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After decades in tech, exhaustion and escapist fantasies set in—but despite the challenges, my career has always been about one thing: people. As diversity, equity and inclusion come under assault, I continue to fight for people.
Leaders, it’s time for some tough love: accountability, communication, and respect are not just expectations for others, but for you, too.
Effective hiring goes beyond filling positions; it's about building relationships and ensuring a positive experience for every candidate.
Charismatic laborers may save the day, but true leaders build a future. Sustainable progress thrives not on heroics, but on empowering teams and creating lasting systems.
A framework I created to explain how managers still have a huge role to play in coaching Agile teams' performance
Just as a successful garden requires preparation and the right conditions to thrive, true leadership is about cultivating an environment where innovation and growth can flourish.
Cascading communication is like a flawed game of telephone: everybody hears a message, but did they hear the right message?
Great leaders don’t just react to exceptions—they redesign systems to prevent them. Progress comes from refining workflows, not just playing whack-a-mole with disruptions.
Authentic leadership isn’t just about being genuine—it’s about being humane. Leaders must balance their authority with empathy, bridging the gap between their humanity and the power they hold.
Save those encouraging notes and emails in a 'For Bad Days' folder. When imposter syndrome hits, pull it out and let those kind words remind you that you are great at what you do.
How I've learned to protect time for deep thinking and doing
Many leaders view their job as creating thrust behind the organization (read: "sense of urgency"). I don't see it that way.
Every leader should prioritize the power of language in their interactions. Using phrases that convey vulnerability, openness, and empathy can transform a team's culture.
Even in the face of disheartening transformations, the connections forged and the values instilled continue to ripple through time, reminding us that our legacies are built in the space between human beings.
Great leaders know when to embrace uncertainty outside their teams but prioritize creating clear paths and shared goals within, ensuring everyone moves forward together.
Leadership is built on beliefs, lessons, and experiences—big and small—that shape how we guide others. Here’s a collection of truths I hold about leading people.
People's names matter, and it's worth taking the time to get them right.
Declaring calendar bankruptcy every now and then is a good thing.
Buying our first house was a dream come true, but it quickly turned into a costly lesson about ignoring problems. What we thought was an insurmountable expense turned out to be a simple solution, teaching me the importance of recognizing and challenging limiting beliefs.
When my son gamed our potty-training system to maximize cartoons, I realized something: measuring the wrong thing drives the wrong behavior. The same is true in software development—if we focus solely on output, we risk missing the outcomes that truly matter.
While most people settle for the first workable solution, designers dig deeper, exploring a multitude of ideas and embracing risk. This is their superpower.
The tension between designers, developers, and product managers often feels like a struggle for dominance—but what if that tension is the key to building great products?
My oldest recently moved out on her own, and my youngest will start high school next year. I’m right on schedule for a midlife crisis.
I haven’t purchased a sports car, and I love my wife more today than I did when we married twenty-five years ago. My midlife crisis has taken the form of complete professional exhaustion. My escapist fantasies of late center around leaving tech to do something—anything—else.
I’ve spent over two decades—my entire work life—in this industry. While my friends in high school worked typical afterschool jobs slinging burgers, I slung HTML at the local internet service provider.
I was fortunate to discover user experience in its infancy. I loved the beautiful, supportive, loving design community that sprang up in the early days of Twitter. I credit that community—with its unrelenting heart and unshakable resolve to make tech serve people when the rest of the industry was so starry-eyed about all things digital that it tended to forget humans exist—with putting me on the path to become a people-centered leader.
Now, between daydreams of opening a funky coffeehouse-slash-bookstore or an off-grid artist colony supported by herds of alpaca, I realize that while I have always loved technology and the unbridled potential it represents, my career has been about people. I have gotten out of bed each morning for two things: coffee, and the chance to make the lives of the people around me a little brighter and lighter. I have spent my career in tech, but I have spent it on people.
Over the last decade, while coffee has been a constant buoy, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to be a leader whose raison d’etre is people. I have been swimming against a dehumanizing and never-ending tide. My arms are tired, and my lungs burn.
Earlier this week, I posted to LinkedIn about my frustration over what I feared was a tectonic shift away from support for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the tech industry. This morning, I read that Meta has shuttered DEI efforts, ended diverse slate hiring practices and representation goals, and eliminated supplier diversity programs.
Why? In an internal memo, Meta’s VP of HR, Janelle Gale, wrote that Meta will “focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background,” which baffingly reads like an argument for DEI. The real reason is clear: “The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.”
As vile as I find these actions, Gale is not wrong in the assertion. The legal and policy landscape is shaking in violent and previously unseen ways.
The ethical landscape, however, is unchanged.
The tech industry has always struggled to remember that there is flesh and blood behind bits and bytes. It will continue to do so.
And I’ll still be here. Arms aching, lungs gasping, making things better for people in every way I can. Because people matter.
The alpaca will just have to wait.
Cover photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
