/team-building
Posts touching team building.
11 posts
- April 5, 2026 4 min
What I got wrong in my first year as Head of Engineering and what I would do differently
Over-hiring before culture. Saying yes to everything. Underinvesting in developer experience. Staying hands-on too long. The common thread was not trusting the team.
- /engineering-leadership
- /career
- /decision-making
- /team-building
- /experience
- March 5, 2026 5 min
Engineering teams do not need more process. They need better defaults.
Every incident triggers a new process proposal. The real fix is better CI pipelines, better templates, and better linters. Better defaults scale. More process does not.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /ci-cd
- /decision-making
- /blog
- January 5, 2026 5 min
The hardest conversation I had in 2025 was firing a senior engineer I had hired
He interviewed brilliantly but could not operate in a startup. Performance management is the most important and least taught leadership skill.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /hiring
- /decision-making
- /experience
- October 20, 2025 4 min
I mass-deleted our internal wiki and started over. Twice.
The wiki grew to 400 pages that nobody read. The fix was not better organization. It was aggressive pruning and a decay policy.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /decision-making
- /experience
- September 17, 2025 4 min
The one-on-one framework I use after fifteen years of getting one-on-ones wrong
Three fixed sections: blockers with deadlines, career trajectory, and one question the report chooses. Structure creates safety without drift.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /career
- /experience
- August 4, 2025 4 min
Why I stopped asking candidates to whiteboard and started asking them to review pull requests
Whiteboard coding measures performance under artificial stress. PR reviews measure what the job actually requires.
- /hiring
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /blog
- July 7, 2025 4 min
Two years in and I finally stopped rewriting the org chart every quarter
Constant restructuring is a symptom of unclear ownership, not wrong structure. Org charts stabilize when decision rights are explicit.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /startup-life
- /experience
- June 19, 2025 5 min
The on-call rotation that was just me, and why I finally admitted that was not sustainable
For 14 months I was the only person who got paged at 3 AM. The real reason was not team size. It was that I did not trust anyone else to handle production incidents.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /observability
- /startup-life
- /experience
- June 9, 2025 4 min
Cross-functional friction is a feature, not a bug, if you build the right feedback loops
For months I treated pushback from product, sales, and compliance as obstacles to velocity. The reframe: friction between teams is signal about misaligned priorities, and the right response is better feedback loops.
- /cross-functional
- /engineering-leadership
- /financeops
- /team-building
- /experience
- March 10, 2025 5 min
Learning to delegate when every task feels faster to do yourself
For six months I was the bottleneck on every code review, architecture decision, and production deploy. Delegation felt slower because it was. The turning point was redefining my job.
- /engineering-leadership
- /team-building
- /startup-life
- /decision-making
- /experience
- November 18, 2024 5 min
Hiring engineer number three when you can barely keep engineer number one from burning out
I posted a job listing for our third engineer while privately wondering if our first hire was about to quit. What I got wrong about workload distribution.
- /hiring
- /engineering-leadership
- /startup-life
- /team-building
- /experience