Leadership

Engineers care deeply about observability. We instrument systems, build dashboards, define SLOs, and set up alerts. Because a system you can’t see is a system you can’t improve. We’d never run production infrastructure without telemetry.

Then we run teams with no telemetry at all.

No signal on whether the week moved things forward. No structured way to surface blockers early. No feedback loop that converts experience into better execution. Just meetings, Slack noise, and the vague sense that things are either fine or not fine.

I’ve been an engineering manager for about a month. Everything I think I know about this job comes from books, talks, and watching other managers. Not from doing it.

That’s an uncomfortable thing to write. But it’s accurate, and I’d rather be honest about where I’m starting than write a post that performs experience I don’t have.

I’ve had a personal north star for a while that’s shaped why I wanted this role in the first place: