12 posts
Tech lead is your go-to move for scaling a team. But if you promote too early, you lose a great IC and gain a half-time manager. Here's when it actually makes sense.
Read →How to make the hardest people decision as a technical leader. Structure, timing, communication, legal basics, and how to protect your remaining team.
Read →You don't need a Spotify-model org chart if you have 15 engineers. Here's how to structure teams that actually work at your size, without premature complexity.
Read →The RTO debate is over. Here's what actually matters for engineering velocity, and how to choose what works for your team.
Read →Stop talking about psychological safety. Start building it. Concrete behaviors that change how your team operates: blameless postmortems, disagree-and-commit, code review culture, and what you do when someone fails.
Read →A simple, no-BS framework for evaluating engineers when you don't have an HR department. Structure, execution, and how to use reviews as a leadership tool instead of a compliance checkbox.
Read →A founder-friendly template for 1:1s with senior engineers. What to ask, how to listen for signals, and why this is your most valuable hour each week.
Read →Your team structure isn't just about org charts. It's encoding itself into your architecture. And if they're misaligned, you're shipping slower than you think.
Read →A practical playbook for building and scaling distributed engineering teams. Written culture, decision logs, async code review, and the myth of the synchronous overlap window.
Read →A practical 90-day playbook for your startup's first engineering manager — the mindset shifts, the weekly cadence, and the mistakes that derail most IC-to-manager transitions.
Read →A founder-friendly translation of the Team Topologies framework, with practical advice on when and how to apply it at a 10-, 25-, and 50-person engineering org.
Read →The exact weekly cadence I set up with every fractional CTO client — standups, reviews, 1:1s, planning — and why most engineering teams don't need a new process, they need a working one.
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