https://leegold.com/tags/engineering-management/ Recent content in Engineering Management on Lee Goldsworthy Hugo en-au Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/why-arent-we-shipping-faster-with-ai/ Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/why-arent-we-shipping-faster-with-ai/ “Why aren’t we shipping faster with AI?” is the dominant question I’ve seen up-close from 13 (and counting) Boards and Executive Leadership Teams to CTOs of software scale-ups this year. “If tomorrow we were to go twice as fast with our current setup, we’ll have twice the Sev1 incidents, twice the bugs, and twice the undiscovered security vulnerabilities” is the completely reasonable pushback I see, but turning that pushback into a constructive leadership conversation about resource allocation is what I’m interested in. https://leegold.com/posts/the-bottleneck-just-moved-to-the-leadership-team/ Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/the-bottleneck-just-moved-to-the-leadership-team/ Over the next 1-4 months, every Senior Engineer can have output equivalent to a whole team in 2025. This moves the bottleneck to Product/Engineering Leadership and the CxO team. We’re going to need organisational change; Level 4 Agentic Orchestration is just shining an even brighter light on what we’ve always known was central to success: Clarity of purpose, and shared understanding. Yes, there’s still real work to do in Engineering teams to embed the L4 Orch tech, but it’s now obvious to me there’s even more change required in Senior Leadership / Executive teams to get traction with all this new horsepower, otherwise it’ll just be a lot of spinning tyres. https://leegold.com/posts/senior-engineers-from-tradie-to-builder/ Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/senior-engineers-from-tradie-to-builder/ The role of “Senior Software Engineer” is right now in the process of evolving from “Tradie” to “Builder”. The tech is now here, but the adoption is uneven. This is a call to action. As of January 2026, every company with software engineers can no longer afford to ignore the sea-change that has arrived in software product engineering: Loop-based Orchestration. For software folks who have already used Model-native CLI Agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex), we’ve all realised we can get multiples more done, safely, reliably, within some constraints. https://leegold.com/posts/how-i-run-zero-inbox-as-a-fractional/ Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/how-i-run-zero-inbox-as-a-fractional/ As a Fractional, my Attention Management has to be brutal, and a friend recently asked me to describe how I run my Zero Inbox. it’s a blend of Eisenhower Matrices and recurring Ceremonies I use to manage the noise from working with 4-6 startups at a time (often with inboxes, calendars, chat and project tools for each), so I figured I’d share it here. Core Principle: “I should only see things I need to do that Hour, that Day, or that Week (in that order), everything else should resurface at the right time without me thinking about it” https://leegold.com/posts/being-wrong-out-loud/ Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/being-wrong-out-loud/ When you’ve (recently in my case) been objectively wrong (and publicly so), do you get the most out of the opportunity? I was hanging out with my in-law’s over the weekend, and I said (with a lot of conviction) something at Saturday lunch I was confident was true. Upon reflection the next day, I realised I had learned the relevant “fact” so long ago that it was prior to me having usefully developed standards of evidence. https://leegold.com/posts/from-why-are-we-doing-this-to-how-we-measure-success/ Tue, 25 Mar 2025 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/from-why-are-we-doing-this-to-how-we-measure-success/ There’s a progression in a Software Engineer’s career, but the job title doesn’t really help us to understand the broader journey. Jnr/Mid SWE is about Applications and Infrastructure Snr/Staff SWE you add People and Delivery HoE/CTO you add Strategy, Culture and Risk There’s a through-line in all of these, that grows in intensity through the progression: As a Jnr/Mid, we learn to ask “Why are we doing this?”. You know, “Tell me about the problem we’re solving, or the benefit we’re hoping to get”. https://leegold.com/posts/two-hours-two-days-or-two-weeks/ Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/two-hours-two-days-or-two-weeks/ “Can we drop what we’re working on and focus on this URGENT thing please?” …is a phrase all Engineering Managers and Tech Leads hate hearing. The reflex is to say “We don’t have time / we’re too busy for that”, but it’s an antipattern. The strong pattern looks like this: “Here’s three approaches to what you asked for: 2 hours (20% of the value), 2 days (40% of the value) and 2 weeks 80% of the value). https://leegold.com/posts/effort-size-and-fidelity-three-definitions-to-agree-on-day-one/ Tue, 17 Dec 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/effort-size-and-fidelity-three-definitions-to-agree-on-day-one/ When I land in a new startup/scale-up, I want to have fast and deep conversations with their product and engineering teams, and have everyone walk away with a highly converged understanding at the end of the chat. In service of this, there’s a few types of information I always find useful to get a handle on right at the start: Their internal naming conventions for foundational concepts that product and engineering rely on every day. https://leegold.com/posts/break-the-rewrite-cycle/ Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/break-the-rewrite-cycle/ Been there, rewritten that. Every software engineer has imagined an amazing rewrite that breathes new life into a legacy codebase/stack, but let’s be honest: Some rewrites feel destined for a repeat – the Groundhog Day of software dev. What’s the Cycle? Tangled legacy code tempts engineers to start fresh, followed by a lack of stakeholder buy-in, rosy estimates, and scope creep leading to half-baked rewrites that become the next rewrite target before they’re even shipped. https://leegold.com/posts/the-engineer-with-the-broader-aperture/ Sat, 07 Sep 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/the-engineer-with-the-broader-aperture/ One of the traits I see consistently in the strongest technology leaders is their ability to adopt a broader organisational aperture than their peers when facilitating engineering decision making. Now for the sideways jump: Nascent literature¹ on the first successes for use of LLMs within software engineering practices has been using LLMs trained on the canonical texts that developers work with every day: Code Repositories. Github Copilot is the best known, and just this week Anthropic launched their native GitHub integration for Claude. https://leegold.com/posts/aws-bill-like-servicing-car/ Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/aws-bill-like-servicing-car/ Shovel cash into the furnace that is AWS/Azure. It’s fine. For a while at least. Don’t do cost optimisation Link to heading I encourage early stage tech companies to not even think about their AWS/Azure bill until it reaches $10k/y. At that point, it wants a timeboxed 1 hour sanity check, with perhaps a few hours of tightening up unused services, then don’t look again until it reaches $20k. https://leegold.com/posts/cancel-your-performance-reviews/ Mon, 05 Feb 2024 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/cancel-your-performance-reviews/ …or shrink them into insignificance Link to heading Having a spectacular manager early in your career is a kinda profound experience. They somehow see you, understand your goals, weaknesses and likely some of your neuroses too. What they never do is learn those things while you are both awkwardly filling out Likert scales and quibbling over Key Results in the HR-supplied Annual Performance Review template. Nobody likes peformance reviews, and for many folks they’re straight-up anxiety inducing. https://leegold.com/posts/hard-feedback/ Wed, 11 Oct 2023 18:00:00 +0800 https://leegold.com/posts/hard-feedback/ It’s all about trust Link to heading I came across this Julie Gurner quote today: “People can take hard feedback if they know you are in their corner” The first thing to note here is that praise needs to be a tool in your toolbox. If none of your feedback is praise, then you should read Radical Candor by Kim Scott asap. Assuming that you’ve got that nailed down, sadly not all your feedback can be praise, but the trick to getting good mileage from the critical kind of feedback is a symptom of how much trust you’ve built in the preceding months and years.