John-Mason Shackelford

This week, I was re-reading the book "Accelerate" and uncovered invaluable insights. Here are the top 3 takeaways: 1️⃣  **Great Software Delivery = Great Business Performance** It’s not just about IT anymore. Companies that build and release software quickly and safely absolutely crush it in the market. Speed and stability aren’t trade-offs — you can (and must) have both. 2️⃣ **Focus on the Right Four Metrics** Most teams track way too many things. Accelerate proved that four simple metrics — deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore — tell you almost everything you need to know about team health and business agility. 3️⃣ **Culture Is the Real Secret Weapon** Want faster releases, better innovation, and happier teams? It starts with psychological safety, trust, and empowering people. Tools matter, but culture matters more. #Accelerate #DevOps #Leadership #SoftwareEngineering #BusinessGrowth #ContinuousImprovement

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Leadership style is such an overloaded term. I’ve always thought of it less as a label and more as a compass - A set of principles I lean on whenever I’m faced with a decision. The real magic happens when my team understands that compass too. It means they’re not blindsided by my choices, and they can even anticipate how I’ll respond to new ideas. Instead of seeing decisions as random, they see the consistency which then builds confidence and trust.! What guiding principles do you rely on most often when making decisions as a leader?

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As Fred Brooks wrote decades ago: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Coordination isn’t free. New devs mean onboarding, syncing, and re-aligning. The fastest teams aren’t the biggest, they’re the ones that communicate best.

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Ok Rust, there is a lot I genuinely love about your language design, but can we all acknowledge having self and Self as keywords that mean different things was a horrible decision. I don’t care what the rationalization was - having a key semantic characteristic differ by freaking capitalization is absurd. We shouldn’t sound like philosophers when we write code - “we each have multiple selves, and they represent different meanings”. Anyway, CodeQL has Rust support now, so for all of the security minded devs there is finally a global interprocedural analysis engine at your disposal.

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If you could look inside a PM’s brain: You’d see fire drills, shifting deadlines, and a stakeholder whispering, “just one small thing.” It’s not chaos. It’s controlled overload. 𝟴:𝟭𝟬 𝗔𝗠: The vendor update’s late. Again. You scan Slack, check the RAID log, start drafting Plan D. Your brain triggers the cortisol before your coffee kicks in. 𝟵:𝟬𝟬 𝗔𝗠: Your senior engineer opens up: “They keep changing priorities. I’m burning out.” You pause. Let the silence do its job. This is what real leadership looks like—unseen, unpaid for, but unforgettable. 𝟭𝟬:𝟯𝟬 𝗔𝗠: A feature’s delayed. Product wants a new date. Leadership wants “no slippage.” You translate tension into timelines. 𝟭𝟮:𝟰𝟱 𝗣𝗠: Lunch becomes a 1:1 with a junior PM. They ask how you stay so calm. You don’t say “habit.” You say, “scars.” 𝟰:𝟭𝟱 𝗣𝗠: A last-minute escalation drops in. You prep the response, soften the edges, and loop in the right people. In delivery leadership, only 30% is project. The rest? People. 𝟲:𝟮𝟬 𝗣𝗠: The day winds down. You finally check your phone. And you see a post: “PMs just move tickets around, right?” — Project Managers aren’t just managing scope. They’re absorbing emotion, defusing conflict, and navigating the invisible. Every ‘on track’ hides a hundred rewrites. Every calm update masks a dozen silent sacrifices. So the next time a PM calmly says, “We’ve got it covered.” Know that what they really mean is: “We carried the load, so you didn’t have to.” — ♻️ Repost and tag a PM who’s carried the load. ➕ Follow Rajesh Mathur for more real talk on leading chaos calmly.

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Is This Your Plan? If you’ve followed my posts for a while, you might notice I return often to themes like individual development plans, autonomy, and building strong teams. This may sound repetitive—and that’s okay. These ideas are on repeat in my own mind because I’m still working to make them a consistent reality. I haven’t yet reached the point where every team member I support can confidently say, “Yes, this is my plan.” Until I do, I’m not tired of saying it—and I hope you won’t be tired of hearing it. This focus, I believe, is also one way to clearly separate management from leadership. A manager might come up with a long list of things they want someone to improve on—things they believe will lead to growth. But a leader takes a different path: they work with the individual to co-create a development plan that reflects their motivations and goals. They help the person understand what matters, why it matters, and how it connects to where they want to go. If someone truly wants to grow, they'll lean in—and often, they already have clarity on what they need. Especially with experienced team members, it’s about conversation, not prescription. So I’ll keep coming back to this question: Can each person on your team say, “Yes, this is my plan”? Because that answer is the difference between compliance and commitment. And that difference is how strong, enduring teams are built.

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