I have a mechanical engineering degree I have used exactly never, in the way it was intended.
What I’ve actually done with it: test manager, ticket analyst, project manager, functional owner, product manager, scrum master, team lead. At BMW. At WSA. Across twelve countries, leading teams I could see and teams I could barely reach.
Somewhere in there I also collected a stack of certifications I’m too lazy to even put on LinkedIn. Product management, SAFe, LeSS, agile-this, personality-that. The full business development curriculum, basically. I’ve sat through all of it. I’m not against any of it, exactly. I just don’t think a framework has ever once told me what to say to someone whose job just disappeared.
A warning, because you’d find out anyway: I’m not an easy person. Direct in a way that makes some rooms go quiet. Honest even when soft would be more comfortable. High standards, for myself and everyone around me, and I’ve never once pretended otherwise to be more likeable. I tell you this not to scare you off. It’s the only way I know how to write.
I’ve spent my life being the person responsible. The one who walks into the room. The one who says the hard thing. The one who watches a colleague’s face change when a restructuring slide goes up, and has to find something true to say afterward. Because platitudes don’t survive contact with someone whose world just collapsed.
Nobody trains you for that part. They train you on frameworks, on stakeholder management, on the seventeen things a good scrum master apparently does before breakfast. Nobody trains you for the specific weight of being responsible for a person you can’t fully reach, in a culture you’re still learning, inside a system that wasn’t built for what you’re actually trying to do. I’ve made the mistakes that come with that. Led from fear when I should have led from clarity. Gotten the cultural read wrong, eight time zones from home. Lost sleep over decisions that were both unavoidable and still mine to carry.
This newsletter is what I’ve learned from it. Not frameworks. Not five habits. The actual, occasionally brutal texture of being responsible for people, including in the moments AI is now rewriting what that responsibility even means.
A few things this is not: a management manual, a career accelerator, a list of traits of high-performing teams. Plenty of excellent newsletters do that. This one won’t.
What it is: an honest, mostly uncomfortable, hopefully precise account of what leadership actually costs. Written by someone who’s paid some of that cost personally and is too stubborn to pretend otherwise.
I publish when I have something true to say. Free. My own personal psyche, out in the open. No sponsored content, no gear reviews (sorry tech guys), no compromises.
If you’ve ever stayed in the room after everyone else found a reason to leave, you already know whether this is for you.
