Technical Leadership Thursday
Weekly insights for technical leaders from someone who has actually done the technical work
I once went 38 hours without sleep on a mission-critical issue.
The engineering was completely solvable. The delay happened because a team couldn't write "remove microphone cap" without politics and blame games. While the mission waited, I absorbed the dysfunction — because that's what technical leaders do. We hold the line. We fill the gaps. We stay until the problem is resolved, even when the problem isn't ours to carry.
If you've been there — if you've ever been the most capable person in the room and somehow ended up doing the most emotional labor in it — this newsletter is for you.
"I'm so glad to be reading insights from someone who comes from a technical background. It's just different here — business leadership books don't get it."
What Technical Leadership Thursday is
Every Thursday, one idea. No five-point frameworks, no recycled productivity advice, no content written by someone who has never had to defend a technical position to a hostile room.
The issues are drawn from three decades in aerospace leadership. Right now, that means working on Artemis, the program that will return humans to the moon. Each issue covers the things technical leadership books tend to skip: the human variable. The dysfunction that travels upward until it lands on whoever cares most. The patterns that turn excellent engineers into shock absorbers for broken systems. And occasionally, what it looks like when you stop absorbing and start engineering something better.
Recent issues have covered: the primal part of your brain that reads disagreement as an existential threat — and how to override it in a high-stakes review. What happens when "whatever you want" becomes your problem to solve. Why psychological endurance isn't about absorbing more pain, it's about navigating more precisely. How to build a team that doesn't need you to function. And the harder conversations — toxic leaders, impossible situations, and the question of whether the system is worth fixing at all.
"It's so refreshing to hear someone talk about the emotional aspect of leadership without making it feel soft."
“Thanks Lisa! I’m really finding myself looking forward to this read each week! Literally all points you touch on about the human aspects of Engineering I can relate to. Love it!”
These issues go out every Thursday. Individual issues stay in the inbox — not archived, not published publicly. Once a year, the best thinking from the year gets compiled into a subscriber summary.
If you want them, you have to be on the list.