Leadership in Tech
Leadership in Tech
#273 – December 21, 2025
it's less about rare talent and more about the choices you make every day
Hello, 👋
This is the last issue in 2025. We'll take a short break over Christmas to recharge and will be back on the first Monday in January. Thank you so much for your support and your lovely feedback. I have a lot to go through from the survey and figure out what to bring into the newsletter.
Lastly, I'd like to ask you to share the newsletter with your tech friends and colleagues. It helps heaps.
How to be exceptional at anything
3 minutes by Abdul Hamid Hassan
Being exceptional is less about rare talent and more about the choices you make every day. It’s a set of habits that quietly outwork everyone else. Abdul shares five habits for anyone who wants to be exceptional. These habits work together and compound over time, leading to fewer problems and the ability to handle bigger challenges.
Stop Bots and Abuse in Real Time with WorkOS Radar
sponsored by WorkOS
Bots exploit trial signups and drain compute. WorkOS Radar uses device fingerprinting, traffic analysis, and behavioral signals to detect and block abuse in real time while integrating cleanly with your existing auth flow through a simple API.
Compensation commandments
7 minutes by Stay SaaSy
Compensation is difficult. Even more than that, it is sensitive, business critical, and often has almost nothing to do with the rest of your job as a leader. Stay SaaSy shares some rules for making compensation decisions effectively and efficiently.
The decision triangle: A simple way to improve decision making
18 minutes by Peter Gillard-Moss
Peter talks about a framework for better choices. After years of using Architectural Decision Records, he developed the decision triangle which breaks every decision into three parts: what triggered it, the desired future outcome, and the action taken. For bigger decisions, he added four elements: context, conditions, scenarios, and analysis.
The bet on juniors just got better
5 minutes by Kent Beck
AI tools are changing the economics of hiring junior developers. Companies often avoid juniors because they need months to become productive, and many quit before reaching that point. However, AI coding assistants can dramatically shorten this learning period from 24 months to 9 months when used properly for learning rather than just writing code.
Calendar rules I learned from an executive assistant
9 minutes by Jade Rubick
Jade gives some valuable calendar management tips he's learnt from an executive assistant. These include resolving meeting conflicts immediately instead of waiting, color coding meetings by type, and creating time budgets for different activities. Other useful practices are starting meetings on time, using speedy meetings that end 5-10 minutes early, making calendar invites editable by attendees, and syncing personal and work calendars.
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:
Happy holidays!
Jakub