Topic: People & Leadership (7 articles)
The Constraint Has Moved: AI, the Theory of Constraints, and the Org Around Engineering
For thirty years, engineering was the constraint. Everything else in the business was sized, staffed and paced to march to engineering's slow drumbeat. AI has broken that constraint almost overnight — and the Theory of Constraints is unambiguous about what happens next: the bottleneck doesn't disappear, it moves. It has moved into security, risk, compliance and go-to-market — the functions that were merely adequate in a slow-moving world and are now the thing killing your delivery. A board-level primer on suboptimisation, drum-buffer-rope, and why making engineering faster has, for most companies, changed nothing at all.
What Is the HiPPO Effect? When to Trust It and When to Suppress It
The Highest Paid Person's Opinion is a bias to fear — and a responsibility you were hired to carry
The HiPPO effect — the Highest Paid Person's Opinion overriding the evidence — is real and dangerous. But the opposite failure, a leader who defers every decision to 'the team' and never pushes the organisation forward, is just as costly. Here's how to tell signal from ego.
What Is a Watermelon Project? How to Spot One Before the Write-Off
Green on the outside, red on the inside — and how to read a status report that's lying to you
A watermelon project is reported green on the surface while the reality underneath is red. Here's why watermelon reporting happens, how to spot a fake green before the write-off, and the board-room detection playbook I use in PE diligence and NED work.
Sometimes People Have to Grab Hold of the Electric Fence
Sometimes people have to grab hold of the electric fence. Sometimes you have to pull them back from it. The craft of leadership is knowing which is which — and a Type A vs Type B decision framework that helps you get it right more often than wrong.
Work On the Org, Not In the Org
Every CTO I have watched get ejected from a senior role had the same root cause — they worked in the org rather than on it. Your job is not to pull the train. Your job is to build an engine that can pull the train. A practical guide to the 1:1 cadence, the hiring standard, and the cultural discipline that produces CTOs and CPOs who last.
Stop Overloading Your Roadmap: Why WIP Limits Are the Most Important Rule in Product Planning
Why the single most important rule for building great product roadmaps is limiting work in progress—and how WIP limits transform both delivery speed and stakeholder conversations.
Size REALLY Matters: Finding the Squad Size Sweet Spot
Your Squads should be three developers, plus or minus two. Discover why squad size impacts planning effectiveness, why individual-level planning creates fragility, and how to structure teams for accountability and successful delivery.
