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Weekly Reflection #10 - Be Successful on Purpose
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Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightSam Barlien highlighted this stat from the State of Platform Engineering 2025 report: 30% of platform engineering teams don't measure their success at all. Nothing. You might stumble into good outcomes for a while, but without measurement, you can't prove what caused them, defend your budget, advocate for headcount, or show leadership why your work matters. When cuts come (and eventually they always come), unmeasured teams are first on the list. This isn't just lazy; it limits your career, team effectiveness, and business outcomes. To fix this, start small. Pick one or two metrics that align with your team's goals. If you focus on developer productivity, track lead time. If reliability is your priority, measure change failure rate. Establish a baseline, review it regularly, and iterate as you learn. Now you're being successful on purpose. Wisdom"Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action." — Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (1967) ReflectionWhat does success look like for your team—and are you measuring it? Lagniappe
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Weekly Reflections Newsletter
Practical insights on platform engineering, developer experience, and building teams that ship. Each issue is written to be useful, actionable, and applicable. No filler, no promotions-only emails. Enter your email and sign up for free right now.
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight This week LiteLLM, the most popular open-source LLM proxy in the python ecosystem, was hit by a really gnarly software supply chain attack. The awful part was that the attack vector was through Trivy, a security scanner LiteLLM trusted to help protect its code. Attackers compromised Trivy's GitHub Actions and used that to steal LiteLLM's PyPI publishing credentials, and used them...
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight In Will Larson's book, Crafting Engineering Strategy, he nails why so many executives fail at executing on strategy. However, my experience is that engineering strategies fail for very mundane reasons—the most common of which is that executives assume their strategy will roll itself out. The second most common reason is forgetting to spend time validating the details. Both are...
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) Insight It is easy to treat Change Management as a means of controlling the change itself, as if changes were discrete events you could shove into a box on a specific timeline. But change is continuous, it's fluid, and it's much more powerful than any of us can truly control. Systems were changing long before we intervened, and they will continue to change long after we are gone. Surfers...