Leadership

A few nights ago I found myself in another one of those rooms. Same shape as the last one I wrote about: a circle of experienced people, a general topic and coffee and networking breaks. This time the subject was the relationship between tech and product teams; specifically, the friction in how they communicate, and why the two so often end up talking past each other. It’s a good topic. It’s also a trap. Everyone in a room like that has a war story, and war stories are easy to tell and very hard to learn from. So we told them. And somewhere between the third and fourth anecdote, I started noticing the things we weren’t saying - which, as usual, turned out to be the interesting part. ...

A few days ago I attended a small, invite-only tech gathering hosted by Cafe Ertebat. Think of it as a low-key salon: about a couple dozen people, all of them with at least a decade of experience, almost all with shiny titles: CTOs, VPs of Engineering, technical leads, founders. It was the kind of room you’d expect to be intimidating. It wasn’t. And that was the interesting part. Walking into an “Elite” Room I was invited through two friends and colleagues who referred me to the host. That alone set a certain expectation in my head: if this is curated, and everyone is hand-picked, then the conversation is probably going to be sharp, opinionated, and uncomfortably insightful. ...