The Human Bottleneck
AI agents ship faster than you can review. The answer isn't speeding up. It's choosing where your attention actually matters.
Topics
leadership 
50 posts
Leading teams, making decisions, and growing as a technical leader.
Working With the Garage Door Open
Working in the open lets people help while the work is still shapeable. The real skill is pushing the right signal to the right room.
The Levels of AI Adoption
A six-level ladder of AI adoption, from copy-paste prompts to agentic teams and AI-native workflows. Where most companies stall, and how to climb.
Idealism vs Pragmatism
Doing things right against getting things done. TDD, pair programming, AI: the best results hold both ends of the rope.
Build Your Own Team of Agents
Stop using AI as a single assistant. Organize agents into specialized teams with roles, docs, and parallel execution for real leverage.
AI Gives You Speed, Not Quality
AI accelerates your output but doesn't ensure quality. You're responsible for every line you commit. Speed without direction is chaos.
What Success Means to Me
Success is waking up knowing that what you do makes the people around you, and yourself, happier. Consistency over perfection.
Man's Search for Meaning
Frankl shares his experience of the Holocaust and a philosophy about finding purpose even in the darkest of times.
People Skills
You have mastered the code, but technical skill alone will not carry you. If you cannot work with others, nobody wants to work with you.
The Phoenix Project
An impossible project, people playing politics, and endless quick patches, instead of anyone helping the business thrive.
What Kills Agility?
Why Agile if you already do Scrum, Kanban or SAFe? How you manage an organization defines its quality, and what really kills it.
Radical Candor
Kim Scott, former Google leader, on being a great manager: empathetic and results-oriented, where people can speak freely.
Deployments on Fridays
The panic around deploying on Fridays. Does banning a whole day of delivering value to your customers actually make sense?
The Lean Startup
Most startups fail, and many of those failures are preventable. The approach that changed how companies build and launch.
Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing
Tuckman's five stages, and practical strategies for each one: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.
Crucial Conversations
The tools to handle life's hardest conversations: say what is on your mind and still reach the resolution you want.
Unhealthy Working Environment
An unhealthy working environment can have various symptoms that negatively impact both the physical and mental well-being of employees.
The Peter Principle
The Peter principle: people get promoted until they land in a role they are not competent for, and then stop being promoted.
It's Your Ship
Michael Abrashoff on how he transformed the performance and culture of the USS Benfold, and the leadership principles behind it.
How Do You Get Everyone on Board?
From my talk at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress: my experience with Extreme Programming and the benefits of embracing change.
The Blocksize War
Jonathan Bier chronicles the Bitcoin blocksize war of 2015 to 2017: the players, the strategies, and who controls the protocol.
Effective Remote Work
An effective remote work environment is about treating everyone as remote, with everyone in mind having the same level, equality, and information.
Great Leadership
As organizations grow, leaders must shift focus from customers to employees. Key principles for scaling leadership effectively.
Adapt or die
Told through the story of People First IT, this book lays out The Algorithm of Success for changing every part of an organization.
The infinite game
From the bestselling author of Start With Why and Leaders Eat Last, a bold framework for leadership in today's ever-changing world.
The Essential Drucker
Twenty-six selections from Drucker on management in the organization, the individual and society. The principles that still hold.
Dare to lead
Leadership is not about titles or power. It is about recognising potential in people and developing it. Courage over comfort.
The Beauty of Leadership
Leadership is action, not a title. It has nothing to do with management or hierarchy. What it really means and how anyone can lead.
The Great CEO Within
How to scale from startup to company with a system of accountability, real problem solving and transparent feedback.
The Starfish and the Spider
Cut off a spider's head and it dies. Cut off a starfish's leg and it grows back. How decentralized organizations change business.
The Power of Authority and Obedience
Milgram wanted to know how far people obey an order that means harming someone else. What he found, and why it still matters.
Modern CTO
Joel Beasley maps the jagged transition from developer to CTO: the challenges, the lessons and the things worth avoiding.
Leaders Eat Last
A company's real strength is never its products. It is its people, and their willingness to rally together when it gets hard.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
A leadership fable about a tech company whose C level cannot agree on anything, and the new CEO who names the five dysfunctions.
Start with Why
Why are some organizations more innovative and profitable? Why do so few repeat their success? Sinek starts from the why.
Leadership is Language
Marquet dives into the sinking of the El Faro and surfaces with new ideas on how the language we use defines our leadership.
Red Work vs Blue Work
Blue Work and Red Work, the two modes David Marquet describes in Leadership is Language. Different mindsets, and different languages.
Turn the Ship Around!
Marquet turned the submarine Santa Fe around by moving from leader-follower to leader-leader. On the limits of top-down hierarchy.
Lord of the Flies
A group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island try to govern themselves. It ends in disaster.
Responsibilities of a Tech Lead
The Trident Career Model by Patrick Kua has three tracks. Each track represents where people spend most of their time or energy.
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager
A solid compilation for engineering managers: 1:1s, performance reviews, hiring and firing, politics and remote work.
Conformity Experiments
How far do social forces bend your opinion? What matters more: the size of the majority or its unanimity. Asch's experiments, explained.
The Art of Leadership
Leadership practices are small things done repetitively over time. Managers tell you where you are, leaders tell you where you're going.
97 Things Every Engineering Manager should know
As a manager your work is to create clarity, clarity, and more clarity.
Embrace the Change
The tale is a beautiful metaphor of the different attitudes that people adopt as part of their identity in life when they have to confront any change.
Never split the difference
Chris Voss, former FBI lead kidnapping negotiator, on negotiation techniques tested across the full spectrum of human stakes.
High Output Management
Andy Grove's Intel classic on managerial leverage, meetings, decisions and how to get the most output from a team.
The Manager Path
Camille Fournier maps the path from engineer to CTO: 1:1s, mentoring, and what changes at each level of technical leadership.
How to Improve Your Tech-Talk (or Any Other Presentation)
We have all sat through a talk that was hard to follow. How to prepare and deliver a tech talk people actually want to hear.
The Art of War
Sun Tzu's ancient treatise on strategy, and how its lessons on conflict and positioning still read today.