Most days, the real work is the constant shifting between details and direction, rather than anything on the to-do list. You’re working out when to dive deep and when to come back up for air.
I used to think there was a map for this. Management books lay out neat layers: strategy at the top, execution at the bottom, tidy flow from one to the other. Reality is messier. Some days I’ll start sketching architecture for a new service. Within an hour I’m chasing a production bug or untangling a hand-off that’s blocking delivery.
It’s rarely a smooth climb. Most weeks feel like running up a down escalator. Get a few steps up, set a direction, then gravity pulls you back: a fire, an unexpected dependency, some invisible bottleneck that only shows when work stops moving.
This is engineering leadership. You learn when to stay close and when to step back, and you build the habits that stop the nearest problem pulling you in.
The Flight Levels framework helps here. Klaus Leopold’s Flight Levels: Leading Organizations with Business Agility describes three organisational altitudes:
“It’s not about getting everyone to 30,000 feet. It’s about knowing which altitude you’re at, why you’re there, and when it’s time to change.”
Flight Level One is inside the team, where you deal with stories, bugs and stand-ups. Everything is concrete and the feedback loops are tight, which makes it satisfying because you can see the work.
Flight Level Two is across teams, where you deal with dependencies, bottlenecks and hand-offs. The question shifts from “how do we ship this feature?” to “how do we keep the machine running?”
Flight Level Three is the balcony view, covering systems thinking, business outcomes and portfolio management. Tickets and boards don’t come into it. You’re looking at how the organisation adapts and where it puts its resources.
Gravity always wins
Gravity always pulls you back to level one. Every fire, incident, or broken hand-off tempts you to jump in and fix things directly. As an engineer, this feels like helping. As a leader, it treats symptoms, not causes. Stay in the weeds and nobody watches the system.
The only way to operate at the right level is building habits that force you to look up. Weekly reviews of cycle time, cross-team blockers, work pileups. Even just asking “are we working on the right thing?” before diving into the next fire.
Leadership isn’t helping your team do the work. It’s working on the system that produces the work.
Step back regularly, using rituals like weekly reviews and retros to force the altitude change. Surface the hidden constraints by mapping dependencies, bottlenecks and hand-offs. Make the goals explicit, because the higher you go the fuzzier alignment gets, so over-communicate the why and the what rather than the how. And resist the urge to rescue. When you feel yourself about to jump into ticket triage, ask whether you’re solving a one-off or treating a pattern.
Flight levels as a practice
I’m getting more deliberate about where I spend my time and which altitude I’m working at.
Flight Levels makes the point that you don’t need to stay at 30,000 feet. You just need to know why you’re at the altitude you’re at, and when to come down.
Published on . Co-authored with AI.