Leadership

Frank Neff
15 Apr, 2026

We Have More Important Things to Do Than Culture!

A few weeks ago, someone told me something that stopped me in my tracks. We were discussing the lack of team and company culture, and they said: “We have more important things to do! We first need to fix the processes and the systems before we can care about culture and these things.”

I’ve heard this in different variations throughout my career. Every time, it reveals the same fundamental misunderstanding: Culture is something you get to after the real work is done. A nice-to-have. A cherry on top once the org chart is clean, the processes are humming, and the product is stable.

That moment never comes. And the reason it never comes is often… culture.

Frank Neff
11 Sep, 2025

28 Days Later: Surviving Your First Month as a CTO

There’s a tired old trope in leadership circles: “Your first 100 days define your legacy.”

Cute idea. Presidential even. But let’s be real: in a tech org, 100 days is a lifetime. By the time you’re on Day 101, you’re not building credibility – you’re shambling through the hallways, moaning about roadmaps, and scaring interns. In other words: You’re already a Zombie CTO.

You don’t get 100 days. You get 28. Roughly three sprints if you’re on a 10-day cycle, and that’s all the slack you’ll ever get. If you don’t establish trust, show judgment, and land a couple of quick hits by then, you’re at best irrelevant – at worst, undead.

So here’s your 28-day survival guide – not theory, not TED-talk fluff, but field-tested tactics for how to stay alive (and keep your org alive with you).

Frank Neff
02 Sep, 2025

How to Map Your System Landscape in One Afternoon – The C1.5 Shortcut

You’ve just stepped into a new role – maybe as CTO, maybe as Head of Development – and as usual, the architecture is a maze or even completely missing. Documentation is outdated, knowledge is scattered, and no one holds the full picture. Without a map, you’re flying blind.

You could spend weeks reading thru confluence, readme and code, piecing things together, but there’s a shortcut:

In this post, I’ll show you how to map a “good-enough” system landscape in one afternoon using a lightweight, practical shortcut of the C4 framework I call C1.5.

Frank Neff
20 Jun, 2025

Is SAFe Just Waterfall Wearing a Hoodie?

SAFe gives leaders a comforting sense of order: roles, layers, roadmaps, and predictable increments. But too often, that “safety” hides something familiar – Waterfall dressed up with agile terminology.

On paper, SAFe promises agility at scale. In practice, it often turns into months-long planning cycles, extra layers of governance, and top-down control with new names. The labels change – “epics” instead of projects, “program increments” instead of deadlines – but the behaviors stay the same.

Which brings us to the real question: Is SAFe actually helping companies become agile, or is it just Waterfall in disguise?

Frank Neff
28 May, 2024

Stop Faking Agile: How to Actually Deliver Faster

Almost every company today claims they’re “agile.” They run standups, hold retros, track velocity. The word shows up in job postings, investor decks, and board meetings.

But let’s be honest: In 99% of cases, “agile” is just a buzzword. It’s a label slapped on the same old waterfall process, dressed up with sticky notes and Jira boards.

I’ve stepped into SaaS companies where work still moved in quarterly chunks, QA was a final-phase bottleneck, and priorities were dictated top-down. Nothing about that was Scrum or Kanban — it was waterfall in an agile costume.

Frank Neff
10 Aug, 2021

Why complexity in software projects is bad (and you should not advertise it)

There are (still) many people telling proudly, how complex their product is. There are job ads, explaining that you will “create highly complex software”. These false signals, which I personally saw in many positions and projects, create a potentially huge long-tail problem, not primarily for engineers, but for the product management and engineering team lead. In this blogpost, I want to point out some of those impacts of advertising complexity…