Leadership
Your job, and the four times it completely changes.
What you personally do all day, how you decide, how you write, and how you stay useful as the thing you built outgrows your direct reach.
The job changes four times
Builder, multiplier, architect of the machine, then steward of the strategy. Each transition invalidates the habits that got you promoted.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Decisions, disagreement, and speed
Most decisions are reversible and belong to one person, made in minutes. Consensus is reserved for doors that only open one way.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Writing is the leadership multiplier
Writing is the only thing you do that reaches people you'll never meet, in rooms you're not in. Major decisions get a document before they get a meeting.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Delegation without abdication
Delegating an outcome means handing over the decisions that come with it. What you keep is the definition of done and the frequency of checking.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Managing up and sideways
Your peers in sales, product, and finance aren't obstacles, they're constraints with reasons. Translate engineering into their currency and most of the friction goes away.
20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
What your boss is carrying
The person you report to is carrying two or three specific worries, and almost none of your work is pointed at them. Find out what they are and solve one.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Complaints and proposals
A complaint hands someone a problem plus the work of deciding what to do about it. A proposal hands them a decision. Same information, completely different weight.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
The board and the exec team
A concise monthly written note, and no surprises, ever. Boards want confidence that you see reality clearly, not detail about how the system works.
50-150 · 150+
Hard conversations
Have it early, plainly, and once. Early means the second occurrence, not the first and not the fifth, because that's when a thing stops being an incident and becomes a pattern.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
Your calendar is your strategy
Whatever you actually spend hours on is your real strategy. Everything else is an aspiration you've written down, and the calendar is the only honest record of which is which.
5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+
You don't know half their story
You're comparing your full interior record against someone else's edited exterior, and losing. Compare against yourself twelve months ago and against the job you want to be able to do.
0-5 · 5-20 · 20-50 · 50-150 · 150+