Leadership
Player-coach: Strategic when needed, hands-on when required.
Player-Coach Balance
The best technical leaders know when to set direction and when to get their hands dirty. I operate across three modes depending on what the situation demands.
Strategic
Roadmaps, priorities, cross-pod reviews. Setting direction when the path is clear.
Hands-on
High-ambiguity decisions that unblock teams. Diving deep when needed.
Delegated
Execution once direction is clear. Trusting teams to deliver.
Experimentation Culture
Innovation requires psychological safety to fail. I build teams that experiment systematically.
Clear Hypotheses
Define what we believe and why before building
Lightweight Testing
Prototypes, not production. Fast, cheap validation.
Defined Metrics
Know success criteria before the experiment starts
Rapid Learning
Short loops. Learn, adapt, iterate.
Discovery Without Blocking Delivery
Design discovery and engineering delivery shouldn't compete for time. The key is staying ahead without becoming detached.
Discovery Before Planning
Discovery happens ahead of sprint planning, then re-contextualizes as you go. BA and Product Owner stay in sync for user story generation-ambiguity kills velocity.
Discovery Artifacts Ship
Prototypes and research findings go into shared Notion docs same day. Engineers see what's coming and can flag concerns early.
Time-Boxed Exploration
Discovery sprints have hard deadlines. If we haven't found signal in two weeks, we make a decision with what we have-not keep exploring.
Solution Architect in Discovery
The SA bridges design and engineering-catching impossible ideas early, validating technical feasibility, and ensuring specs are buildable before sprint planning.
Preventing Design Bottlenecks
Design shouldn't be a gate that everything passes through. The goal is to multiply design quality across the team, not concentrate it.
Delegation Model
- ● Green: ICs own entirely. Bug fixes, copy changes, minor polish.
- ● Yellow: Async review. New components, significant flows.
- ● Red: Sync collaboration. Core patterns, system changes.
Design System as Guardrail
Well-documented components mean engineers can ship without design review for 70% of work.
- • Variants pre-defined with constraints
- • Usage examples, not just specs
- • "When to use" and "when not to use"
Office Hours, Not Gates
Scheduled design time for questions beats interrupts and approval queues.
- • Tuesday/Thursday drop-in hours
- • Async Loom for quick feedback
- • Figma comments with 24h SLA
"The best design leaders make themselves less necessary over time."
Success is when the team ships great design work without needing approval-because they've internalized the principles.
Context Over Control
The hardest leadership lesson: giving context is more effective than giving instructions.
The Vitreus Lesson
Managing 26 developers across 4 time zones, I couldn't review every decision. Instead, I invested heavily in shared context:
- 1. Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)
Every significant choice documented with context, alternatives considered, and why we chose what we chose.
- 2. Weekly context broadcasts
Not status updates. Strategic context: what's changing, why it matters, how it affects their work.
- 3. Decision frameworks, not approvals
Instead of "run this by me," I shared decision criteria. If they could answer the framework questions, they could ship without me.
Result: Faster decisions, higher autonomy, and-counterintuitively-better alignment. People make better choices when they understand why the boundaries exist.
Vitreus Organization Structure
At Vitreus, I held dual roles as CTO and Director of Product Design, managing 26 people across 2 cross-functional pods. Each pod included Business Analysts, Solution Architects, Project Managers, and development teams-coordinating across 4 time zones.
By the Numbers
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