Practical thinking on engineering leadership, cloud strategy, architecture, and delivery — written for CTOs, Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, and Heads of Platform.
Your best engineers are your biggest constraint. Here is how to diagnose the patterns, understand why it happens, and fix it structurally — without losing the people you cannot afford to lose.
Most leaders frame scaling as a headcount problem. The real question is whether your architecture and org chart are evolving at the same pace — and which one breaks first when they do not.
The practices that got you to Series A are actively dangerous after it. Here is how the best engineering leaders diagnose the transition, reset expectations, and build for scale without killing momentum.
Blaming developers for technical debt is like blaming drivers for traffic. It is a systems problem with a leadership solution — if you know where to look.
Saying no to feature requests is one of the hardest skills in engineering leadership. Here is how to do it with data, frameworks, and a culture that respects focus over velocity.
Headcount feels like progress. But adding engineers to an architecturally constrained team often makes things slower, not faster. Here is the diagnosis and the fix.
The best CTOs are neither pure visionaries nor pure operators. Here is a framework for knowing when to lead with ambition and when to lead with practicality — and how to do both credibly.
High performers are at the highest risk of burnout. Here is what engineering leaders consistently miss about the structural causes — and what actually fixes it.
Most microservices migrations fail for the same reasons. Here is how to diagnose the patterns, understand the real trade-offs, and avoid the mistakes that set teams back by years.
Not every team needs microservices. Here is a practical framework for knowing when distributed architecture helps, when it hurts, and how to make the case for simplicity.
Over-engineering kills early-stage products more quietly than under-engineering. Here is how to spot it, stop it, and make the case for appropriate simplicity.
Event-driven architecture is a leadership decision with deep organisational and operational consequences. Here is what engineering leaders need to understand before committing.
Passing tests do not guarantee a reliable system. Here is what engineering leaders need to understand about the four dimensions of system fragility that tests miss entirely.
The build vs buy question is always a strategy question, not a technical one. Here is the five-dimension framework that makes the decision rigorous and consistent.
Resilience is a design constraint, not a feature you add later. Here is what engineering leaders consistently get wrong — and how to build systems that fail gracefully.
Moving to the cloud is more than a technology upgrade — it is a fundamental shift in how your organisation operates, innovates, and competes. Learn how leading enterprises structure their cloud transformation to achieve measurable ROI.
Cloud cost overruns are a leadership problem before they are a technical one. Here is how to break the blame cycle, implement FinOps, and make cloud costs a shared engineering responsibility.
DevOps transformation failures follow predictable patterns. Here is how engineering leaders can diagnose where their transformation went wrong and what to actually do about it.
Platform teams promise to accelerate engineering. They frequently deliver the opposite. Here is how to tell the difference and build a platform function that engineers actually use.
Kubernetes promises simplified operations and deployment scalability. The reality is more nuanced. Here is what engineering leaders need to know before committing to K8s.
More automation tools does not mean less work. Here is how engineering leaders can distinguish automation that delivers leverage from automation that delivers complexity.
SRE is one of the most misunderstood disciplines in engineering. Here is what engineering leaders actually need to know to implement it well — or decide not to.
Multi-cloud is sold as vendor independence. It often delivers distributed complexity. Here is how engineering leaders should think about the decision on its merits.
Security spending is at all-time highs. So are breaches. The tooling-first mindset misses the real cause. Here is how engineering leaders build security culture that actually reduces risk.
There are two ways organisations experience compliance: as friction that slows everything down, or as guardrails that let teams move faster with confidence. Here is how to get to the second one.
When the alert fires at 2am, the technical response is the easy part. Here is the leadership playbook for managing the human, organisational, and stakeholder dimensions of a major incident.
Most DR plans are compliance documents masquerading as operational readiness. Here is how to tell the difference — and build disaster recovery that actually works when you need it.
When Agile is not working, the problem is almost never Agile. Here is how to diagnose which leadership decisions are breaking the process — and what to do about it.
Roadmaps in fast-growing organisations have a failure rate that should concern every engineering leader. Here is why they fail and how to build planning processes that survive contact with reality.
Velocity, commit count, DORA metrics — all can be gamed, all can mislead. Here is how to build a measurement system that reflects the actual health of your engineering organisation.
The chaos that got you here will break you there. Here is how engineering leaders build the discipline that makes sustained scale possible without destroying the culture that made you successful.
