management
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Escaping the No-Code Platform by Building a Software Factory
→: Escaping the No-Code Platform by Building a Software FactoryI’m not someone who gets called when things are going well. So when Michelle – the Twill CEO – called me in December, it was because she needed some help with engineering. In 18 months of being an advisor, this was the first time it was a phone call and not an email. There were…
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Judgement > Output
→: Judgement > OutputThe benefit of conference season is talking to a lot of people (the downside: needing antibiotics), and of course many of those conversations came to AI, explicitly or not. But underneath the obvious shift there’s an industry one, which started with the end of ZIRP and AI exacerbated. An industry that used to be quite…
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Attempting to reverse engineer code review
→: Attempting to reverse engineer code reviewI keep hearing complaints about code review. About volume, about quality, about trying to take responsibility for code produced by colleagues who have abdicated their responsibility for thinking and are uncritically hitting enter. But how much of that is just grumpiness? Frustration? “AI slop” is the new “I didn’t like it.” Code review was always…
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What do managers even do now?
→: What do managers even do now?I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they’re a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding what’s worth doing. Being responsible for what ships, without doing it all themself. My job is giving them the pieces of management that are useful right now. Not how to run a 1:1. How to think…
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The Date – Blunt Implement or Forcing Function?
→: The Date – Blunt Implement or Forcing Function?On some of the worst run projects I’ve seen, leaders trying to get them back on track would set a date. Never, ever, in that circumstance, have I seen a date be met. No-one believes in it, no-one is willing to work overtime to meet it. It slips. Another one is set. And another. Maybe…
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What would make next week better?
→: What would make next week better?Just about everyone gets overwhelmed sometimes, and many of us deal with that by working harder. This is a reasonable response to a single unexpected thing, or a bad week, but it’s not the right response to systematic overwhelm. Then you need to stop asking the question “what do I do next” (or worse: “how…
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The Value of Getting Closer to the Work
→: The Value of Getting Closer to the WorkScaling The core problem of scaling a team is that not everyone can know everything. Scaling is the work of systematizing that – so that things are understandable, knowable. It’s turning “tribal knowledge” into documentation, automation, and process. It used to be that only the automation was for the machine, but now documentation is machine…
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Useful AI skills for Engineering Leaders
→: Useful AI skills for Engineering LeadersThe volume is up. More PRs, more pings, more incidents, more asks coming from more directions. I used to have 8 directs that dealt with most things, and organized and routed information to me for what I had to help them with, but since embarking on a new adventure, I’ve been rebuilding a different system…
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Making a New Plan
→: Making a New PlanOnce, I got an email. To paraphrase, it said: I ignored your recommendation, but new evidence arrived, and now I see that you were right. I won’t do that again. A rare enough thing that I can, years later, still quote it. Part of what made it so meaningful was this person didn’t have to…