HeyJaredEngineering Leader's Playbook ⚡️
Engineering management insights that actually work: team building, technical decisions, and work-life balance from the trenches.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Jul 13, 2026
Latest issues
How to Build Extreme Ownership on Small Teams (opens the original)
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Let me get this out of the way first. I don’t think anyone who does code review is a sucker.That’s not what this post is about.It’s about something else. Code review, the way most teams practice it, quietly takes ownership away from the person who should carry it. And I’ve seen it happen enough times to build a strong opinion around it.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cdRH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-po
The Build vs Buy Framework for Engineering Leaders (opens the original)
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This one comes from a reader content request. If you’re stuck on a decision in your engineering org and want me to think through it publicly, reply to this newsletter - I’ll turn the good ones into articles like this.Every engineering team eventually hits the same fork in the road: buy the thing, or build it yourselves.On paper it looks like a simple cost comparison. In practice, it’s one of the decisions I see leaders get wrong most often - because the “obvious” rule everyone quotes has way mor
How I give technical feedback to engineer who's more technical than me? (opens the original)
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Pretending you reviewed the code is worse than admitting you didn’t.I stopped writing production code a few years back. Somewhere in that stretch, I ended up managing engineers who are sharper than I’ll ever be again on the technical side. I still get my hands dirty from time to time, but only occasionally, mostly to actually understand what’s slowing my team down. And at some point, every manager in that position has to sit across from one of them and give feedback that actually means something
How AI Rewrote the Rules of Engineering Multitasking (opens the original)
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Open three initiatives at once, and surely one of them lands sooner. That’s the logic I ran on for years, and I still catch myself falling back into it.It doesn’t. Run the math, and sequential almost always wins.But here’s the twist nobody talks about. AI changed what “sequential” even means, because half your day is now spent waiting on a prompt, not typing code. That waiting time is exactly where multitasking sneaks back in, just not the kind that hurt you before.I manage many engineers across
How to Read Engineering Performance From GitLab (opens the original)
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Every conversation I have with another engineering manager about underperformance eventually turns into the same question: where do you actually look? Not what do you feel, what do you look at. This article is my answer.I’ve written two articles on underperformance already, and both of them leaned on the same idea without ever spelling it out.The first one is about catching an underperformer early, before it becomes a formal problem, the small signals that show up months before anyone files a PI
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