How will we know
Effective engineering leadership optimizes for observable outcomes, not prescribed implementations. The recurring question is “How will we know?”
- Prescribing what to build while paying no personal price for being wrong is a decision-making failure mode.
- Define measurement, not implementation: success criteria (conversion, errors, latency, etc.) make misalignment visible; teams course-correct when the problem is visible.
- Fixating on Kafka vs. RabbitMQ can feel like leadership while skipping the KPI that would falsify the effort.