People & Team Leadership

Leadership is about empowering people, building trust, and driving toward a shared vision. These principles guide how I approach building teams and organizations:

People First

Focus on growing your people through autonomy, mastery, and purpose (see Daniel Pink's book Drive). Build your leaders and allow them to spread their wings. Ensure they do the same for their leaders, and on down to new hires. When people understand the big picture, the vision, and the changes needed to get there, they can align and drive toward desired outcomes with ownership and passion.

There is nothing more engaging than feeling you are a part of something more important than a paycheck and the next raise. Those will come "accidentally" when you are working toward a vision you believe in and growing in your profession. It's not complicated: Give people the space to grow, own, and win!

Listen and Respond

You have smart, eager, and talented people around you. You may have the right answer and often will, but let them come up with it through questions and coaching. That will lead to positive and engaged change. Work yourself out of a job as fast as you can by growing your leaders and empowering them to speak and drive change! Don't fear it—you and everyone will grow if done right. (See Christopher Avery's work on responsibility: Teamwork is an Individual Skill and The Responsibility Process)

Own the Company Vision

Don't focus on protecting your team or organization. Understand and align with your company's vision. Partner with your cross-functional leaders to drive that vision forward. It's not helpful if your org is doing great and the rest of the company is failing—you and your team will eventually fail as well. Understand what you and your teams can do to help Sales, Marketing, IT, Finance, etc. (See Patrick Lencioni's classic: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team)

Build Relationships

As a leader, this is something you do and you mentor and coach your teams to do. Build trusting relationships with not only your team but your cross-functional partners. You build trust through actions and not words—one promise kept at a time. Also, get to know folks beyond the company-level tasks at hand. We are all human, so connect at a basic level.

Expect Excellence

Be clear on what you expect from folks and be clear with others on what they can expect from you. Do what you say you are going to do. Use metrics that matter to show results in an objective way. Opinions are interesting but often not that useful, so use data, science, and metrics to drive your decisions and articulation of results.

Lead in the Age of AI

The leaders who thrive now treat AI as a thought partner, not just a productivity tool. I practice what I lead: over the past year I've shipped six full-stack products end-to-end with agentic AI, which keeps my technical judgment current and my expectations of teams grounded in reality. The same principles that build great people—clear intent, tight feedback, and ownership—are exactly what make AI-augmented teams effective. (See Geoff Woods' The AI-Driven Leader and Gene Kim's Vibe Coding for two perspectives I draw on; see my technology page for the products and lessons learned.)

Key Areas of Focus

• Team Building: Creating cohesive, high-performing engineering teams
• Mentorship: Developing the next generation of technical leaders
• Culture: Fostering innovation, collaboration, and psychological safety
• Scaling: Growing organizations from startup to enterprise

I've mentored and coached many leaders into senior roles over my career, and built trusting relationships with cross-functional partners along the way. Several of them have shared recommendations on LinkedIn.

For references and recommendations from leaders and colleagues I've worked with, please reach out or connect with me on LinkedIn.