Concrete observations about ownership, autonomy, communication, and team design.
5 posts
Around 2022, before AI was useful, I onboarded a whole team into a brand new area with two- and three-hour meetings every day. Documentation was thin, the knowledge lived in people's heads, and everyone was drowning. A working session built around user story mapping cut the fog: put every actor (human or system) on a visible surface, walk the flow out loud, and let the shared picture replace the marathon meetings.
A George Washington film handed me a phrase that stuck: 'independent fire.' I cannot vouch that Washington ever said it, but the tactic it points at is real history. The colonists could not win by copying British linear volleys on open fields; they had to use cover and let soldiers pick their own targets. Independent fire is the perfect model for how high-agency engineering teams should be allowed to operate.
Watching World Cup 2026, some squads talk like a single organism and others like strangers in matching shirts. Soccer is a one-dimensional model of a team (one field, one ball, one clock); engineering is played across many planes at once and across time. The lesson: stardom is local, the most valuable star is the versatile generalist who moves between planes and passes the ball six months into the future, and resilient teams rotate that capability instead of betting on one hero.
A reflection on why the word impact is too overloaded for work conversations, and why accomplishments and outcomes are clearer alternatives.
Choosing a name is the first step in taking your team's destiny into your own hands. It is the first thing that creates a sense of belonging, and it is often ignored even though it is such a multiplier. Belonging cannot be dictated. It has to be adopted. It has to be organic.