Tag: leadership

  • The Tech Lead Trap

    - The tech lead role can become a dead end if you're not careful. How to spot when you're trapped, and what to do about it.

  • Inheriting a Struggling Team

    - You've taken on a team with low morale, deep technical debt and no clear direction. What to do first, and what takes longer than you'd like.

  • Giving Hard Feedback

    - How to raise a performance issue, an attitude problem or a skill gap in a way that's direct without being cruel, and that leads to change.

  • Making Technical Decisions Stick

    - Technical decisions get revisited, ignored, or forgotten unless you make them stick. ADRs, RFCs, or just conversations? Match the documentation to the decision's weight.

  • Scope Creep and How to Fight It

    - Scope creep kills projects slowly, one small addition at a time, until the original timeline is impossible. How to spot it early and have the conversation.

  • When to Say No

    - Saying no is one of the most important skills for a tech lead. When to do it, how to phrase it, and how to keep the credibility that makes it...

  • Managing Up

    - Your engineering manager needs information from you to do their job. What to tell them, how to advocate for your team, and how to influence decisions you don't control.

  • Working with Designers

    - The tech lead and designer relationship has its own friction points. When to push back on designs, how to collaborate early, and what to do about the 'pixel perfect' argument....

  • 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. What separates the two.

  • 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 working out how much code to write. Too much and you're not leading. Too little and you lose touch.

  • Your First 90 Days as Tech Lead

    - The first three months as a tech lead set the tone for what follows. 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

    - The four pillars of engineering leadership: artisanship, strategy, culture and stakeholder engagement. Each one needs the one before it.

  • 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...