Problem Definition As A Path for Career Growth

More from Developer Tea All episodes →

1. 

   E1282 · 20 Jan 2026 · 15 min

   Career Growth Roadmap - De-risking Your Career By Understanding Your Vulnerabilities

   Are your career choices truly yours, or are they being held hostage by hidden vulnerabilities? In this episode you'll perform a "career pre-mortem" to identify the people, situations, and financial burdens that currently exert leverage over your decision-making. We explore how to gain autonomy by de-risking these areas—like eliminating debt or shifting how you relate to job misalignments—so you can reclaim the agency needed to make principled moves that align with your true purpose.

2. 

   E1281 · 13 Jan 2026 · 29 min

   Career Growth Accelerator - Assessing Yourself - Using a Nine-Block to Map Your Skill, Potential, and Energy Investment

   Evaluating what you are uniquely good at is more than just making a list of your current skills; it requires looking at your past, your future potential, and what actually energises you. In this episode, I introduce a practical tool called the Nine-block to help you map out your skills across performance and potential, while adding critical dimensions of energy and risk to help you break through career stagnation.

3. 

   E1280 · 5 Jan 2026 · 29 min

   Career Growth Accelerator: Going from Autopilot to Purpose

   This episode marks the 11th anniversary of the show, and I want to celebrate by continuing our Career Growth Accelerator series. Today, we’re moving beyond the "autopilot" mode that many engineers find themselves in and learning how to define goals that are uniquely yours so you can find the specific challenges that will actually move the needle.

4. 

   E1279 · 18 Dec 2025 · 21 min

   Announcing - Career Growth Accelerator, Episode Zero - Getting Out of Your Own Way

   This episode kicks off the Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the specific hurdles faced by mid-to-senior level engineers, managers, and leaders who are looking to move to the next level. Before diving into specific strategies, I’m addressing the fundamental prerequisite for real growth: getting out of your own way. We often block our own progress because our ego conflates our self-worth with our career position, making it impossible to see the real problems or lessons we need to learn. In this episode, I share a vital mental exercise to help you disconnect your identity from your…

5. 

   16 Dec 2025 · 3 min

   Announcing: The Career Growth Accelerator Series

   Are you a mid-to-senior level engineer or leader who has hit a career roadblock or found yourself stagnated? I'm launching the new Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the difficult, non-obvious hurdles that prevent you from moving to the next level. In this foundational Episode Zero, I cover the critical prerequisite for growth: Getting Out of Your Own Way. Our ego often protects our self-worth by blaming external factors for failures, making honest diagnosis impossible,. • Learn why protecting your ego is the most dangerous way to control your career. • Discover the fundamental…

6. 

   E1277 · 2 Dec 2025 · 13 min

   You Know The Hard Thing You Need to Do Next - Here's Why It's Worth Doing Now

   We often look for ways to reduce the load on our brains, seeking shortcuts and optimizations to get ahead. Sometimes this works, reinforcing the belief that we can hack our way around every problem. However, this episode addresses the truth that many fundamental aspects of your career require something difficult, messy, slow, or inefficient, demanding deep thought and repeated failure.

7. 

   E1276 · 25 Nov 2025 · 16 min

   Career Fundamentals - Avoid Career Traps by Focusing on Primary Paths of Improvement

   If you're looking to accelerate your career growth, this episode gives you what may feel like hard truths about the path forward. So many engineers fall into traps of overthinking, chasing minor optimizations (like 5% or 10% productivity boosts), or playing the games of politics and networking. While these sideline activities aren't necessarily useless, I want to help you focus on the "big engines" and "primary considerations"—the things that will make the monumental difference in your career building strategy.

8. 

   E1275 · 18 Nov 2025 · 16 min

   Getting to Senior - Taking Ownership Without Leading Projects

   If you're an engineer looking to move into a senior role, you have likely heard that you need to demonstrate "ownership". Unfortunately, this crucial term is often poorly defined and leads to a major misconception: that ownership means being assigned a full project or a Tech Lead role. I want to dispel that myth and explain why ownership is actually a necessary behavior and mindset shift, applicable in almost every action you take, regardless of whether you’re leading a project.

9. 

   E1274 · 11 Nov 2025 · 36 min

   Part Two - Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, on AI, Engineering, Art, and Everything In Between

   Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. This is the second part of my interview with Bryan McCann, the CTO at you.com. If you haven't listened to Part One, I'd encourage you to go back, as it provides crucial context for our continued discussion. In this episode, we dive into how you can think about relating to and integrating the massive changes that AI is bringing to your job, whether you are a software engineer, manager, director, or product professional. Bryan and I discuss his interests beyond research, including art and organizational design.

10. 

    E1274 · 4 Nov 2025 · 35 min

    Part One - Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, on AI, Engineering, Art, and Everything In Between

    Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. It's been quite a while since I've had a guest on the show. Today, I'm joined by Bryan McCann, CTO at you.com. We dive into a wide-ranging discussion, exploring the philosophical origins of his career—from studying meaning and language to working in very early AI research. This discussion is less advice-heavy and more focused on kind of theory and discussion. I hope this is insightful for you and helpful as you crystallize your own philosophies on these subjects.