Most engineering teams have copilots and chat tools. Almost none have redesigned how work is structured, planned, or delivered around them. The productivity gains stay at the individual level. Delivery doesn't change. The gap between L1 tool adoption and L3 orchestrated delivery is where most organisations are stuck, and most leaders don't know how to cross it.
Agents don't need better prompts. They need requirements, epics, stories, and architecture specs structured so the pipeline itself provides context. That's an SDLC redesign, not a tooling purchase. It needs someone who understands both the leadership operating model and the daily engineering reality. That combination is rare.
I've sat on leadership teams and I've shipped production code. I co-founded a healthtech start-up and I've run multi-team engineering at a telco. I'm practising agentic development now, not just reading about it. And I've learned that transformation fails when the engineer doesn't trust it. Getting that trust is a skill. I have it.
20+ years hands-on, most of them in production environments. Currently using Claude Code and Gemini for agentic development. Can review architecture decisions, join technical debates, and know when something is actually hard versus just unfamiliar.
8+ years on leadership teams at Sunrise and Komed Health. Can translate between engineering reality and strategic intent without watering either down. Stakeholder management without losing the engineers.
Built and led teams up to 15 developers. Raised test coverage from zero to ~75% on each focus platform. Led the shift to cross-functional teams at Sunrise. The metric that matters: did engineers grow, and did they stay?
Scrum Master certification and long practice. But the point isn't the framework, it's delivery cadence, shared ownership, and a backlog that reflects what's actually shippable. Agile as discipline, not ceremony.
Designing the end-to-end model for software delivery where agents operate inside the pipeline. From requirements to verification, with human oversight embedded by design rather than bolted on.
Three patterns matter: human-to-agent (delegation with oversight), human-to-human (the collaboration model changes when both parties use agents), and agent-to-agent (orchestration with defined trust boundaries). Most teams have only thought about the first.
Hands-on AI tooling adoption with developer teams, building trust and genuine capability rather than compliance. Currently leading this at Sunrise with multiple frontend teams.
Engineering leadership roles at Swiss or EU scale-ups where the AI transformation is a real priority and the org is small enough that leadership decisions actually reach engineers. Sector-agnostic. Currently at Sunrise until October 2026, but open to start sooner for the right opportunity.
Test coverage, CI/CD, clear ownership, meaningful backlogs. These aren't glamorous, but organisations that skip them can't absorb AI tooling effectively. Every serious transformation I've led started here.
The rarest thing in engineering leadership: being credible with the leadership team on operating model decisions and staying close enough to engineers to know what's actually happening. I operate at both levels at once, and that's what makes transformation stick.
Good engineers are scarce and easily disengaged. Tools don't fix that. Culture, autonomy, and meaningful work do. AI adoption fails when it feels imposed. It works when engineers feel like they're gaining capability, not being replaced.
Agents don't receive context from runtime prompts. They receive it from the SDLC pipeline: requirements, epics, user stories, architecture specs. The organisation that structures its pipeline to feed agents correctly is the one that gets reliable output. That redesign is a leadership problem, not a tooling one.