About

I’m Greg, or Gregory. I’ve spent more than a decade leading development teams and the last five managing engineers directly, across six teams at three companies in B2B SaaS and ad tech. Engineers, QA, and interns. Most of that work has sat close to the frontend: design systems, developer experience, the surfaces people actually touch.

In those five years, no one has voluntarily left a team I managed.

I’m careful about what that means. People leave for reasons that have nothing to do with their manager, five years is a small sample, and I can’t isolate my own effect on it. Anyone selling you a retention formula is selling you something. But I don’t think it’s an accident either, and the interesting question was never whether I caused it. It’s what I was doing that made staying the easier choice.

Some of it I can name. Engineers stay where:

• they’re trusted to make decisions that might turn out wrong
• the blame for a bad project stops at their manager, and the credit for a good one never does
• the work gets noticed when it goes right, not only when it breaks
• someone will tell them plainly what their work is actually for

That’s not complete, and I’d probably write a different list next year. None of it is complicated either. It’s just hard to hold onto under pressure, which is exactly when it matters, and exactly when it’s the first thing dropped. The job was never to be the smartest engineer in the room. It’s to build a room where the smartest thing gets said out loud.

I got here sideways. I started university in engineering, graduated with a business degree, and ended up writing code anyway: engineer, then technical lead, then manager. Most of that was frontend work, and what I kept drifting toward was the shared layer: design systems, tooling, the parts other people build on top of. I won’t claim expertise there, plenty of people have gone deeper. But it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that what I liked about that work is the same thing I like about managing. Both are the job of making everyone else’s work easier.

So that’s what I write about here. Management as it actually goes: what held up, what I got wrong, and the parts nobody warns you about. It’s the version of this I wanted when I started managing, and couldn’t find.

The newest piece is just below. Start there.

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