This post closes a series of reflections written at different points during my first tenure as a team lead — after roughly six weeks, 12 weeks, 18 months, 30 months, and now 48 months. Each text captures a moment in time, written without knowing what would come next.
I’m intentionally leaving the earlier posts unchanged. Not because they are complete, but because they reflect the questions, uncertainties, and partial clarity that tend to accompany leadership in real life. Read together, they don’t form a guide — they form a trajectory.
If you’re new to leadership or approaching it for the first time, consider this series less as advice and more as field notes from different distances to the same starting point.
I am glad to announce that my custom Emacs configuration Brainiac has reached release status. I am now using it without major changes since a couple of weeks, so it's time to freeze this version if other people want to use it.
As a lot of other peoples, I am interested in self improvement. So I read related blog posts, books etc. All of these sources are filled with examples of good habits one should develop, in order to be healthier and happier in life.
Here are some I tried and failed at over the years:
As a manager one of my tasks is to do yearly performance evaluations of the employees in my team.
I take this very seriously, as although I speak regularly with my people about tasks and behaviors, this yearly review gives me time to pause and reflect deeper about the stuff I (and the company) find important and how does the employee measure against that.
During the year I keep notes of all 1:1 meetings we have and also of stuff that happens between them that catch my eye, positive as well as possible improvement points. During the yearly review preparations, I sit down and go thru all the notes in order to consolidate the feedback I want to give to the employee.
I read the nice book from Tiago Forte “Building a Second Brain” and in order to understand the concepts better, I created this small Mindmap as a summary.
As I like to play around Emacs, I used PlantUML and generated the Mindmap using Org-mode.
So it's about 30 months now since I took over building and leading an engineering team.
Building is the right word, as on the first day I started there was no team. There were just 2-3 engineers in India, that started doing some testing in the last sprint and had absolutely no clue what they are doing. (Somebody told them they are the test team and that the software to test is in Artifactory …)
Something over 18 months ago a big change happened in my work life. After years of trying, learning, searching for ways forward, changing jobs on the same level … I was appointed team leader in my company and tasked with building up a team completely from scratch. I already wrote on the topic several times, this is a follow up.
Had a strange discussion the other day in the project. We had a Release Meeting and my team was showing the current state of testing, defects and so on. During the presentation I intentionally said to the Defect Manager, that she should highlight in the Dashboard how long bugs are open in our product (we have a couple of them dragging on for more then 6 months). Of course this caught my managers eye.
