The Team Already Knows
New leaders inherit teams that already have the answers. The mistake is walking in like you have them too. A confession about what I got wrong in my first 90 days at Converse, and what I would do differently now.
Jono Herrington
Thoughts from The Builder's Leader on team transformation and the frameworks behind high-performing teams.
Latest posts
The Model Fills the Envelope. You Have to Shrink It.
AI keeps generating code until someone decides what one pull request is allowed to carry. Most teams haven't made that decision. The rubber stamp is the result.
I Stayed in the Sprint Too Long. Here Is the Fix.
A senior director told me projects went well when I was involved and struggled when I was not. I first heard it as a compliment. It was a signal that I had over-rotated into the craft and underbuilt leaders beside me.
Your Runbook Is Written. Nobody Runs It.
The worst failures are not always missing documentation. Sometimes the page exists, the link is green in Slack, and the team still routes around it when pressure returns. Reliability is what you do when nobody is clapping.
Diagnosis Didn't Change My Leadership. Ownership Did.
My diagnosis didn't magically improve my leadership. It handed me a framework for my reactions, less friction in cross-functional work, and a way to keep accountability on my side of the desk.
Your Team Doesn't Need a Buddy. It Needs a Coach.
Managers fail development in two predictable ways. They only ask for status, or they avoid hard feedback to stay liked. Real leadership pairs clear standards with real care.
Repeat Incidents Are a Leadership Smell
The team responded to the incident. Then the same issue hit the next release. Pager coverage worked. Leadership follow-through didn't.
You're Promoting Confidence, Not Leadership
Communication matters. When promotion systems reward confidence without delivery and delegation, you multiply titled performers before you multiply teams.
Most 1:1s Are Career Drift Meetings
A high-drive engineer asked what it would take to grow. The gap was map-making, not motivation. Your 1:1 is where you either build that road or quietly train people to drift.
Your Team Is One PTO Away from Missing the Quarter
If one engineer taking PTO can stall shipping, your problem is not staffing. Your system is carrying critical context in people instead of in the work.
Your Codebase Was Always This Bad
A team turned on agent mode. Three weeks later, incidents spiked. They were ready to blame the tool. Then their senior traced the bug back to 2019.
We Blamed Stack Overflow for a Decade. Now It's AI.
For 23 years I've watched developers copy code they didn't understand. First from Stack Overflow, now from AI. The pattern never changed. We just changed who we blame.
Your 40-Page Style Guide Isn't a Standard. It's a Wish List.
I was watching the head of architecture demo his team's AI setup when I realized we'd been solving the wrong problem. The style guide wasn't missing. It was invisible.
'AI Wrote It' Is Just the New 'Steve Wrote It'
Everyone has worked with a Steve. Now AI is Steve. The lesson isn't about the tool ... it's about what we tolerate.
Most People Use AI Like Google. That's Why It Sucks.
For the first month I treated Copilot like a junior engineer with ambition and no guardrails. It created variables named R and T, broke tests it didn't care about, and left me cleaning up for two hours.
You're Great at Writing Code. That's the Problem.
A senior engineer posted on Reddit recently about how it's almost like he's in grief. More than a decade of craft. The things he loved. And now it's all changing.
Tech Debt Didn't Start with AI
AI is amplifying the technical debt you were already permitting. The slop in your codebase isn't a tool problem ... it's a permission problem.
AI Is Becoming Infrastructure
We stopped talking about DevOps. Now everything uses it. AI is slowly crossing that same threshold.
AI Needs Curriculum, Not Better Prompts
We treat AI like a vending machine. Prompt in, code out. When it fails, we prompt harder. That's nonsensical.
The Math Doesn't Work
I built a dashboard to track PR review times. What I found broke my assumptions about code review culture. Large PRs were getting approved almost as fast as small ones ... and that says everything about where we're actually paying attention.
My Junior Can Explain It. My Senior Can Defend It. The AI Just... Did It.
Accountability means knowing why. When AI breaks something, there's no 'why' to interrogate. Until you define it.
I Stopped Trying to Focus
Every productivity system I tried assumed my brain could be disciplined into submission. They were all solving the wrong problem.
Writing Code Was Never the Hard Part
Every junior engineer thinks the job is syntax. Every senior engineer knows it's the conversation three weeks before the syntax. AI just made that clearer than ever.
AI Masters vs Everyone Else
The strongest engineers walking through the door are not the ones with the cleanest GitHub. They're the ones who can describe, in detail, the agent loops they've built.
AI Isn't a Crutch for Bad Developers ... It's the Unlock for Neurodivergent Ones
The loudest voices in engineering keep framing AI as the great equalizer that will let mediocre developers ship junk code. They're missing what's actually happening.
Everyone's Using AI. No One Agrees How.
Six months into AI adoption, every team has dashboard metrics that look good. But ask what a good AI-assisted PR looks like and you'll get six different answers. The tools showed up, people figured out their own way, and no one had the conversation about what 'good' actually means.
AI Doesn't Fix Weak Engineering. It Just Speeds It Up.
AI changes speed. Not judgment. If a team already struggled to make sound architectural decisions, the tool doesn't rescue them. It just helps them make more bad decisions faster.
AI Isn't 10x-ing Your Team. Your Execs' Imagination Is.
Your leadership thinks you'll code in 3 seconds, read and understand it all, push to production without breaking stride, and never forget anything. They've never watched a junior engineer prompt through complexity he should have wrestled with. Never seen a senior freeze when the AI suggestion doesn't match the pattern she knows is right. Never been in the room when the thing that 'should just…
AI Isn't Killing Your Hiring. Your Double Standard Is.
You're asking engineers if they know how to use AI tools. You expect it. Then you're testing them without those tools. Here's why that mismatch is eroding trust before the first offer letter goes out.
The Spark Is Leaving Before the Code Breaks
I've seen engineers lose the spark in their eyes in their craft having to just plan and review the output. The sheer pace of AI is wearing down engineers.
The System Went Down
I used to stay up endless nights losing myself in code. Now I avoid it. Here's what that costs.
When AI Makes You Forget How to Code
A junior engineer told me he couldn't explain his own code. Not because he wasn't working. Because he wasn't being forced to learn anymore.
Hope Is Not a Flight Plan
Procurement is not adoption. The leaders who are winning the AI transition did one thing the others didn't: they went first. They used the tools, showed their teams what the learning curve looked like, and built the conditions for real capability to develop. Buying licenses created access. It didn't create any of that.
You Used to Know Good Code
When AI scales output without scaling review, the quality gate breaks. The problem isn't the tool. It's the leader who lost the reference point for what good looks like in their own system.
Build the System, Not the Prompt
If I had to roll out AI to my engineering team again, I wouldn't start with the tools. I'd start with one repeatable workflow, map every step, define what good looks like, and turn it into a pipeline that compounds. Here's how that works in practice.
AI Multiplies What You Already Have
A junior engineer told me he wasn't sure he understood everything the AI was outputting for him. He was reading it, checking it, shipping it. But he couldn't reliably tell if it was right. That conversation opened a harder question about what AI is actually doing to the engineers who never built the foundation first.
You Can't Align AI Judgment If You've Lost Your Own
Technical leaders are being asked to set AI standards, define acceptable output quality, and govern what gets into production. You cannot do any of that if you've lost your own connection to how your team builds. Here's what the drift looks like, and what it costs you when AI has already doubled your team's output.
Adoption Metrics Are Not Skill Metrics
When I reviewed my team's AI adoption dashboard last quarter, every number was moving in the right direction. What the dashboard couldn't show me was who had stopped understanding the systems they were shipping. Adoption metrics and skill development metrics are not the same thing. I had been treating them like they were.
The Mandate Had No Return Address
More than 500 engineers described what happened when their companies chose mandates over conversations. The dashboards showed adoption. The engineers showed compliance. What didn't appear anywhere was what wasn't working.
When You Push for 3x
Jono Herrington pushed for higher velocity. The team delivered. Then he sat at a lunch table bragging about doubled output while his engineers knew exactly what they'd done to produce that number. The same pattern is playing out in every AI productivity mandate right now.
Your AI Rollout Didn't Create Inconsistency. It Revealed It.
Six weeks after giving our team AI coding tools without guardrails, the codebase looked like a junk drawer with a CI/CD pipeline. Our first instinct was to fix the AI config. The right answer was to fix the humans first.
Your Code Is Moving. Your Judgment Is Not.
GitHub found developers complete tasks 55% faster with AI tools. Nobody measured what happened to the evaluation cycle. That asymmetry is where the real risk lives.
The Atrophy Problem
Engineers who spend their days directing AI agents and reviewing generated output are experiencing the same skill decay that managers hit years ago. This is not a tooling problem. It's an atrophy problem.
Engineering Is a Team Sport. Your Incentives Aren't.
Most teams attack PR bottlenecks with better tooling, shorter PRs, and review rotation schedules. None of it sticks. The bottleneck isn't the process. It's what you're rewarding.
AI Is Shipping Your Blind Spots
AI doesn't have blind spots. You do. When you prompt from one angle, AI ships those blind spots at scale. The feedback loop is the problem. Better prompts won't close it.
Velocity Is Up. Ask Why Your Team Is So Quiet.
AI adoption at speed is erasing the orientation senior engineers spent years building. The throughput is real. The sustainability is not something you can see on the board. The quiet is the data.
Your Best Engineers Are Tired
AI tooling compresses the low stakes work out of an engineer's day. What fills the gap is not rest or recovery. It's more evaluation. The leaders who miss this are running depletion schedules, not engineering orgs.
AI Didn't Break Your Culture. It Exposed It.
When an engineer says 'ChatGPT recommended something else' to close a technical debate, that's not a technology problem. It's a culture problem you already had. AI just gave it a name.
Get in the Dirt
I spent time in a thread with 500+ engineers saying AI destroyed their love of coding. The pattern wasn't the tool. It was the rollout. Here's the difference between a mandate and a leader who actually shows up.
How to Write Architecture Decision Records That Actually Get Used
An engineer on my team pulled up an ADR we'd written months earlier, realized the constraints still held, and saved two weeks on a migration that didn't need to happen. Here's the template, the repo layout, a scaffolding script, and the mistakes I made running ADRs across distributed teams.