"A leader is not a role. A leader is a relationship to the people you lead." — from the livestream
I recall the moment I first realized I was the bottleneck.
It wasn’t during a standup or while planning a roadmap. It hit me late at night, as I stared at a whiteboard full of post-it notes — each one a different flavor of team struggle: missed deadlines, silent meetings, a wave of burnout that no retro could fix. I had a title. I had experience. But I didn’t have follow-through. Not from the team. Not from myself.
What I faced wasn’t a lack of process. It was resistance. Invisible, silent, but everywhere. And I had to ask: What actually makes someone worth following?
Leadership Is a Relationship
“We often confuse managers with leaders”
One of the biggest revelations I had was that leadership isn’t a role to be filled; it's a mindset. It's a relationship. We often confuse managers with leaders. Managers manage resources, define boundaries, and set headcounts. A leader, however, is someone others choose to follow. It’s about how others perceive you — are you worth following? That’s a different question from, Do you have authority? "Do"
In practice, this means that you can be both — a manager by role, and a leader by relation. And the most successful tech leaders I know are both.
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