Hi, I’m Jorge Figueiredo.

Hi! I’m Jorge Figueiredo. Welcome to my online home. My career started as Software Engineer (or actually, while I was finishing my degree). At that time, it was totally out of my aspirations to move to any leadership role. Looking back, I can’t tell the reasons. It might have just been because I focused on learning all the exciting technologies. I didn’t care much about anything other than being an excellent contributor. Skills are essential for leaders. Communication, negotiation, stakeholder management, and others were not my forte, being an introvert. My computer science degree also didn’t help. It was mainly focused on the technical side of the Software Engineering job.

But at some point, after learning the technologies being used at the time and building exciting software products. I started to pay attention to the dynamics of a team and how different they were from high-performing teams.

My interest in these dynamics started to grow when they were unsuccessful. I felt I was archiving less as a team and could archive myself only as an individual contributor. This was not because I considered myself a “10X” engineer. It was because of the overhead of each team member’s planning, communication, and performance. It was so bad that the sum of all individual contributions was inferior. And even my contributions were much less because this overhead consumed most of my time.

I then started gravitating more towards leadership responsibilities to influence these team dynamics from an individual contributor to a manager (and then from manager to manager of managers). I didn’t get formal training, as I imagine you might be in this situation. So there was a lot of trying and error, making the process much slower and more stressful.

Therefore there are two main reasons for blogging about technical leadership. First, to help others have a more smooth journey to leadership that I got. The second is to build a set of resources that I can point my teams to learn about these topics.

What I’m blogging about is not for a particular job title or level. I believe that independent of your role in a team. Everyone should understand how to communicate, negotiate and manage many aspects of working in a team and delivering a common goal(s).

Check my LinkedIn profile for more of my professional past experiences.

Let’s learn together… Check my blog posts on leadership and management.