About me
Hey there, my name is Mirek. 👋
I've been leading engineering teams and technology for almost a decade. I truly loved every single day of that. Over this time, I worked with or helped many people who are now great leaders. The impact they generate makes me proud but also motivates me to continue sharing my experience at scale.
During my career, I experienced almost every stage of building a startup.
- I was a co-founder of a startup, later a software house, where my team and I built products for our clients and us. I experienced every single lesson of failing startups.
- I joined a startup in its early days during a seed round, where I did coding, drew some UIs, and did probably a hundred other things people do in early-stage startups.
- The startup evolved into the growth phase, where each aspect of "move fast and break things" needed to be rebuilt, stabilized, and delegated. I slowly replaced micro-management with trust&inspire approach. Monolithic systems were replaced by distributed ones. An on-prem solution went to the cloud. Silo teams evolved into cross-functional ones. Goals changed to KPIs and later to OKRs.
- The growth phase went into a scale-up phase, where things got serious, the company broke even, and the multi-level management hierarchy developed.
- I experienced the acquisition process led by a bigger organization with a different culture and market (from B2C to B2B).
During this journey, I experienced big wins and learned even bigger lessons. Each day I worked hard to build empowered team(s), yet not all things worked as good as it's described in books. Thanks to that, over the years, I learned the true nuances behind great leadership ideas.
Today, I know not everything will work everywhere. Not every company will be the second Apple, Tesla, or Netflix. Not every organization has to be like them.
Not every team will be high-performing. Not all teammates will be A-players, and even if they do, you won't always find the best fit for them.
Things don't have to be perfect. Ordinary people and ordinary organizations can still be successful. And great leaders can maximize it, even when they face challenging conditions.
This is the experience I have.
I helped to grow many engineers and engineering leaders. I did that in an environment that was far from perfect, yet many of these people are successful professionals today - either as inspiring leaders or great individual contributors.
So this is what I do here at Practical Engineering Management. I want to help you to be an outstanding leader and make great ideas happen. No matter where you work and how far your organization is from perfect.
I empower engineering leaders through practice.
Contact info
I’ll be grateful for any feedback that can make Practical Engineering Management better. Let me know if there is any particular subject you are interested in reading. If you want to chat about other ways we can cooperate, drop me an email at mirek@practicalengineering.management.