Leadership in Tech
Leadership in Tech
#272 – December 14, 2025
multiply team effectiveness by creating clear principles and reducing dependence on yourself
Hello! 👋
I can't believe it's almost the end of 2025. This year, I worked on the foundations and the less visible parts of the newsletter. It is back on a homebrewed self-hosted platform with improved deliverability and performance. Emails are more accessible and cleaner. And I'm following almost 1000 different authors and websites every day to find the most interesting articles.
I've put together a short survey so if you'd like to help me make the newsletter better in 2026 please fill it in. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. And you can participate in a $30 book voucher draw as a thank you for being an awesome reader. Here's the survey.
Traits of a good tech lead
9 minutes by João Alves
Engineering managers handle people, projects, and processes. Tech leads focus on technical direction through architecture decisions, code quality, and mentoring developers. Good tech leads multiply team effectiveness by creating clear principles and reducing dependence on themselves. They use written documents for technical debates, negotiate scope carefully, and help teams make autonomous decisions.
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sponsored by WorkOS
Enterprise customers demand SSO, directory sync, granular permissions, and audit logs built to strict compliance standards. Building in-house takes months and creates ongoing maintenance that pulls focus from your core product. WorkOS lets teams ship these features fast with clean APIs, streamlined customer onboarding, and built-in SOC 2 and GDPR support. Trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Vercel, and 1,000+ more companies.
Succession
9 minutes by David Hoang
Apple's leadership changes sparked discussion about CEO succession, highlighting how successful companies plan these transitions decades ahead. Good succession requires giving future leaders real experience with key decisions over many years, not just promoting them when needed. The best handoffs happen when organizations already see the successor in action, creating smooth transitions rather than sudden changes. Leaders should view succession as stewardship, ensuring their work continues effectively long after they leave.
How to lead when things feel increasingly out of control
11 minutes by Eric Solomon, Anup Srivastava
Leaders face mounting pressure from three colliding forces: constant policy changes, AI's rapid transformation of work, and widespread uncertainty about the future. Many executives find themselves scrambling to adapt to new AI tools while managing team restructuring and job insecurity. Eric and Anup bring five practical ways to address the fear while preserving imagination, morale, and momentum.
Why labeling relationships is so important
13 minutes by John Cutler
Labeling relationships between elements in company operating systems reveals hidden patterns that simple hierarchies miss. John found four different models for how goals and initiatives connect, each reflecting distinct organizational worldviews about strategy and execution. Traditional containment models break down at scale because they ignore the rich network of mechanisms, feedback loops, and dependencies that drive real work. Tools that focus only on hierarchical roll-ups fail to capture how companies actually operate.
Scaling by delegation isn’t good enough
5 minutes by Jason Cohen
Traditional delegation creates teams no better than the founder by hiring people to work exactly like you. This limits company growth because you remain the bottleneck. Instead, hire people who are better than you at every position and let them own their work completely. True scaling happens when teams can grow themselves without needing your constant input. Convert your initial selfishness into empowering others to exceed your abilities.
Tests are dead. Meticulous AI is here.
sponsored by Meticulous
Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an exhaustive e2e UI test suite that covers every corner of your application – with no developer intervention required whatsoever. Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and hundreds of organisations rely on Meticulous for their frontend testing. It is built from the Chromium level up with a deterministic scheduling engine – making it the only testing tool that eliminates flakes.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: