Jake A. Smith.
A few years into my career as an engineer at Yahoo, I made the move into management. Some of the people who ended up reporting to me were the same people who had interviewed me for my IC role four years earlier. That was the moment it became real that becoming a manager wasn't a step up the same ladder — it was a different job.
Since then I've spent years on the leadership side of engineering at scale. I've mentored dozens of ICs through the transition into management — several of whom ended up reporting to me, others who moved up through other parts of the org. I coached my own direct reports through their first hiring rounds, and built the cross-team hiring framework multiple groups eventually used to standardize how candidates were evaluated across the org chart.
I've absorbed entire teams, drawn and redrawn org charts, and made layoff decisions. I've stood up horizontal platforms, absorbed adjacent ones, EOL'd the ones that had run their course, and consolidated platforms inherited through acquisitions and reorgs that had drifted into competing with each other. I'm known inside the orgs I've worked in for letting product teams move quickly on top of shared infrastructure, then "industrializing" the experiments that worked.
How I think about the work
Build platforms, not empires.
Too many leaders let ego make their org-design decisions for them — protecting scope, growing portfolio, building what's best for their career rather than what's best for the company. Positioning the organization for success, even at a temporary cost to your own ownership, almost always benefits you in the long run. It's the single principle I come back to most.
Reduce complexity wherever you can.
Most engineering organizations are heavier than they need to be. Process, layers, competing initiatives, and meetings that exist because they always have. Optimizing by removing is undervalued and undertaught.
Favor execution over perfection.
Most decisions are smaller than they feel in the moment. Move.
Challenge the assumption, not the person.
The questions I ask most often: what constraint actually prevents this? what's the value of doing it at all? what's stopping you from doing it today?
Radical candor over quiet obedience.
The leaders I work best with want to be told the truth, including when the truth is inconvenient. I don't let an org chart stand in the way of a conversation, and I won't expect you to either.
How I work with clients
No scripted frameworks, no personality assessments, no coaching that sounds good in a workshop and evaporates the moment you're back at your desk. Our sessions are about the actual decisions in front of you this week, and what those decisions tell us about what to work on next.