The realisation
Leadership as a Verb started from a moment I did not see coming.
I was the bottleneck. Not because I was failing, but because I was succeeding in the wrong way. For years I believed leadership meant being the person with the answer, the one who could see the flaw before anyone else, the one who ended the meeting with the right call. I was rewarded for this. Promoted for it. Told I was indispensable.
Then I noticed something. The more indispensable I became, the less my team could function without me. The expertise that made me valuable was the exact thing preventing the people around me from developing their own. I had built a leadership identity around knowing, and that identity was now the ceiling on the room.
That was the first realisation. The second came later, when the tools arrived that could replicate the knowing faster than I could. The architecture draft in thirty seconds. The code review completed before I opened my laptop. The answer that used to require a decade of experience now required a prompt.
I actively recommend publications that share this audience. If you write for senior engineers and tech leaders thinking about AI, identity, and worth, reach out.
I was not facing redundancy. I was facing a question I had no language for. If what I knew was no longer scarce, what was I for?
This publication is the language I am building for that question.
What I write about
One underlying question. Three ways of approaching it.
Leadership as a Verb — the essays. Every other Tuesday. What happens to your sense of professional worth when the skill you built a career on stops being scarce. Not the optimistic version. Not the catastrophist one. The honest one, from someone who has spent twenty years inside tech and would rather ask it plainly than pretend it is not there.
Practicing the Verb — the practices. Every other Tuesday. One specific action derived from the essay. One sentence to try. One silence to hold. One question to ask instead of answering. The essay asks the question. The practice moves toward an answer. A question you only think about stays inside your head. A question you act on changes who you are.
Patching the Verb — the mechanics. Paid-only. The deeper thinking about why the practice works, what the friction signals, how to build the habit so it becomes who you are, not just what you did once. The essay asks. The practice moves. Patching explains why the motion works.
Writing the Verb — the book. Who Are You Without the Title? Paid subscribers see the chapters first, the doubt, the cut paragraphs, the thinking before it is polished.
Behind the Verb — It’s raw, unscripted, human material. Corrections of your own past beliefs. Reactions to things that happened.
Who this is for
The senior leader, the Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, Senior Engineering Manager and also for engineers whose job is changing faster than their sense of who they are at it.
You are not looking for another newsletter about leadership tactics. You are not looking for five ways to delegate better. You are looking for someone who will name the thing you are sitting with and then give you one motion and intentional action to try.
You might be exhausted by the “move fast and break things” culture. You might be realising the solo-hero act is burning you out. You might be moving from individual contributor to management and discovering that your job is no longer to ship code but to create the conditions where others can. You might be fifty-three, with thirty years of expertise that a tool just made replicable, and no one in your organisation is acknowledging what that costs.
You might be carrying a version of this question: What am I here for, what is the worth of my skill, when the thing I was trained to do is being automated before I have finished becoming it?
If that question lands, this publication is for you.
How it works
Free subscribers get,
the essays and the practices, alternating every Tuesday. Plus Notes throughout the week. Short observations, genuine questions I do not have the answer to, and the occasional thing that could not wait until Tuesday.
Paid subscribers get,
Patching the Verb, the mechanics beneath the practices.
Writing the Verb, the book as it is being written.
The chat, where I post the questions the essays raise but do not answer, and reply personally to everyone.
The chat is not a forum. It is where people who are tired of carrying these questions alone find out they are not the only ones.
One final thing
Everyone needs help. No matter where they are. The higher you go, the fewer safe spaces there are to admit that. I am building one.
The map is on the table. Come navigate.
Welcome.
One verb at the time.
Diamantino
