Blogs about Management

We cannot truly know whether we are not at this moment sitting in a madhouse. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books) An astounding percentage of Lichtenberg’s quotables are just as relevant today as they were …

Six years ago I spent a week training a neural network to write blog posts and the results were terrible. Now with LLMs I want to see how much easier and better the results are.

We are now living in the age of OpenAI narrative, and a lot of problems are to be aligned to fit it. What are going to be side-effects of its implementation is going to be …

I was really happy to join Mal Minhas and Chris Evans on a panel at The SaaS CTO conference. Moderated by the excellent Jon Topper, we covered what criteria we use to differentiate between genuinely …

A list of toolkits or resources for people that are new to advocacy and campaigning, or organisations that are considering starting work in this area. The Changemakers’ Toolkit this year especially for those new to …

Companies frequently hire me as a consultant to teach their teams how to set up sustainable collaboration and design system practices. In order to do that, I have 2 lessons I consider prerequisites for almost …

Writing code for a computer is hard enough. You take something big and fuzzy, some large vague business outcome you want to achive. Then you break it down recursively and think about all the cases …

Let’s talk about the basic concept of the "making app". I’ve written about this before, and demoed it in some of my public project walk-throughs, but there’s no single straightforward explanation out there, so let’s …

One of the recurring challenges that teams face is getting headcount to support their initiatives. A similar problem is the idea that a team can’t get a favored project into their roadmap. In both cases, …

I wanted to share some notes on how I run remote retrospectives. These are not incident retrospectives, which I tend to run differently. But these are for project retrospectives, or for regular check-ins with a …

In a startup that sells software, what is the “business” side of the company? When I worked in retail, developing software for internal use, there was a clear division between the engineering teams in IT …

Performance reviews are useful for two things: Thing #1: Succession planning. There’s a decent chance you’ll get a new manager before the next performance review. That new manager needs to know how you’re doing, where …

Chapter 5 of The Staff Engineer’s Path is going to be about leading big projects, the kind that involve a lot of teams, or where the stakes are high, or the path forward is ambiguous–or …

As leadership, Q+A serves several important functions. The first, obviously, is to answer questions people have. No matter how well we communicate (and let’s be honest, how well do we really communicate?) there will always …

This year, I’ve helped 5 design teams draft their charter. At the outset of this work is a series of 4 2-hour group sessions (it used to be a one-day workshop in a conference room) …

TL; DR: Critique and review are different. Critique is simply about making the work better. Review is about assessing readiness for the next stage in the process. Healthy critique requires psychological safety. To make the …

You ask, "Should I be making a new directory for this feature I'm building?" You expect a return value of: "yes" or "no." You had a 50% chance of guessing the "correct" answer...right? Four hours, …

A leader starts their management journey in reactive mode, and graduates to the strategic mode over time.