Tag: leadership

  • When to Say No

    - Saying no is one of the most important skills for a tech lead. To PMs, to stakeholders, sometimes to your own team. Here's how to do it well.

  • Managing Up

    - Your engineering manager needs information from you to do their job. Here's how to keep them informed, advocate for your team, and influence decisions without authority.

  • Working with Designers

    - The tech lead and designer relationship has unique friction points. When to push back on designs, how to collaborate early, and handling the 'pixel perfect' conversation.

  • Working with Product Managers

    - The tech lead and PM relationship can be the most productive partnership in a team or a source of constant friction. Here's how to make it work.

  • Running Effective 1:1s as a Tech Lead

    - As a tech lead, 1:1s are your most important meeting. Not status updates, not technical discussions. Real conversations about how people are doing and where they're going.

  • Balancing Coding and Leading

    - The hardest part of becoming a tech lead is figuring out how much code to write. Too much and you're not leading. Too little and you lose touch. Here's how...

  • Your First 90 Days as Tech Lead

    - The first three months as a tech lead set the tone for what follows. Here's what to focus on, what to ignore, and the mistakes most people make.

  • What is a Tech Lead?

    - The tech lead role means different things at different companies. At smaller organisations, it usually means doing both technical leadership and people work. Here's what that actually looks like.

  • Navigating Flight Levels

    - Why management isn't about climbing layers, it's about knowing when to zoom in and when to pull back.

  • Four Pillars of Engineering Leadership

    - A few years ago, 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....

  • Culture Follows Incentives

    - If you want to influence how people act at work, don't spend time on motivational Slack posts or new processes. The real lever is incentives. Most of us like to...

  • Finding Your Place: Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners

    - Why engineering teams need different archetypes at different phases, and how mismatches quietly slow things down.

  • Stuff I learned at cinch

    - Today's my last day at cinch, where I was a Tech Lead across multiple teams for the past two and a half years. I've learned so much working there, and...