A field guide to engineering leadership in imperfect organisations
A practitioner's account of the real challenges of Agile leadership in complex organisations: the politics, the resistance, and what actually works. Built on the Drift framework and drawn from fifteen years inside agile transformations, not from a framework deck.
Most writing on Agile leadership describes the framework as it is meant to run. This book is about the other thing: what leadership actually has to do when the framework on paper and the organisation in practice have drifted apart, and no one quite agrees on which one is real.
Every organisation runs two systems at once: the Stated System it documents, and the Lived System it actually operates. The distance between them is the Drift, and the book works it across twenty-two chapters as a practical leadership instrument.
Each chapter is built around a scene drawn from fifteen years inside agile transformations: a decision, a dependency, a piece of organisational politics. The scenes are anonymised and composited, but the patterns are real, and so is the discomfort.
Release Train Engineers, Solution Train Engineers, senior Scrum Masters, and engineering leaders running scaled programmes, especially in safety-critical or otherwise unforgiving contexts where the framework cannot simply be followed as written.
A full sample chapter is available now as a PDF. Several essays on this site are condensed chapters or precursors to the book; they are the fastest way to see how it reads before launch.
The framework at the spine of the book: the Stated System, the Lived System, and the practice of reading the distance between them rather than trying to close it.
Chapter 21, condensed. Becoming the constraint in scaled engineering leadership, why the standard fix makes it worse first, and the diagnostic question that finally surfaced it.
Why ‘how can I help?’ quietly outsources diagnosis to the team, and the harder question to ask yourself before walking into the next cadence event.
Backlog management in scaled Agile is largely an interface problem disguised as a coordination problem, and what changes when teams treat their slice of the backlog as an exported API.
A full chapter as a PDF, available now.
The complete set of long-form essays lives on the Articles page.
Worksheets and diagnostics from the book are free to download in the companion set.
The book is in final preparation for a Summer 2026 release. New essays appear roughly every two to three weeks in the run-up, and launch details go out on Substack first. Subscribing there is the simplest way to be notified, and to read the work as it builds.