What I'm working on

At the moment

I'm thinking a lot about the move from technical leadership to organisational leadership.

For most of my career I've made systems faster, cheaper or easier to understand. Lately I'm more interested in the conditions around the systems: who trusts them, who avoids them, who gets to make decisions from them, and what happens when the technical answer is right but the organisation still isn't ready for it.

I'm Acting Head of Data at PEP Health, in the back half of a full AWS platform rebuild. The architecture is in a good place now, which means the harder work is more human: standards, confidence, ownership, and making sure the platform can outlast the person who designed most of it.

I'm also in the early stages of building Townsend Data Consultancy, which mostly means asking myself what kind of work I actually want more of, then trying to build honestly around that.

Current rabbit holes

• Engineering judgement: how people develop it, and what quietly gets in the way
• AI inside engineering teams: what is actually changing, and what is just louder
• Platform transformation: the organisational work people underestimate
• Making good engineering visible without turning it into performance
• Why organisations gradually stop trusting technology they paid a lot to build

Reading

• An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson. The most practically useful book on engineering management I've come across.
• The Goal by Goldratt. Returning to it. Holds up surprisingly well as a lens for thinking about data platform bottlenecks.

Building

• This site, trying to make it useful enough that I still bother with it in five years
• A set of platform assessment notes I've been carrying around in my head for too long

Beyond work

Trying to get back out on the hills more regularly. The Peaks are close enough that I have no good excuse. Playing guitar most evenings, usually working on fingerpicking versions of songs that were not asking to be fingerpicked.