Leadership is currently overhyped — you can’t lead if nobody is willing to follow you. Following is not trivial, as any dancer will tell you: it is a mirror art to leading. In fact, we spend most of our career following. So getting good at that matters more than getting better at leading. But outside of dancing, being a good follower is rarely taught or even appreciated. This needs to change!

This blog post was co-written with my awesome friend, ML engineer Duana Stanley

“Are there good rules of communication I should be aware of when I'm communicating with engineers?” I recently got this question from a designer, a new subscriber to my newsletter. It is a question I keep asking myself as well.

Influencing is a crucial part of collaborating with others effectively. Without it, we would rarely arrive at the same page and head in the same direction. We cannot not influence, we can just do it more or less effectively. Here I share some of my observations on how to influence developers.