• Frank Neff
• 26 Sep, 2025

• leadership
• engineering
• teams
• talent
• culture

The 9 Talents in Software Teams

Job titles like “Senior Engineer” or “Principal Engineer” don’t explain how someone actually contributes to a team. Counting a candidate’s years of experience doesn’t tell you whether they’ll bring stability in a crisis, explore new ideas, or quietly hold a group together when things get messy.

After leading different engineering teams and organizations, I’ve seen the same profiles appear again and again, regardless of title or tech stack. These profiles shape how teams perform, where they get stuck, and how they grow. Over time, I began to think of them as archetypes of engineering talent: Patterns of behavior and impact that show up in every healthy software team.

• Frank Neff
• 20 Jun, 2025

• agile
• SAFe
• scaling
• leadership
• process
• culture

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?