Leadership in Tech
Leadership in Tech
#334 – August 02, 2026
it is less about moving fast and more about building the right foundation
Framework for managers starting a new role
10 minutes by James Samuel
Starting strong in a new management role is less about moving fast and more about building the right foundation. Focus on absorbing company culture, building relationships early, and aligning with your manager on clear expectations. Resist the urge to prove yourself immediately. Instead, listen to your team, spot patterns, and let your first wins come from solving problems that actually matter.
A simple view on progressive software architecture
sponsored by IcePanel
The way software is built is changing. Yet, architecture thinking is more important than ever. Learn about key principles and frameworks we believe are critical to thriving in this new, chaotic world.
The AI productivity gap
3 minutes by Bjorn Roche
AI speeds up coding, but coding is only a small part of most developers' days. Senior engineers spend most of their time in meetings, reviews, and system design, areas where AI helps little. This means AI saves seniors around 15% of their time, while juniors, who code more, gain closer to 25%. Expect steady improvements, but not dramatic productivity leaps, especially from your most experienced staff.
How to think about span of control
18 minutes by Jade Rubick
Span of control and team size involve real tradeoffs. Fewer management layers reduce complexity and improve clarity, but overloaded managers neglect their teams and slow everything down. Small teams of around eight people tend to move faster and work better together, while larger teams offer more resilience. As companies grow and processes mature, spans of control can increase, but mandates pushing managers to oversee 20 or more people rarely work well in practice.
No wind is a good wind
5 minutes by Aviv Ben-Yosef
Teams move fast but build the wrong things when leadership lacks a clear vision. There's a simple check: ask yourself what the vision is, then ask a few engineers the same question and see if the answers match. If the vision exists but you're not part of those conversations, push your way into the right rooms. If it doesn't exist at all, that's a problem worth raising loudly.
The economic benefit of refactoring
16 minutes by Giles Edwards-Alexander
An AI agent built a 150,000-line application, but its data access layer ballooned into a single 17,000-line file with massive repetition. To test whether refactoring helps AI agents work more efficiently, the same code change was measured before and after each refactoring step. After 15 steps, the tokens needed to make that change dropped by 83%, because the agent could read fewer, better-organized files instead of scanning one giant one.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: