Skip to content

Leadership Failed Successfully

A podcast I co-host with Daniel Mirecki. Every episode starts from something that went wrong inside a real engineering organisation, and works forwards from there: what we tried, what it cost, and what we would do differently on the Monday after.

It is the same subject as the rest of this site, argued out loud with somebody who disagrees with me often enough to be worth recording.

The episodes are in Polish. We record for engineering leaders working in Poland, and we do not dub or subtitle them, so a listener who does not speak Polish will not get much out of the recordings themselves. The titles below are the real ones, and the writing on this site covers most of the same ground in English.

what the show is

Something went wrong. That is exactly why the show works.

Daniel Mirecki and I talk about leading engineering teams the way it actually goes: the everyday problems, the practices that survived contact with a real organisation, the failures, and the moments something finally moved. Sometimes it is the two of us. Sometimes we bring in someone whose answer we want to argue with.

No buzzwords. No textbook voice. Nothing padded to fill an hour.

If you run a team, own the culture of an engineering organisation, or simply want to be better at leading one, it is for you.

Co-hosted with Daniel Mirecki (opens in a new tab)

What keeps coming up

  • What AI is doing to engineering roles

    Whether the senior developer role survives it, what the tools give back, what they quietly take, and how much of the enthusiasm holds up a year later.

  • Delivery process, and the day it stops working

    Agile, Scrum and the architecture arguments that come back every few years, judged by whether anything shipped faster afterwards.

  • The distance between engineers and the people they build for

    What an organisation pays, in rework and in motivation, once the people writing the software no longer meet the people using it.

  • Incentives, and why sensible people make the wrong call

    Game theory read as a management tool: which decisions inside an engineering organisation are zero sum, which only look it, and what changes once you can tell them apart.

where to listen

The show is on YouTube and Spotify. If it is on another platform too, tell me and I will say so to my co-host.

recent episodes

The most recent conversations, straight from the show's feed. Press play to watch one here, or open it on the channel.

Every episode on the channel (opens in a new tab)

Recognise the problem?

Most episodes start from something that broke in an engineering organisation. If one of them sounded like yours, that is a better opening line for a conversation than any pitch I could write here.

Tell me which one

Not sure which problem you have? That's usually the first finding.

Free. No pitch. You'll leave with at least one named bottleneck.