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The Second Cohort
→: The Second CohortAfter the first cohort of DRI Your Career I wrote that the first time you do something, you can believe in it but you can only really hope. But we just wrapped up our second cohort of DRI Your Career and have two other courses we’ve run full cohorts of. I’m going to call it…
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Understanding the Game
→: Understanding the GameI used to panic when someone asked me what I thought about an acquisition. I had vague opinions, weakly held, because I didn’t know enough to reason about it. My opinions were about the product and the team. Knowing that most acquisitions fail to deliver their value (and having seen a couple up close) the…
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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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WordPress + Claude – a new look for cate.blog
→: WordPress + Claude – a new look for cate.blogIf you’re reading this on cate.blog, things look different. I’m pleased with how it came out. Getting there was more difficult than I expected. I came into this confident. I used to work on WordPress (admittedly, the mobile apps – but I did the support rotations and lived in P2 like everyone else). I have…
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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…
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The Joy of Scope Creep
→: The Joy of Scope CreepI’m disciplined about scope. Ship the smallest thing that moves you forward. The feature you don’t build is the feature you don’t maintain. When I was running a team, holding the why was the job. Keeping us focused on the things that actually mattered, and away from the things that didn’t. In Navigating the AI…
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The New Realities of EM Lyfe
→: The New Realities of EM LyfeA fascinating thing is happening. EMs are saying it’s better to be an IC. ICs think being an EM is where it’s at. This is part of the AI shift. The industry seems to be in chaos, and wherever you are, somewhere else seems better. But below that, it’s not just the job that’s changing.…
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Force Multipliers
→: Force MultipliersIt’s harder than ever to be an engineering manager. Fewer resources, higher expectations, and a public conversation actively questioning whether the role should exist at all. Less support than ever, in a job that already often felt hard and lonely. That’s why Jean and I built the Engineering Manager Survival Guide – and I’m so…