So many startup leaders bemoan that their team seems to “lack a sense of urgency.” As a freelance coder, clients would regularly comment I was getting more done in two days a week than their FTEs. Is that (solely) due to my awesome coding skillz? Nope. …

If you have an engineering background, you’ve doubtless spoken of tech debt more than you ought to. For developers, tech debt is a trap that often steals more time than provides real value. It’s the path of least resistance where we can exert our cleverness without anyone else being the…

I’ll start with a little flex to make my point. During my career as a professional coder, I shipped code in at least 13 different programming languages. Naturally, I wasn’t an expert in all of those, but I was quite proficient in most. One rule that continued manifesting during all…

Innovation in the tech sector often hinges on a concept that goes beyond technical prowess or market strategy. It’s a concept I refer to as ‘product mastery’-a shared purpose and understanding of the company’s vision, critical for leading R&D organizations to bring about real innovation and novelty. But what does…

It really is a tough job running a product engineering organization. It is extremely easy to optimize for short-term results and “getting things done.” That would definitely position you as an effective leader and get you some pats on the back. That is, until one day, you’ll realize someone else whizzed past your team. Let’s talk about balancing short-term goals with long-term innovation. The Problem with Best Practices

If you want to unlock your team’s potential, it has to be able to work at maximal speed, with minimum to no failure work. On our quest to triple impact-per-engineer, let’s talk about one part of that core: creating autonomy. When there’s no autonomy, leaders tend to act as “routers.”…

For quite some time, I’ve preferred the term “product engineering” over plainly “engineering” or “R&D.” That’s mainly because, as I’ve written before, the most important partnership of any tech executive is with their product peer. However, it seems that even while many leaders understand this at face value, they don’t…

While IDEs make refactoring straightforward, doing the same with your org chart is not as easy. Yes, you might use a tool to drag teams and people around, but the same principles that make for clean code don’t necessarily map to teams. Here’s a quick grab bag of pitfalls I’ve…

Every so often, you reach a point where the organization you’re leading seems not to be making adequate progress. If you’ve made some attempts at improving yet seem to be at an impasse, the solution is rarely to keep butting your head against the wall but harder. …