I ever had. Nobody explained it to me. I just knew, the way everybody knows. The evidence was on the calendar. Photo by airfocus…READ2026-08-05Somebody Has to Be the End of the LineI coach people to only ever complain “up”. It’s one of the first things I say to a new leader who’s frustrated with their boss, their peer org, the roadmap, whatever it is that week. If you complain down, or sometimes…READ2026-07-29Celebrate It or Complain About ItI lost another engineer to a company that could pay more, and I walked into my boss’s office to complain about it. This was early in my career, at an insurance company that had decided it was becoming a technology…READ2026-07-23My Best Idea Last Week Cost Me Zero TokensLast week I was sitting in a Google Meet, waiting for someone who was running late. I had 5 minutes with nothing to do. I was already in the meeting, so I couldn’t really start anything else, and there was a problem…READ · WATCH2026-07-15Your "Open Door" Policy Is TheaterI’ve said the words “my door is always open” to more than one team over the years, and I meant them every time. We all have. I know you have too… Photo by Lan Gao on Unsplash This week on the Meta-Cast, Bob and I went…READ2026-07-09What 900,000 Lines of AI-Built Code Taught Me About Being WrongA few months ago, GitHub CoPilot reviewed one of my pull requests and came back with zero comments. Not “looks good with minor suggestions.” ZERO . Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash My first reaction was suspicion. I…READ2026-07-01Your Best Hires Have Always Been "AI-Native"My inbox keeps telling me how to build teams now. So does my YouTube feed, my LinkedIn, and just about every conference lineup that’s crossed my desk this year. Build your AI-native team. Rethink talent for the agentic…READ2026-06-24The Pull Is Strongest When the Work Is BestLast week I went on vacation. The trip itself was the easy part. Getting myself ready to leave took weeks, because I knew exactly what I was up against. The first half of this year has been the most alive my work has…READ2026-06-17You Can't Script an Unscripted MomentA decade ago, one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with caught me right after a meeting and told me, straight to my face, that I was making a huge mistake. He was furious about a promotion I hadn’t given. It was…READ · WATCH2026-06-10The Closed Door That Taught Me to Trust MyselfWe had just walked out of a big room. Forty or fifty people, a transformation kicking off, a Waterfall shop trying to find its footing in Agile. This was my third or fourth client after I’d started my consulting…READ
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CTOs, VPs of Engineering, engineering managers stepping up, and founders who just became the technical leader by default.