Pragmatic Tech Execution Blog

Most people who say they hate politics hate hollow political actions, not impactful politics.

The concept of “having a mentor” used to be a distant dream for me. When I first started in the working world, I sensed deeply the insights that a wise, travel-tested professional would be able to impart on me. They could help me understand how to steer my career towards the opportunities that aligned with my most cherished skills and my passions.

Process lets us solve hard problems. Rigidly adhering to outdated processes creates new problems. Originally published on Medium.com at Inflexible Process Could Be Stalling Your Projects 'Race Day' Image Created by Julie Fleischer Using Canva Throughout my career, I have bristled when someone referred to me as a “process” person. It’s not that the label doesn’t, in theory, fit some of what I bring to the table. If you define process as “a lightweight set of steps or framewor

I enjoy that liminal space organizations occupy right after their initial successes and as they are starting to scale. These are the teams I tend to run towards, chaos and all, to help them create enough structure for success. While every team is unique with their own specific chaos and own distinctive needs for structure, I have noticed recurring patterns.

For a founder, every decision carries weight and the pressure to “get it right” can he heavy. I put together the following adaptive decision-making map to help myself (and other founders) work through ambiguity and move forward with clarity.

When your requirements are in multiple, disparate systems, you are one question away from chaos. You need someone to roll up their sleeves and create a process that works. PTX offers you this clarity through Clarity Sessions and Fractional Work.

The mechanics behind executing with urgency are a mindset to get all goals completed by the deadline as well as a specific set of tactics. The tactics include determining Top Issues and keeping the team's focus on them. When the ball is in someone else's hands, an engineering leader maintains focus on the ball.

This Case Study showcases the positive impact that Adaptive Change Control and Designing Predictable Releases have when applied to talented scaling engineering teams that happen to say yes to customer requests without considering the impact and release software that has defects customers later find. Adaptive Change Control helps teams include customer changes without derailing plans, and Designing Predictable Releases helps them release on-schedule with high-quality repeatab

Explore the Pragmatic Tech Execution Starter Pack, including decision-making rubrics, execution playbooks, and hands-on exercises for scaling engineering teams navigating complexity and urgency.

I was once on a project with an incredibly tight end of year deadline and only a few months of runway to deliver. A slip of even a day could have cost us the win. As the Technical Execution Leader, I knew I couldn’t allow any issue with the potential to derail us fester. The risk of assigning a key issue to the wrong person to resolve or to the right person but with the wrong approach could be the difference between meeting our deadline or missing it. Our traditional forum

Welcome to Pragmatic Tech Execution! This is something I have wanted to do for a while. In two and a half decades in big tech, I honed an approach to turn strategies into execution plans and consistently deliver something the customer wants and needs. I refined these techniques in extreme environments. That is, I worked in big tech, but I gravitated towards the new and unproven initiatives, the initiatives with nascent markets that we were learning about as we went, the in