Why Engineering Leadership is About the Team, Not the Code

The hardest thing about becoming an engineering leader isn't learning to manage people. It's unlearning the identity that got you there in the first place.

From Maker to Multiplier

When you're a senior engineer, your value is direct and measurable. You write code, systems improve, bugs get fixed. The feedback loop is tight.

Leadership breaks that loop. Your job becomes making your team more effective — and that's a much harder thing to measure on any given day.

What I've Learned

After years of leading engineering teams, a few things have become clear:

The best thing you can do is get out of the way. Great engineers don't need you to solve their problems. They need context, air cover, and clarity on what matters.

Your job is to raise the floor, not the ceiling. Helping your weakest team member improve has far more leverage than making your strongest performer even better.

Consistency builds trust. Teams don't need a perfect leader. They need a predictable one — someone whose behavior they can model and rely on.

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More on this topic coming soon.