// archive
Category: Engineering Leadership
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The Non-Product Surface Area
Every time I’ve watched a company get built from the inside, the same thing happens. The founders pick a product direction, start shipping, and for a few quarters…
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The Org Chart Is Flattening & Nobody Has a Replacement
Two things happened last week that look unrelated but aren’t. JPMorgan told its 65,000 engineers and technologists that AI tool usage is now part of their performance reviews.…
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“Tokenmaxxing” Is Lines-of-Code Thinking for the Agentic Era
Silicon Valley has a new competitive sport, and it’s exactly the mistake you think it is. The New York Times reported last week that engineers at Meta, OpenAI,…
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Your AI Notetaker Is the Biggest Security Decision You’re Not Making
Every engineering leader I know is running at least one AI meeting recorder. Fathom, Otter, Fireflies, Granola — they show up in your Zoom call, they transcribe everything,…
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Minutes Added To Workforce
Every company I’ve talked to in the last two quarters is asking the same question about AI: what’s the ROI? The instinct is to measure AI value in cost…
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Block Just Cut 3,500 Jobs. You’re Reading It Wrong.
Jack Dorsey announced this week that Block is cutting roughly 3,500 people — about 40% of its workforce. The stock has been sliding for years. The headlines are…
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Are You Managing Your Manager? (The Agentic Update)
In 2015, I stood in front of a room full of engineers at Code Driven NYC and laid out a formula for how individual contributors could take charge…
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Can AI Solve the Four Burner Problem?
In my last post, Awe in an AI World, I wrote about the reclaimed time that AI is creating and the question that keeps me up at night in…
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The Next Platform Giant Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Every major era of software development has produced a defining platform company. The one that quietly became the infrastructure everyone depends on. GitHub didn’t win because git was…
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Awe in an AI World
I’ve spent most of my life implementing systems at scale, watching engineering teams transform how they work (pre- and post-AI), and having thousands of conversations about what it…