• High say do ratio. We do what we say we will. Over time that becomes the organization's reputation, and reputation is the currency that buys autonomy, budget, and the benefit of the doubt.
• Say hard things nicely. Feedback is a working norm, not an annual event. It moves in every direction, and senior people go first.
• One first team. We debate hard at the leadership table, then speak with one voice. My team never hears me question another team's plan. They hear that I helped shape it, I stand behind it, and here is how we support it.
• Grow the leaders, not just the org. Organizations scale when judgment scales. I build leaders deliberately, and the best evidence of my work is the people it produced.
• Write it down. Strategy, standards, career ladders, postmortems. Organizations remember what is written and relitigate what is not. The career ladder and AI first engineering playbooks are public versions of that discipline.
• Platforms are products. Engineers are customers, not ticket submitters. Roadmaps, adoption, and developer experience carry the same rigor as anything revenue facing.
• Simple beats clever. Complexity is a tax paid monthly. Fewer moving parts, owned end to end. This site is plain HTML in a repo I deploy myself.
• Go to bed smarter than you woke up. Twenty years in, and I still refuse to manage from memory. New tools, new research, a deeper layer of the stack, every day.