A short discussion of leadership improvements you can start using in your startup today as a technical executive, whether you are a CTO, CIO, VP Engineering, VP R&D, and so on.
Risks are unavoidable in our day-to-day work. Yet many of us need some "calibration" of our treatment of risks. Many tech-oriented people have a risk appetite that differs from the company's, resulti…
For more than a week, I kept saying the exact same thing at the same caffé in Rome, and we got a different drink almost every time. Communication is weird. Words are vague. Realizing that is essentia…
Fear has two opposite ways of harming how you lead—do you freeze or do you roll over? Either way, fear-driven leadership is not really leadership. You can short-circuit fear's control of your behavio…
When we see things with a fresh set of eyes, we can notice many things others around us have gotten used to. Be it if you're standing in front of cheeses you've never heard of before in an Italian su…
If your internal conversations are all about your struggles and obstacles, and you always skip over the actual progress you've made, you will inevitably generate self-inflicted burnout sooner or late…
You should be thinking ahead, but don't confuse that with useless busywork that doesn't actually matter. We do it because we're anxious, because we want to do *something*, or because we wrongly mista…
We moved to Rome and are essentially starting the house from scratch. It's tough, but also liberating. When we're only limiting ourselves to incremental thinking, we might get stuck in a local maximu…
🎶 If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad 🎶 Actually, it can.
Leaders who wrongly think their first priority is to ensure their team is always happy, fine, and dandy create nurseries, not impact p…
There are things that you can just put aside and not think about them until you have to. And then there are areas where you can save a lot of effort by ensuring regular maintenance. That's the differ…
You definitely shouldn't be too hard on yourself, and any particular failure shouldn't rattle you too much. Yet, it is dangerous to get so accustomed to failures and cutting yourself slack that you n…
Whenever you're hiring someone, you realize that titles don't mean the same for everyone. It's not enough to have a reference call where they say someone was a "good senior engineer" and be satisfied…
Somewhat annoyingly, my usual reply when someone tells me they have a certain issue is to ask for real examples. You'd be surprised to see how often people are overly critical of themselves, or obses…
Cognitive dissonance is sometimes a must, because not everything can be clearly decided one way or another. Nevertheless, while you might be aware of the dissonance, as it gets spread in your organiz…
So many CEOs are worried about their team lacking "urgency" and throw that word around, without realizing how to increase productivity in a manner that's effective. Too often we end up with performan…
We're all going to make a lot of mistakes, we might as well get better at maximizing the learning-per-mistake we get. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger… if you actually make the effort to get …
Everyone celebrates long-tenured team members—but what if comfort is killing your company? Let's discuss the hidden dangers of having people who’ve been in the same seat for too long. From culture fo…
When things aren’t going smoothly, most tech leaders don’t slow down to rethink—they speed up to fix. We overcompensate. We protect the team too much, get involved in every decision, pile on late nig…
Many leaders nowadays suffer from this chronic condition. They do everything right if you only judge each single action by itself. On any given day, you can look at their decisions and say you would'…
Imagine if your private leadership notebook — the one where you wrote what you really think about your team — suddenly became public.
How surprised would they be reading it? How surprised would you be…
Product Mastery – The Tech Leader’s Force Multiplier
Most tech leaders settle for “understanding the product.” But true product mastery is something else entirely. It’s the difference between being a …