The Reformed Manager
For fifteen years I ran engineering orgs the way most leaders do — reacting, firefighting, hoping the next quarter would go better than the last.
Then AI arrived and did the thing nobody warned us about: it amplified everything. Healthy systems got faster. Broken ones broke faster. My teams shipped more — and for a while, that included shipping the wrong thing at a higher speed. DORA's research says it plainly, and I lived it: the returns don't come from the tools. They come from the system underneath.
So the job changed. Running the org stopped being the work; designing the system it runs on became the work. Models instead of vibes. Gates instead of heroics. AI on the jobs it's actually good at, with a human on every decision. The name I write under is a confession: reformed means there was something to reform from.
What you'll find here, as The Reformed Manager:
- The Health Gates — the 12-gate SDLC health system I run, Gate 10 (Intake) to Gate 120 (Closeout), one protocol at a time. It's the basis of sdlc-ops, a tool I'm building: AI scores the gate, the human decides.
- AI Amplifier — where AI multiplies healthy engineering orgs, and where it just ships the mess at scale.
- Augmented Management — the engineering leader's jobs-to-be-done (1:1s, refinement, retros, postmortems), redesigned with AI in the loop.
- The Role & the Human — role vs. person, firm-not-cruel, and the 20% of the work that yields 80% of the result.
The proof behind the opinions: I've held the VP of Engineering and CTO seats — and the senior engineer and product manager ones, which is why I can zoom in to the diff and back out to the operating model. Teams and orgs from 3 to 40, on-site and remote. The through-line: building the delivery system that makes shipping predictable, then shipping enterprise products on it — across automotive, manufacturing, fintech, communication, and retail. These days I run engineering teams inside a world-class SaaS company, where the AI transition is happening for real.
Every protocol starts where I'll leave you: which of the 12 gates is your org weakest on?
Elsewhere: LinkedIn — same handle, minus the article.