If you’re leading a team or project of any size its 99% likely you’re making at least one mistake right now. Great leaders are aware of this and actively look for the signals that tell them they’re on the wrong path. When you’ve made big mistakes in the past have…

“It’s happening” said the text. Russia had just kicked off its invasion and it was time to talk. Most of the team is based in Ukraine and everyone was looking to the founder for guidance. As a founder it can be incredibly difficult to reorient your perspective when an crisis…

My paranoia is kicking in and I sense something is wrong. It’s our weekly status meeting and Mark is leading the effort to stand up an integration test framework for our new authentication service. The next step is to get a test running in CI that blocks the build on…

Tailoring your startup’s role definitions to your strategy will give your team a competitive advantage. Most founders just hire against traditional role definitions. What they often miss is that altering role definitions to be specific to the sets of problems your startup is facing can dramatically improve your team’s performance. …

Most founders assess their engineering teams by only assessing their short term deliveries (or misses). As a coach I often hear leaders vent about why some changes took so long to ship. This ignores that team performance is far more than hiring good people and telling them what you want. …

The discussion is tense and Laura, the head of support, interrupts “Everyone take a deep breath. I’m sensing a lot of tension right now and I think we need to take a few minutes to calm down.” At that point in my career I’d never heard a leader talk directly…

My Operations manager wants us to create deployment blackouts before weekends so she and her team can spend time with their families on Friday evenings instead of chasing down deployment issues. This sounds fair and my Operations team is depending on me to follow through so I spend a few…

I’m excited for my next meeting with Senior Vice President, Jim. Jim has a world famous resume, but I trust Jim because he is the most experienced, smart, and insightful leader I’ve ever worked for. More importantly, when we bring problems outside of our scope to Jim they get resolved…

Innovation is the result of an investment in knowledge, infrastructure, and/or experimentation that uncovers previously unseen opportunity. Making these investments when there is not a concrete justification is inherently risky so they’re easy to resist. Cynicism, when tolerated by a leader, behaves as kryptonite for innovation by serving up an endless stream of straw man arguments used to resist change.