Building Software for People

For early-stage startups, growing products and sustainable teams.

Hi, I’m Greg. I help engineering leaders and organizations accelerate development, eliminate friction and create resiliency.

Articles and Insights


  • Simple Is Hard

    Many core values of tech companies include some idea of simplicity. After all, everyone knows “Keep It Simple, Stupid”. But the nature of simplicity is often misunderstood in many engineering organizations. Many mistake “Keep It Simple” for avoiding complexity altogether, rather than recognizing simplicity is a work product achieved through navigating complexity with skill and…

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  • Top 5 Most Missed Engineering Standards

    Top 5 Most Missed Engineering Standards

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    These aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re the standards that become nearly impossible to retrofit once you’ve scaled. They transform tribal knowledge into shared understanding and convert good intentions into consistent practice.

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  • Head, Heart, Hands

    Head, Heart, Hands

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    It doesn’t take long in tech to understand that different companies operate with very different cultures. Within large companies, the culture often varies from organization to organization and team to team, but I’d bet the description of the top-level culture at places like Amazon, Meta, Google, and others would sound relatively consistent from person to

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  • It’s your fault they didn’t read your email

    It’s your fault they didn’t read your email

    Leaders say, “Didn’t you read my email!? It had all that in there!” as if their emails are Brussel sprouts. “Eat your vegetables, children!” I mean… if you are serving Brussel spouts, you really should do it right.

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  • Greg’s Expectations for Managers

    Greg’s Expectations for Managers

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    In which I attempt to clarify my expectations of others on the team, particularly people managers.

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  • The Journalistic Retro

    The Journalistic Retro

    Retrospection is the foundation for any highly effective organization. It’s the engine for a thriving Growth Mindset. There are different scopes to retros from the sprintly team retros, to postmortems about big projects or launches or failures, to the accumulated learning as teams constantly iterate and experiment within their scope (e.g. “How do we get customers

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