🅺evin 🅶oldsmith 🇺🇦

Today is the day! My book "it depends: writing on technology leadership 2012-2022" is now available everywhere! amazon.com/Depends-Writin…

New in the It Depends newsletter: how to actually develop systems thinking as a skill. Most senior leaders built it by accident. I tried to lay out a path to build it on purpose. kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/every-organi… #systemsthinking

New ep of It Depends: "Every Organization Is a System. Are You Designing It or Just Living in It?" I've been telling people to learn systems thinking for years without ever teaching how. This episode is my attempt to fix that. itdependspod.com/episodes/every…

New newsletter: "The Director to CTO Path: How to Follow It, or How to Mentor It" You don't get promoted to demonstrate the next level. You get promoted because you have already been. kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/the-director…

New ep of It Depends: "The Director to CTO Path: How to Follow It, or How to Mentor It." The thing that made you great as a director will hold you back as a VP. The job doesn't just get bigger. It gets different. itdependspod.com/episodes/the-d…

"Are you optimizing to be right, or to be understood?" The answer should always be the latter. New It Depends newsletter on executive communication: what I learned from years of presenting to (and for) senior leaders. kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/talking-to-e… #TechLeadership #ItDepends

New ep of It Depends: "Talking to Executives: That's Not a Derailment, That's the Meeting." I once got permanently banned from presenting to a VP because I insisted I was right about the word "avatar." I was right. It didn't matter. itdependspod.com/episodes/talki…

The skills that make you a great manager can quietly break when you start managing managers. Staying close to execution feels responsible. It also turns you into a bottleneck. kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/the-shift-to…

🧭 Learn what it takes to grow from Director to CTO, or help others do it. @KevinGoldsmith at ConFoo Feb 25–27. #LearnAllTheTech buff.ly/DXyqWlM

🔥Hot off the press: Issue #337 of Level Up, a curated newsletter for leaders in tech #cto #vpeng #engmanager #techlead w/content from @joost_minnaar @johncutlefish @leebryant @diego_pacheco @kellogh @Fjellstedt @KevinGoldsmith & more! See sh1.sendinblue.com/3gge7elz539pfe…

Managing managers isn't about staying close to the work. It's about providing context so they can make better decisions than you can. New episode: The Shift to Managing Managers itdependspod.com/episodes/the-s…

Eventually, leadership means owning work you’ve never done yourself. This piece is about what senior leaders are really responsible for once expertise stops scaling, and how to lead without becoming a bottleneck. kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/leading-what…

"Crafting a Technical Strategy That Actually Works" Moving from disconnected decisions to a unified technical direction. @KevinGoldsmith kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/crafting-a-t…

🔥Hot off the press: Issue #334 of Level Up, a curated newsletter for leaders in tech #cto #vpeng #engmanager #techlead w/content from @Leadershipfreak @avivby @RogerLMartin @StackOverflow @KevinGoldsmith & more! See sh1.sendinblue.com/3gg1kalz539pfe…

New episode: Leading What You’ve Never Done Before Your scope will outrun your resume. The job isn’t mastering every domain; it’s leading the system around them. itdependspod.com/episodes/leadi…

The job getting easier is a warning sign. This week’s newsletter is about reflection as a leadership skill and why experience without reflection quietly turns into autopilot. kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/reflection-i…

The adversarial approach is a long-established pattern in machine learning to produce better results. I’m leaning a lot more on it to tame the quantum-like nature of LLM outputs.

New podcast episode for the new year! Why a reflection practice is critical as you move into senior leadership (because no one else is going to be focusing on developing you). You can’t lead others to grow if you’ve stopped growing yourself. pod.link/1724860326/epi…

Process isn’t good or bad. It’s a tool. The problem is that teams usually add too much of it, too late, or for the wrong reasons. This issue is about how to add just enough process without killing autonomy or speed. kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/process-is-a…

Tech debt isn’t a moral failure. It’s a signal Some debt is deliberate Some is harmless Some actively constrain the business Some is code telling you a people story If you treat it all the same, you’ll make the wrong calls If you read the signal, you won’t kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/tech-debt-is…

@jnack @claudeai @NanoBanana I’ve had both very good and very bad luck generating google slide decks with Gemini. Sometimes, it has turned an outline into a usable, editable, deck. Sometimes it gives me slide-by-slide instructions on how to make the deck myself or tried to write code to generate the file.

.@claudeai just made me a super crappy deck. Silver lining: I discovered the new Google Slides ability "Beautify slide" via @NanoBanana 🍌🪄🙏: