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The Observation Framework: How Leaders Get Called Visionary Without Predicting the Future

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Quick Bridge: Visionary leaders aren't predicting the future. They're watching the present more carefully than everyone else. The Observation Framework (watch the work, notice friction, build proof, tell the story, persist) turns normalized problems into career-advancing solutions without needing authority or a crystal ball. Visionary leadership isn't about predicting the future. It's about observing the present more carefully than everyone else. Early in my career, I won an award for being a visionary team member. The recognition came from work I did improving our localization process. Teams were spending months doing manual translation work. They went through game content line by line, identifying text that needed translation, then retrofitting it all in. It took forever. Most teams put it off until the end of projects, which made it worse. I started pitching ideas to fix it. Built a prototype. Ran the numbers on what it was costing us. I talked to my boss. Then his...
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How to Use Your Emotions as a Leader Without Letting Them Control You

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  TL;DR: In 4 minutes, you'll learn how to stop suppressing emotions at work and start naming them calmly to build trust, improve communication, and turn frustration into actionable feedback. When you suppress emotions to stay professional, your team picks up on it anyway. The anger leaks out sideways: shorter responses, blame in meetings, teams avoiding each other. Research from Daniel Goleman shows that emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 25% of leadership performance variability —a massive effect. Yet most leaders still believe hiding emotions is professional. It's not. It creates exactly the problems you're trying to avoid. I had a manager whose team built games. By the time I got involved, he was complaining about the server team to anyone who would listen, his engineers were doing the same, and the two teams couldn't be in the same room without mocking each other afterward. They worked together constantly. Had to. The games needed the backend infrastru...
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When Following the Process Means Missing the Goal: Why Engineering Leaders Need Context Over Checklists

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  TL;DR: In 4 minutes, you'll learn how to stop treating company processes as the goal and start giving your team the context they need to deliver business value when plans inevitably fall apart. The Problem with Process-First Leadership Reed Hastings, Netflix's co-founder, built one of the most successful tech companies by doing something counterintuitive: removing controls and leading with context instead of process . His philosophy was simple. If you give employees context about goals and constraints, they make better decisions than if you force them through rigid procedures. Most engineering and systems leaders do the opposite. They build teams around procedures. Documentation requirements. Approval chains. Sign-off processes. These become "the rules of working with my team." And when things go sideways (which they always do), those same leaders try to force the anomaly back into the existing process. I learned this the hard way during a game launch that nea...
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How to Get Manager Approval for Engineering Side Projects at Work: A Framework for Getting Buy-in for Technical Improvements

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Learn how to get manager approval for engineering side projects at work. A proven framework for getting buy-in for technical improvements that benefit your team and advance your career. I knew our translation integration process was broken. Everyone on the team knew it. We spent 800 hours per game manually configuring translations, and it delayed our releases by two weeks every single time. I had an idea to fix it. A tool that could automate most of the work. I pitched it to my manager. He said no. "Focus on your game. We need you to finish early." The logic made no sense to me. Other disciplines weren't going to finish early anyway. And even if we did, there would just be another game waiting. Why not fix this problem for everyone, forever? So I did two things. I worked on the tool anyway without telling anyone. And I kept asking. My manager. Their manager. Their manager's manager. It took almost a year before leadership finally cared enough about the translati...
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