Agile ways of working, personal growth, and practical AI, filed at whatever hour they arrived.

I told my team I couldn't carry on as we were, and I had no idea what the alternative was

I told my team I couldn't carry on as we were, with no idea what the alternative was. Naming a problem you cannot solve converts a private worry into shared work, and the shared work is what produces the answer.

You cannot understand a team from the outside

I have never managed to assess a team properly without spending real time inside it first. The humans, the technical picture and how work moves all have to be read at once, and none of them is sufficient alone.

Rolling out a new tool takes a sprint

Rolling out a new tool takes a sprint. Getting people to change how they work takes months, if not a year, and waiting for people to be ready is the hardest part of leading change for me.

The most useful thing in a retrospective isn't the feedback itself

The most useful information in a retrospective is rarely the feedback itself, it's who speaks, who stays silent, and how people treat each other when something uncomfortable is on the table. Team health decays like technical debt, quietly, until you notice only once something breaks.

The hardest part of stepping up to lead wasn't the meetings

The hardest part of stepping up to lead wasn't the meetings or the politics, it was watching my team solve problems differently to how I would have, and keeping my hands off the keyboard. Micromanaging is distrust dressed up as standards.

My daughter was three when she told me she couldn't be an astronaut

My daughter was three when she told me she couldn't be an astronaut, not because of the maths or the danger, but because she wasn't a boy. The doors that close on people are rarely slammed; they close through a thousand subtle cues, until we finish the job ourselves.

You won't understand AI until you've used it yourself

There's an entire industry devoted to telling people what to think about AI, but reading about it isn't the same as understanding it. The fastest way to learn what these tools can do is to point one at something in your own week.

The best teams I've built were never the most talented on paper

The best teams I've built were never the most talented on paper, they gelled as a unit, could handle both a sprint and a marathon, and kept being reshaped as the people in them changed. Building a team isn't a one-shot decision, it's work that never really stops.

People assume agile teams skip the planning

People assume agile teams skip the planning. In my experience it's the opposite, I plan more as an agile lead than I ever did on a waterfall project. The difference is when the planning happens, not whether it does.

The pressure to do more never stops, it just changes shape

The pressure to do more never stops, it just changes shape, from 'one more task tonight' as a dev to 'do we stretch or rest' as a lead. The difference between catching it early and drawing the line too late isn't willpower, it's asking what's actually going on.