For Tech Leads & Engineering Managers
The Director Role Goes to the Engineering Manager Who Was Already Visible.
The transition from IC to engineering leadership is one of the most significant moves in a technical career. The market doesn’t see it unless you make it visible — and the advisory roles, conference invitations, and Director pipelines that follow senior engineering leadership all start with a public record of how you think.
The Problem
The IC-to-EM transition erases your external visibility
You made the transition. You stopped writing code full-time, took on direct reports, started running planning cycles, and learned to deliver outcomes through a team instead of through a keyboard. It’s a more complex job than most IC roles — requiring org design, incident retrospectives, technical strategy, and the constant tension between velocity and technical debt.
The technical community you came from has no idea.
The move from IC to engineering manager typically erases external visibility. As an IC, you had GitHub contributions, conference talks, maybe open source work that made you findable in the community. As a manager, that stops. The LeadDev talk you were building toward gets deprioritised. The StaffPlus community where you used to be active goes quiet. The open source commits slow down. From the outside, it looks like nothing has changed — because nothing visible has.
The market treats engineering managers who don’t write publicly as senior ICs by default. It’s not a judgment; it’s an absence of information. If there’s no public evidence that you’ve moved into leadership, operated at organisational scale, or developed a perspective on technical strategy, the signals being used to assess your seniority are still the IC signals from your last visible phase. You can build a 20-person engineering organisation with strong retention, reduce on-call burden significantly, and redesign incident management from scratch — and if you don’t write about it, it doesn’t exist externally.
The search firm or founder looking for a Director of Engineering or VP Eng is looking for a name already appearing in their feeds alongside credible thinking about technical leadership. One conversation a month is the entire investment required to build that presence.
The Process
How it works
Record one 45-minute conversation per month.
You discuss what you're navigating: a difficult technical strategy decision, a perspective on building engineering culture at scale, a take on the IC-to-EM transition. Your actual thinking — not a polished presentation.
AI extracts your insights and distinct perspective.
The conversation is analysed for the specific mental models, management philosophy, and technical leadership positions that make your thinking distinctive — not generic engineering advice, but your actual approach to the problems you face daily.
Published weekly across every channel.
LinkedIn posts three times a week. X/Twitter threads twice a week. Short-form video clips. A newsletter. A blog article. A consistent technical leadership presence — built from a single monthly conversation.
What You Get
Everything you need to build authority as an engineering leader
LinkedIn posts, 3x per week
Substantive engineering leadership content that makes your management growth visible to the technical community, search firms, and founders who need to see it.
X/Twitter threads, 2x per week
Tight, argument-driven content that re-establishes your presence in the engineering and technical leadership community.
Short-form video clips
Drawn from your conversation, formatted for LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts.
The conference presence pipeline
LeadDev, StaffPlus, and QCon speaker shortlists are built from names organisers are already reading; publishing is what gets you there.
A public record that tracks your management growth in real time
So when the Director or VP Eng opportunity comes, the market already knows you've been operating at that level for years.
Newsletter and blog article each month
Long-form content that builds authority with the QCon, LeadDev, and StaffPlus audiences — the communities that open advisory and Director pipelines.
“I'd been an engineering manager for three years, grown a team from 4 to 18, and shipped some of the most complex work my company had done — and had essentially zero external presence. Six months after publishing through BrandForge, a founder I'd never spoken to reached out about an advisory role at his seed-stage infrastructure company. He'd been reading my posts about on-call culture and incident retrospectives. That one engagement opened three others.”
Annika Larsen
Engineering Manager, Stockholm
“I was a tech lead transitioning into management and worried about losing my standing in the technical community. Publishing consistently about the IC-to-EM transition, technical strategy, and the org design decisions I was navigating actually strengthened my community presence — differently than before. Within a year I was invited to speak at LeadDev. The organiser cited a thread I'd written about managing principal engineers. That speaking slot led directly to a Director of Engineering conversation at a Series B company.”
Raj Patel
Tech Lead (now Engineering Manager), London
Pricing
Most popular for Engineering Managers and Tech Leads
One advisory engagement opened by a founder who’s been reading your posts covers Growth at €999/month many times over. Growth gives you the full content stack: LinkedIn, X/Twitter threads, video clips, newsletter, and blog, at the depth and regularity needed to rebuild your external presence as a leader.
LinkedIn posts · X/Twitter threads · Video clips · Newsletter · Blog · Full AI production
Not sure? Start with Starter at €299/month