There's a strange delay in engineering leadership no one warns you about.
It's the time between when you fix something and when you experience the tangible benefits of your actions.
Fix a bug? You're a hero before lunch.
Rebuild the monitoring system to detect drifts in a payment system? It might be weeks, months before those efforts come into fruition.
That's the Problem → Solution → Impact Gap
Everything Good Takes Longer Than You'd Like
When I joined a Letter (a US fintech startup) as founding engineer and CTO, I had a rare opportunity: greenfield architecture (hello!). No legacy baggage. No weird constraints. Just a blank canvas and a set of make-or-break goals - high availability, airtight data integrity, and compliance-grade auditability.
I designed the platform around immutable event streams, strict type safety, and multi-region resilience. Every customer action—from transfers to tax calculations—became an event in a chain, keyed by ULID, stored immutably, and passed through a hardened RBAC system backed by GraphQL and RPC layers.
At the time, most of this wasn't visible to users. They didn't see the YAML-driven schemas or the ephemeral Redis-based ID masking for security. But six months later? Faster shipping. Fewer bugs. More confident engineers. We weren't just unblocking ourselves—we'd built momentum.
The payoff came later. But the impact started the moment we planted the seeds.
Leadership is full of moments like that:
Where you do the right thing, and then...crickets.
A lot of people fill that silence with doubt, or scurried reactivity.
Don't.
Trust the payoff.
You're a Gardener Now
I've shipped developer tools that now process 150M+ requests a month.
I've built tax software that moves actual money to actual governments (hey sleepless nights!)
I've helped companies from bootstrapped indie outfits to Fortune 500s scale their platforms and their people.
And in every one of those contexts, the same truth holds:
Fast fixes get applause. Long-term bets build legacies.
When I joined WorkMade, I started laying foundations; monitoring, deployment, categorisation pipelines, tax systems. Some shipped fast. Others? Still surfacing value today (I hope 🤞), a year later.
The job becomes:
- Plant the seed
- Protect it from bad weather
- Wait
Time Is a Force Multiplier
The difference between good decisions and great ones?
Time.
- Give your team better observability → They'll ship safer by default.
- Instil a culture of asking dumb questions → The juniors become seniors in record time. Removing fear as a blocker helps people flourish.
- Replace the 3-hour weekly standup with async check-ins → Watch productivity crawl back into your dev cycles.
Each small improvement is a brick. Stack them consistently and you build something that doesn't fall over when the wind changes.
Micro vs Macro Moves
Every day, you get two questions:
- What's one thing I can do today to help the team?
- What's one thing I can do today that helps the product 6 months from now?
Some days that's "unblock an engineer." Other days it's "refactor our infra so we can handle more payments without drowning."
Early in your career, success feels like "look what I built."
Later, it becomes "look how fast and safe everyone else is building."
Lupe Fiasco wrote a banger in 2007 called "Superstar" - which contains the lyric Did you improve on the design? Did you do somethin' new? - I think about it a lot. Not just because it's a great track, but because I now want to get in, improve the system in some small way, then get out of the way.
Compounding Ownership
The best engineers don't just write code.
They own outcomes.
That's what I hire for, what I encourage, what I try to model.
Whether it's onboarding someone into a new React Native stack at MyTheresa, or helping Cisco scale across teams and timezones, the most impactful work has always been about instilling ownership.
Not just "you broke it, you fix it."
More like "you saw it, you shaped it, now make it shine."
TL;DR
You don't lead by doing more.
You lead by doing the right things consistently, even when the results are invisible for a while.
- Fix things fast, but think long.
- Seed value daily, even if it sprouts next year.
- Don't build monuments. Build momentum.
Solve problems. Ship solutions. Think in longer time spans than your innate need for immediate gratification is comfortable with.
The impact is coming.
Trust the gap. Hop in. The water's warm.