The Builder’s
Leader

Engineering leadership for the teams behind lifestyle brands.

The patterns your team feels but hasn’t named yet. Weekly. Free.

Brands I've Built For

Nike
Converse
Life is Good
Bauer
Easton
Skechers

What People Say

Jono is the manager every engineer hopes to work for at least once in their career.

Masom Hamadeh

Software Engineer @ Converse, Nike Inc.

Jono may be the most talented technologist I've worked with in my long career.

Sam Dushkin

Engagement Director @ Chartis.io

Jono has been my greatest professional accelerant. He provided the framework I needed to grow into a technology leader.

Chris Schwab

Engineering Leader @ Life is Good

A natural born leader ... working with Jono was a masterclass in drive with insane depth of knowledge.

Alex Via

Global Digital Product Leader @ Converse, Nike Inc.

Jono excels at building teams and solutions from zero to one.

Alex Munoz

Head of Global Retail and Digital Engineering Support @ Converse, Nike Inc.

Jono propels any team he is a part of.

Dan Seiders

Senior Resident Solutions Engineer @ HashiCorp

Latest Writing

Black-and-white illustration of a bearded man in a cap seen from behind; on one side a bold arrow curves upward with speed lines, on the other a matching arc of cracked crumbling stone and falling fragments, suggesting the same force amplifying ascent and decay.

AI Multiplies What You Already Have

The gap between your senior and junior engineers is compounding in ways most leaders aren't watching.

A junior engineer told me he wasn't sure he understood everything the AI was outputting for him. He was reading it, checking it, shipping it. But he couldn't reliably tell if it was right. That conversation opened a harder question about what AI is actually doing to the engineers who never built the foundation first.

Black-and-white illustration of a bearded man in a baseball cap, hand on the brim, looking down, with stacked weight plates behind his head like a halo, suggesting the weight of judgment.

You Can't Align AI Judgment If You've Lost Your Own

The governance gap nobody talks about when your team ships AI-generated code

Technical leaders are being asked to set AI standards, define acceptable output quality, and govern what gets into production. You cannot do any of that if you've lost your own connection to how your team builds. Here's what the drift looks like, and what it costs you when AI has already doubled your team's output.