The Curious Engineer

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Leadership Garden

leadership.garden

Actionable guides and mental models for engineering leaders who believe management can be people-first, humane, and a real enabler.

Engineering management / careersAI / ML

’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
151 from 24 Feb 2017 to 24 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (34 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 32

  1. AI Is Not Just A Tool
  2. You'll Know in Two Quarters
  3. Get Really Good at Navigating Change
  4. Everyone Has a Recipe Now
  5. The Cost of an Objection Went to Zero
  6. You Get What You Reward
  7. Specs Don't Drive Anything
  8. The Same Feature, Twice
  9. How I Decide Whether to Split a Team
  10. A hard job attached to an easy idea
  11. Why Organizations Defend Failing Decisions
  12. Make Your Judgment Transferable
  13. Dopamine Fracking Comes for Your Judgment
  14. Pain Is a Proxy
  15. The Typing Was the Safety Harness
  16. Productivity Is Not Speed — Leadership Garden
  17. Your Career Framework Can't Run Your Interviews — Leadership Garden
  18. No, AI didn't break PRs — Leadership Garden
  19. Engineering Burnout Has Five Faces, and Your Career Ladder Walks You Through All of Them — Leadership Garden
  20. The Senior Engineer Crisis Isn't Coming. It's Already Here. — Leadership Garden
  21. Your Team Is Not a School — Leadership Garden
  22. Why Your 360 Feedback Isn't Working — Leadership Garden
  23. AI Is an Amplifier. What Are You Amplifying? — Leadership Garden
  24. Verification Debt Is Your Next Headache — Leadership Garden
  25. There Is No Standard EM Role — Leadership Garden
  26. The Finger Is Not the Moon — Leadership Garden
  27. What Actually Breaks at 30 People — Leadership Garden
  28. Why Estimates Fail (And Why You Still Need Them) — Leadership Garden
  29. The Constraint You Won't Find on a Jira Board — Leadership Garden
  30. You're Coaching Too Much — Leadership Garden
  31. Chaos vs. Bureaucracy: Pick Your Poison — Leadership Garden
  32. The Work Moved: What the AI Coding Debate Actually Agrees On — Leadership Garden

2025 34

  1. False Consensus: Why We Think We're The Baseline — Leadership Garden
  2. In defense of office gossiping — Leadership Garden
  3. Developer Flow — Leadership Garden
  4. On (Workplace) Politics — Leadership Garden
  5. Software Engineering Laws - Team & Project Management — Leadership Garden
  6. Software Engineering Laws - Performance & Scalability — Leadership Garden
  7. Software Engineering Laws - Design & UX — Leadership Garden
  8. Software Engineering Laws - Product Development — Leadership Garden
  9. 56 Laws of Software Engineering — Leadership Garden
  10. Software Engineering Laws - Human Factors — Leadership Garden
  11. Software Engineering Laws - Risk & Security — Leadership Garden
  12. Software Engineering Laws - Time & Estimation — Leadership Garden
  13. Software Engineering Laws - Coding & Development — Leadership Garden
  14. Software Engineering Laws - Metrics & Monitoring — Leadership Garden
  15. Software Engineering Laws - Quality & Testing — Leadership Garden
  16. Software Engineering Laws - System Architecture — Leadership Garden
  17. On Experimentation And Trust — Leadership Garden
  18. Why I Dumped LeetCode Interviews — Leadership Garden
  19. 20 Business Terms You Need Before Your Next Budget Meeting — Leadership Garden
  20. No Clear "Why", No Clear Path — Leadership Garden
  21. Avoid “Motivation Hacks.” Build Systems Your Team Can Rely On. — Leadership Garden
  22. Stop Solving Everyone’s Problems. Coach Them To Solve Their Own. — Leadership Garden
  23. Every Team Problem Is Ultimately A Leadership Problem — Leadership Garden
  24. Compliance Is Not Commitment — Leadership Garden
  25. Good Managers Clear Paths — Leadership Garden
  26. Your Team Knows More Than You Do — Leadership Garden
  27. The “Right” Decision Doesn’t Exist. Just Make The Best One You Can. — Leadership Garden
  28. Lead By Example, Especially When No One’s Watching. — Leadership Garden
  29. Bad Managers Hide From Accountability — Leadership Garden
  30. SPACE Framework: 5 Metrics That Actually Work — Leadership Garden
  31. On-Call Done Right — Leadership Garden
  32. The Power Of “I Don’t Know” — Leadership Garden
  33. The Swiss Cheese Model — Leadership Garden
  34. The No-BS Guide to Engineering Team Conflicts — Leadership Garden

2024 36

  1. Loyalty Is Earned, Not Given — Leadership Garden
  2. Smell the Smoke, Prevent the Fire — Leadership Garden
  3. Stop Avoiding, Start Owning — Leadership Garden
  4. The Problem with 'Just': Tech's Most Dangerous Four-Letter Word — Leadership Garden
  5. The Knowing-Doing Gap In Leadership — Leadership Garden
  6. On Conflicts — Leadership Garden
  7. Stop Fixing, Start Leading: How Coaching Changed My Leadership Style — Leadership Garden
  8. Knowledge Silos: The Engineering Productivity Tax — Leadership Garden
  9. Why Goodhart's Law Isn't All That Useful — Leadership Garden
  10. The Art of Calling Out Room Dynamics — Leadership Garden
  11. Conviction, Policy, Consensus: Choose Your Leadership Style Wisely — Leadership Garden
  12. Don’t Fear Power — Leadership Garden
  13. The Johari Window — Leadership Garden
  14. The Ultimate Guide to Retrospectives: Transforming Your Team, One Look Back at a Time — Leadership Garden
  15. Breaking the Expert Beginner Pattern — Leadership Garden
  16. The One Thing Killing Your Team's Output (WIP) — Leadership Garden
  17. Bad Managers Hide From Accountability — Leadership Garden
  18. Revolutionize Your Retrospectives with the Starfish Method — Leadership Garden
  19. An Intro To Career Frameworks — Leadership Garden
  20. The Persistence Principle — Leadership Garden
  21. Being in Tech Means Being a Lifelong Learner — Leadership Garden
  22. From Meh to Yeah: Mastering the Mad Sad Glad Retrospective — Leadership Garden
  23. The Human Element: Tech’s Final Frontier — Leadership Garden
  24. Rescue Your Meetings: 3 Polite Ways to Refocus — Leadership Garden
  25. Don’t Amplify The Drama — Leadership Garden
  26. Set Sail for Success: Why Your Team Needs to Try the Sailboat Retrospective — Leadership Garden
  27. The Start Stop Continue Retrospective — Leadership Garden
  28. Navigating the BS Maze: A Tech Leader's Guide to Brandolini's Law — Leadership Garden
  29. Chesterton’s Fence — Leadership Garden
  30. On Senior Engineers — Leadership Garden
  31. Why Your Big Brain Needs Breathing Room (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Slack Time) — Leadership Garden
  32. Your Brain Needs a Break from Work — Leadership Garden
  33. Mentoring Made Easy: A Beginner's Framework for Success — Leadership Garden
  34. How to Build a High Performing Team — Leadership Garden
  35. Navigating Uncertainty: Software Engineering and Epistemic Learned Helplessness — Leadership Garden
  36. How to Get Your Work Recognized — 6 Strategies — Leadership Garden

2023 15

  1. Quiet Confidence – How To Thrive As An Introvert Leader — Leadership Garden
  2. These 10 Mental Models Will Make You Smarter — Leadership Garden
  3. The 3 Layers to Unlocking Team Trust: A Leader’s Guide — Leadership Garden
  4. 10 Leadership Styles Every Manager Needs to Know — Leadership Garden
  5. How To Start Managing People – The First 3 One-on-Ones — Leadership Garden
  6. 6 Productivity Techniques Which Won’t Burn You Out — Leadership Garden
  7. How to Have More Effective Performance Review Talks: 6 Expert Techniques — Leadership Garden
  8. Great Leaders Make People Feel Safe — Leadership Garden
  9. Demystifying Burnout – A Deep Dive Into Its Symptoms And Remedies — Leadership Garden
  10. The Rule of 3: A Game-Changer for Your Communication Skills — Leadership Garden
  11. The Office Odyssey: Return, Resist or Remodel? — Leadership Garden
  12. Managing Expectations: 5 Steps to Effective Communication and Understanding — Leadership Garden
  13. Zoom Fatigue Unpacked: Understanding and Overcoming Virtual Exhaustion — Leadership Garden
  14. Retrospective Antipatterns: The Silent Agile Team Killers — Leadership Garden
  15. 7 Leadership Lessons from the Fields - Advice from Farmers — Leadership Garden

2022 7

  1. Practical Motivation And Engineering Management – A Tale Of 2 Frameworks. — Leadership Garden
  2. 12 Common Cognitive Fallacies — Leadership Garden
  3. Dunbar’s 6 Magic Numbers — Leadership Garden
  4. Quantifying Burnout — Leadership Garden
  5. The Ultimate Guide To Onboarding Software Engineers — Leadership Garden
  6. A One-On-One Document Template You’ll Actually Use — Leadership Garden
  7. Gender-Neutral Terms To Address A Group — Leadership Garden

2021 8

  1. The Most Important Characteristics Of High-Performance Teams (2023) — Leadership Garden
  2. The 10 Golden Rules of Team Leadership — Leadership Garden
  3. 4 Product Development Fallacies — Leadership Garden
  4. Tips On Prioritizing Tech Debt In A Healthy Way — Leadership Garden
  5. Stop Changing, Start Experimenting — Leadership Garden
  6. The 5 Common Mistakes Of New Engineering Managers — Leadership Garden
  7. Use Active Listening to Boost Your Career — Leadership Garden
  8. The 4 Key Ways We Fail As Engineering Managers — Leadership Garden

2020 15

  1. Kindness is a hidden software engineering superpower — Leadership Garden
  2. 7 harmful biases in performance reviews — Leadership Garden
  3. Communication skills for successful software engineers — Leadership Garden
  4. Acing your technical interview – a hiring manager’s guide — Leadership Garden
  5. The top 11 technical interview myths — Leadership Garden
  6. The four dangerous animals of product development — Leadership Garden
  7. How to stop winning arguments — Leadership Garden
  8. The stories we tell ourselves — Leadership Garden
  9. On COVID, burnout, teams and self-care — Leadership Garden
  10. The 101 of effective goal setting — Leadership Garden
  11. Top 12 Questions You Get as a Hiring Manager — Leadership Garden
  12. Thoughts on giving feedback — Leadership Garden
  13. Learning at work is work — Leadership Garden
  14. Questions vs. directions — Leadership Garden
  15. The basics of one-on-ones — Leadership Garden

2019 2

  1. Excuse no. 13 - this is how I am — Leadership Garden
  2. Kill your heroes — Leadership Garden

2017 2

  1. Engineering managers, stop coding! — Leadership Garden
  2. Staying motivated while growing — Leadership Garden