A senior product leader at a FAANG company could not see himself clearly enough to position what he actually brought to the table. He was not the problem — context was. Here is what happens when that context disappears overnight.
At the director and VP level, competence is expected. The leaders who have real influence vs. the ones constantly pushing uphill are not separated by output — they are separated by whether the room trusts them. Here is what builds that trust.
I spent 17 years managing software teams at companies like Amazon and Snap. The thing that made me leave was not frustration or burnout. It was honesty about which part of the job I actually wanted to spend my time on.
A new CEO coaching survey out of Hoover Institution @ Stanford. The headline: 58% of CEOs now use a professional coach — up from 34% a decade ago. Here are the takeaways worth knowing.
For years I told senior technical leaders not to code. AI agentic tooling has erased the tradeoff that drove that advice. Here is what changed, and what it looks like to spend an hour a week back in the codebase.
As your scope grows, getting buy-in and influencing without authority becomes table stakes. Here is a concrete exercise for building the kind of high-trust relationships that make everything else easier.