Engineering leadership, in practice
I'm Marco Poletto, an engineering leader writing about org design, delivery, and the human side of technology.
Latest thinking
Featured article · 8 min read
This site was built with an AI coding agent. The interesting part isn't how fast it went - it's the moments I overrode it, and what those moments actually have to do with engineering leadership.
Article · 3 min read
Office teams bond by osmosis, just from sharing a room. Remote and hybrid teams don't get that for free - the mechanism has to be built on purpose, and it isn't more meetings.
Article · 6 min read
A strategy that says yes to everything is just a to-do list with ambitions. The core skill of a senior engineering leader isn't picking what to build - it's deciding, out loud, what you won't.
Article · 7 min read
The skills that made you a great engineering manager quietly become liabilities the day you start leading other managers.
Article · 5 min read
Teams are hiring fewer juniors because AI does the grunt work now. But that grunt work was the apprenticeship.
Article · 5 min read
A struggling manager rarely announces it - the team does, quietly, months before it hits a dashboard.
Article · 7 min read
Promoting your best engineer into management as a reward is how you lose a great engineer and gain a struggling manager in one move.
Article · 6 min read
Hiring engineering managers is the highest-leverage decision a leader makes - and the easiest to get wrong.
Article · 6 min read
Two of the hardest things an engineering leader does are grow a team fast and restructure one that already exists - without breaking either.
Article · 4 min read
The books I'd actually hand to someone stepping into engineering leadership - grouped by the problem they solve, not by fame.
Article · 5 min read
Most orgs try to make delivery predictable by adding process on top of teams. That's backwards.
Article · 6 min read
Most engineering strategy documents die in a shared drive because they're written in engineering, not in the language that gets things funded.
Article · 9 min read
Management debt - poorly structured organisations and bloated process - cripples engineering velocity the same way technical debt cripples a codebase.
Article · 8 min read
AI assistants promised to make developers 10x more productive. Instead, many teams are dealing with cognitive overload and burnout.
Article · 6 min read
A guide for engineering managers navigating reorgs, strategic pivots, and layoffs while protecting team focus and morale.
Article · 8 min read
How to use engineering metrics without crushing developer agency, burning out your team, or falling into the Goodhart's Law trap.
Article · 5 min read
A structured, phased onboarding guide to set up new software engineering hires for long-term success, autonomy, and early wins.
Article · 6 min read
How you handle the first few hours of a production outage determines team trust for months.
Article · 3 min read
When output becomes the only lens for measuring engineering success, something critical erodes beneath the surface - and it rarely shows up until it's already a crisis.
Article · 5 min read
In the Dutch tech market, hybrid tech-lead-manager roles don't survive contact with scale - you're expected to choose a lane and own it.
Article · 4 min read
Ten lessons from the one engineering-management book I'd actually hand a first-time manager who doesn't want jargon, just what to do on Monday.
Article · 4 min read
You don't stay technically sharp as a manager by finding more solo coding time you don't have - you stay sharp by using the job itself differently.
Article · 6 min read
The technical skills that made you a great engineer don't automatically transfer to management - here's what actually does, and what to build from scratch.
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