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Three ways in, depending on whether you are becoming a leader, already leading a team, or modernising how a business runs.

There are three different people who end up reading this site, and they want different things. Rather than make you guess, here is the map.

You are an engineer becoming a lead

You were promoted because you were good at the work, and now the work is different. Nobody handed you a manual, and the things that made you effective as an engineer are quietly working against you.

This is the part of the site I care most about, and Becoming a Lead is written for exactly this. Every part is about something that looks like doing the job well and is quietly the reason you are not. Read it in order if you have just moved into the role.

• The promotion is a career change, and nobody tells you. Start with this one. The measure changed and nobody announced it.
• What a one-on-one is actually for, on why a status meeting quietly suppresses the one thing you need from it.
• Trust was not the hard part of delegating, on handing over the task and keeping all the context that made it possible.
• Leading people you used to sit beside, on why your former peers went quiet, and why that was not personal.
• Feedback without evidence is just doubt, on what is left on the table when you raise a concern you have not done the work to support.

You already lead a team

You have a team, a delivery commitment, and probably an inherited situation you did not choose. The questions are about sequencing, capability and how much you can push before something breaks.

• Starting Small, Thinking Big: The Pilot Project Approach, on picking something small enough to finish and big enough to matter.
• Measuring What Matters: KPIs for Digital Success, on the difference between a number that moves and a number that means something.
• Scaling Digital Operations: From Hundreds to Millions, on what actually breaks as volume grows.

You are modernising how a business runs

Something that runs on spreadsheets, paper and people remembering things has to start running on software. That is a digital transformation, whatever your organisation calls it, and you are the one who has to make it happen. Whether you sign it off, build the case for someone else to sign off, or simply have to live with what gets chosen, the questions are the same. The twelve-part series is written for that, start to finish.

• From Manual to Digital, the whole series in order.
• Calculating the True Cost, if you only read one, read this one.
• Building vs. Buying, on where the build-or-buy question answers itself and where it really does not.

A note on how this is written

I am in full-time employment and I write here in a personal capacity. I do not write about company-specific matters, and nothing here draws on confidential or financial information. What I do write about is the shape of problems I have seen enough times to have a view on, which is more useful to you anyway than any particular company’s version of them.