Technical Leadership
Zooming out is not a personality. It is a language you can practice.
2026-02-11 · 6 minute read
When someone tells an engineer to 'be more strategic,' they usually mean 'guess what I am thinking, one floor up.' That is not teachable. Altitude is.
Altitude is the ability to describe the same work as a ticket, a system, a customer promise, and a bet — and to choose which description the room needs. You practice it by sitting in rooms that used to feel like a distraction and by writing the one-page version of the project until a non-engineer can repeat the bet.
You do not abandon craft to do this. You stop confusing the elegance of the how with the necessity of the why.