Blog by James Stanier
Empowering ourselves to empower others.
3 posts in the last 90 days · newest 17 Sept
Over the last decade, much has changed in the role of engineering management. Through the 2010s into the peak of Covid in 2021, for many, the role began to optimize for one thing. That one thing was moving information around. Managers translated context upwards from the team and…
Everyone loves the start of a project. There’s the kickoff, the fresh energy of newness, and the blank canvas of a new feature to build. There’s a particular optimism that comes with beginnings, when the team is aligned, the scope feels manageable, and the possibilities stretch…
Towards the end of 2025, it seemed that we couldn’t get through a week at Provet without some kind of infrastructure degradation. Outages were piling up, they were hard to diagnose, and customers were losing patience. When a major AWS outage hit in October, our customers didn’t…
Read about AI opinion online and you get two camps: those who believe it will fundamentally reshape how software gets built, and those who see it as useful tooling but doubt the transformative claims being made around it. Neither side has a monopoly on insight, and both can…
Read about AI opinion online and you get two camps: those who believe it will fundamentally reshape how software gets built, and those who see it as useful tooling but doubt the transformative claims being made around it. Neither side has a monopoly on insight, and both can…
This month, we’re going to explore a practical technique for learning from leaders you’ll never have access to: distilling their thinking into an AI role you can query on demand. Throughout history, those who’ve succeeded the most have often had something in common: access to…
This month, we’re going to explore a question that is a pertinent topic right now: where are the senior engineers of the future going to come from? After years of post-Covid layoffs, hiring has slowed across the board as companies wait to see how AI efficiency gains and the…
This month, we’re going to explore what might be the most counterintuitive practice in the age of AI: knowing when to slow down. Hang on, slow down? Yes, bear with me here. Let’s bring the debate that’s probably been going on in your team for some time to a head. Some of your…
This month, we’re going to explore one of the most powerful forcing functions available to leaders: the single prioritized list. It’s probably the most simple idea you could think of: that your team, department, or company should have one list of priorities, stack ranked from…
This month, we’re going to think about our teams, departments, and organisations as systems. Specifically, we’re going to consider how we can increase throughput and output by identifying and removing the biggest bottleneck at any given time. This might sound obvious, but it’s…