A few years ago, Paul Ingham, a previous manager, laid out what he called the four pillars of engineering leadership. They’ve stuck with me because they cut through the usual management noise. Leadership isn’t about hierarchy or authority. It’s about shaping the parts that make a team work. Each pillar needs the one before it.
Engineering Artisanship
Start with the craft. Artisanship means writing code that someone else can understand, building systems you’d want to own in a year, fixing things properly instead of patching them.
This is your foundation. If you can’t show what good looks like, don’t expect it from your team. Your standards become everyone’s standards: what gets merged, what gets reworked, what you let slide.
Without artisanship, the rest is theory.
Engineering Strategy
Once you’ve built your craft, you earn the right to set direction. Strategy gives meaning to the daily grind. It’s not picking goals from thin air. It’s connecting today’s work to tomorrow’s outcomes.
You shift from “doing things well” to “doing the right things”.
Without the craft underneath, strategy is just PowerPoint slides.
Culture
Culture builds on craft and strategy. It turns skilled individuals into a team that ships.
You need feedback that flows both ways, candour as the default, shared standards everyone believes in.
This doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through a thousand small choices: what you reward, what you ignore, how you respond when things break.
Culture makes the hard bits work. It turns strategy and craft into momentum.
Stakeholder Engagement
Everything so far is wasted if it stays internal. Stakeholder engagement connects your work to the wider world. Not status updates in Slack. Real collaboration with product, design, ops, users. Solving the right problems together.
This only works with the other pillars in place. Without culture, collaboration dies. Without strategy, you talk in circles. Without craft, nobody trusts you.
This is where engineering becomes visible. Where it matters.
Each pillar needs the one before it. Skip one: quality drops, priorities drift, teams check out, engineering becomes that department nobody talks to.
Stack them right, and you build something that lasts.
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