Tech Lead Journal

“If you have self-organizing teams, your power as a leader is determined by your ability to enable others to grow and take responsibility." Ron Eringa is a leadership developer and the co-author of “The Professional Agile Leader”. In this episode, we discussed insights from his book on how one can become a professional agile leader. Ron started by sharing his view of why agile transformations usua...

“When blame is our focus rather than understanding what happened, people spend as much or more energy avoiding the blame and less time to be productive, creative, and energetic." Diana Larsen is the co-founder of Agile Fluency Project and co-author of the latest book “Lead Without Blame”. In this episode, we discussed insights from her book about building resilient learning teams by moving away fr...

“The strength of SRE is in the alignment of operational concerns between the product management, product development, and product operations." Dr. Vladyslav Ukis is the Head of R&D at Siemens Healthineers and author of “Establishing SRE Foundations”. In this episode, Dr. Vlad shared insights on how to establish SRE foundations from scratch based on his firsthand experience at Siemens Healthine...

“Emotional intelligence is about knowing yourself, empathizing with other people, and always defining a win-win outcome in everything you do." Trenton Moss is the founder of Team Sterka and the author of “Human Powered”. In this episode, Trenton shared the importance of having good emotional intelligence and people skills in digital product teams. He shared the 6 key skills we need to succeed as o...

“An engineering manager should make sure that the team has a good balance of delivering things that the business needs with enough capacity to do it sustainably over time." Today's clip is from episode 94 with Patrick Kua. In this clip, we discussed Pat’s latest course, Engineering Manager Essentials.  We discussed what an engineering manager role is, how it differs from a Tech Lead role, and...

“Interactions with domain experts play a key role in implementing software. You have to make sure that you understand the problem you’re solving. You cannot provide a software solution without understanding the problem first." Today's clip is from episode 76 with Vladik Khononov, the author of “Learning Domain-Driven Design”. In this clip, Vladik shared why understanding business domain is crucial...

“The simplest way to describe craftsmanship is pride of workmanship. It is the mindset that you are working on something important and you are going to do it well." Today's clip is from episode 90 with Robert C. Martin, more widely known as Uncle Bob. In this clip, Uncle Bob shared some insights from his latest book, “Clean Craftsmanship”. He shared the current major challenge of the software deve...

Instead of being given a roadmap of features, an empowered team is given a problem to solve and they get to figure out the best way to solve that problem." Today's clip is from episode 102 with Marty Cagan, the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group and the author of “Inspired” and “Empowered”. In this clip, Marty explained the importance of building the right product and shared the two incon...

“Engineering discipline is the most effective, efficient way of doing high-quality work. If our software development practices do not allow us to build better software faster, we should really change them because they are not engineering." Today's clip is from Tech Lead Journal episode 100 with Dave Farley, the one who runs the popular "Continuous Delivery" YouTube channel, and also the author of...

“Every organization has a mission, a vision, and a set of values. As a leader, your number one task is to live those values and talk about them at every opportunity with your team to create alignment." Manoj Awasthi is the CTO at JULO and previously the SVP of Engineering at Tokopedia. In this episode, Manoj shared engineering leadership lessons from his recent experiences. Manoj started by descri...

“Intrinsic motivation is a great predictor of success. When people are doing things they feel intrinsically motivated to do, they tend to be much more successful." Matt K. Parker is the author of “A Radical Enterprise”. In this episode, Matt started by sharing his views on the underlying causes of the great resignation trend, which includes the dominator hierarchies. Matt then explained in-depth t...

“An ADR is a simple text file describing the context, the decision, and the consequences of a single architectural decision stored in the version control repository." Michael Keeling is an experienced software engineer, architect, and the author of “Design It!: From Programmer to Software Architect”. In this episode, Michael shared in-depth about ADR. He first shared his story of discovering ADR b...

“Developer experience is an approach to thinking about engineering excellence and maximizing engineering performance by increasing the capacity and performance of the individuals and the team as a whole." Abi Noda is the CEO & co-founder of DX. In this episode, Abi started by sharing what developer experience is, why it is becoming an industry trend nowadays, and the different ways of how it i...

“The people who are the communicators are the ones visible within companies. Just being technically proficient is not enough. You have to be an advocate for yourself." Neil Thompson is the founder of Teach the Geek and a public speaking coach. In this episode, Neil explained the importance of public speaking for technical professionals. Neil shared tips and advice on we can start and improve our p...

“As a team leader, you will become more successful and valuable if you are no longer a bottleneck for the people who are working with you and under you." Roy Osherove is the author of “Elastic Leadership” and “The Art of Unit Testing”. In this episode, we discussed leadership insights from “Elastic Leadership”. Roy first shared how he came up with the concept and described what elastic leadership...

“The most responsible thing a human can do, either personally for their own development or the development of others, is play to a person’s strengths." Brandon Miller is the founder and CEO of 34 Strong and one of the first 7 certified Gallup Clifton StrengthsFinder coaches in the world. In this episode, we discussed Clifton StrengthsFinder, also known as CliftonStrengths. Brandon introduced what...

“Companies that are successful in getting the most out of the cloud embrace the fact that distributed application architecture is a first class application architecture concern." Joe Duffy is the co-founder and CEO of Pulumi. In this episode, we discussed cloud engineering concept and how Pulumi is helping to shape its future. Joe started by sharing his story founding Pulumi and the evolution of t...

“If you want to unlock the value of your data by generating data-driven values, and you want to do it reliably and resiliently at scale, then you need to consider data mesh." Zhamak Dehghani is the author of the “Data Mesh” book. In this episode, we discussed in-depth about the data mesh, a concept she founded in 2018, which has then been becoming an industry trend. We started our conversation by...

“There’s no leading without following. We are only a leader because somebody is following us." Jutta Eckstein is a coach, consultant, and trainer who has helped many teams and organizations worldwide making an Agile transition. In this episode, we discussed ideas from her book “Company-wide Agility With Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy”, also widely known as the BOSSA nova. Jutta start...

“If you want to become a better and more effective leader, then one of your core skills should be coaching skills." Bob Galen is the President & Principal Agile Coach at RGCG and a prolific writer, blogger, and podcaster. In this episode, Bob and I discussed coaching and leadership from his latest book “Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching”. Bob started by explaining the concepts of agile lea...

“The most important part about building an experiment-driven culture is to make it safe to fail and to fail in good ways." Lisi Hocke is an active figure in the global testing community. In this episode, Lisi shared her lessons learned growing an experiment-driven quality culture in her recent years. Lisi shared why it is important to have an experimentation mindset before we adopt something new o...

“A way to boost productivity is to create high-quality software from the outset, so that teams can spend less time on rework, both during development and after the release." Karl Wiegers is the author of “Software Development Pearls” and the Principal Consultant at Process Impact. In this episode, Karl shared some lessons he has learned over the past five decades of his career. We first discussed...

“Instead of being given a roadmap of features, an empowered team is given a problem to solve and they get to figure out the best way to solve that problem." Marty Cagan is the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group and the author of “Inspired” and “Empowered”. In this episode, we discussed how companies ought to build great products by learning from the best product companies. Marty explained...

“As a servant leader, your number one job is to serve the people around you. You succeed together with your people, and that’s why serving them first would give you the best opportunity to succeed together." Henry Suryawirawan is the host of your beloved podcast. In this episode, hosted by Jerome Poudevigne, we uncovered lessons from Henry’s career journey and from running the Tech Lead Journal po...

🎙️ CELEBRATE the 100th EPISODE by submitting your story/message at techleadjournal.dev/celebrate-100 🎉 “Engineering discipline is the most effective, efficient way of doing high-quality work. If our software development practices do not allow us to build better software faster, we should really change them because they are not engineering." Dave Farley is the co-author of the Jolt award-winning b...