Five Part Series: Making Senior Engineering Work Legible
Concepts for senior engineering leadership
This is a five-part series about a specific kind of transition: the shift from Engineering Manager to Director-level engineering leadership. Not in title or scope, but in how the work actually behaves.
Many experienced Engineering Managers feel this shift long before they can explain it. Meetings change, decisions behave differently and familiar instincts stop working. Problems that would have resolved cleanly inside a team start looping at senior levels, even when everyone involved is capable and well-intentioned.
This series exists to name what’s happening.
What This Series Is (and Is Not)
This is not a set of best practices, frameworks, or leadership advice.
It doesn’t try to teach you how to “be strategic,” influence without authority, or run better meetings. Those topics are covered extensively elsewhere at the level of behaviour.
Instead, this series introduces concepts and language for senior engineering work that is rarely taught explicitly. My intention is to give names to patterns that experienced leaders already recognise intuitively but struggle to articulate. Patterns that are often misdiagnosed as politics, indecision, or personal inadequacy, when they are in fact properties of the system.
If these ideas resonate, it’s not because they are new. It’s because you’ve already lived them.
Who This Is For
This series is written for experienced engineering leaders:
Engineering Managers who have started operating beyond their team boundary
New Directors who feel the work has become more abstract, but not simpler
Senior ICs or Staff+ leaders sensing that “more context” no longer resolves things
Anyone responsible for decisions whose consequences extend beyond direct control
If you’re early in management, much of this may feel premature. If you’ve been operating at senior altitude for a while, it may feel uncomfortably familiar.
The Core Theme
At a high level, this series explores a single question:
Why does senior engineering work fail in ways that EM-level work doesn’t - even when the people involved are capable and aligned?
As leaders move up, the work shifts from operating within systems to shaping them.
Many of the frustrations that appear at Director level come from treating system-level problems as if they were still problems of clarity, communication, or execution.
This series introduces a small set of concepts that explain why those instincts stop working and what could replace them.
The Five Parts
Each part introduces one concept. A piece of vocabulary that makes a recurring senior-level pattern visible.
You can read them independently, but they are designed to build on one another.
Part 1: Decision Containers
Why senior conversations don’t converge and why clarity alone no longer closes decisions.
Part 2: Decision Half-Life
Why decisions decay over time, even when no one disagrees, and why repetition doesn’t fix it.
Part 3: Alignment Drift (forthcoming)
Why teams can sincerely agree and still diverge under pressure.
Part 4: Shadow Authority (forthcoming)
Where power actually operates in organisations, and why titles are an unreliable guide.
Part 5: Question Debt (forthcoming)
Why organisations accumulate unresolved questions, and why deferring closure has compounding costs.
Taken together, these concepts describe a shift:
Engineering Managers execute and optimise within decision boundaries
Directors design the boundaries themselves and manage what happens after
What I’m Trying to Accomplish Here
Most leadership writing focuses on what to do, while this series focuses on what to see.
If it works, it should give you:
language to explain what feels off without blaming people
a way to diagnose recurring senior-level failures without moralising them
a clearer sense of what the Director role actually consists of, day to day
If you find yourself nodding while reading, that’s the signal this series is aimed at you.