Tag: technical leadership

• Custody

  

  Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash There is a particular sentence that appears in incident reviews, architecture meetings, postmortems, and inherited projects with remarkable consistency. “That predates me.” And usually, it is true. The person saying it did not make the decision. They were not in the room when the architecture was chosen, the exception…

  Dom

  September 20, 2026

  Governance & Systems Design, Leadership & Teamwork

  Accountability, architecture, authorship, Change Management, custody, decision history, decision-making, governance, inherited systems, institutional memory, knowledge transfer, legacy systems, organizational design, ownership, risk management, stewardship, systems thinking, technical leadership

• The Half-Life of Judgment

  

  Photo by Nicolas Lafargue on Unsplash The morning the first iPhone 3G launched, the queue filled with a problem the queue had never seen. I was working in contact centers then, on the floor, hearing the beep of a new call arriving as soon as the previous one ended, watching the flood roll over us…

  Dom

  July 19, 2026

  Governance & Systems Design, organizational design

  Accountability, architecture, Average Handle Time, contact centers, decision-making, dogma, Goodhart’s Law, governance, incentives, institutional memory, metrics, operational leadership, organizational design, organizational learning, policy, professional responsibility, senior individual contributors, standards, systems thinking, technical leadership

• Path B

  

  Photo by Mert Kahveci on Unsplash A few weeks ago, I had the first genuine career conversation of my professional life. I told my director that I intended to keep developing toward the most senior individual contributor levels, and that I had been politely declining recruiter interest in director roles for some time. He didn’t…

  Dom

  July 12, 2026

  Leadership & Teamwork, organizational design, Philosophy

  career development, career paths, corporate culture, Enterprise Architecture, individual contributor, influence, Leadership, mentorship, organizational design, people management, principal-level work, professional growth, Responsibility, technical leadership

• The Shape of Command

  

  Photo by Austin on Unsplash Newton did not begin with equations. He began with a more irritating problem: something in the world was clearly shaping motion, but the thing itself could not always be seen. An object resisted acceleration, and from that resistance mass had to be inferred. A body remained at rest, or stayed…

  Dom

  March 15, 2026

  Leadership & Teamwork, Management

  architecture, Business, decision-making, Leadership, leverage, Management, operations, organizational behavior, organizational change, organizational design, platform leadership, stewardship, Strategy, systems thinking, technical leadership