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 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. Five 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 isn’t 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.
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’s polished.
Behind the Verb — the raw, unscripted material. Corrections of my own past beliefs. Reactions to things that happened, before I’ve had time to make them tidy.
Who this is for
Senior leaders. Heads of Engineering, VPs of Engineering, Senior Engineering Managers. And 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, then give you one motion and one intentional action to try.
You might be exhausted by “move fast and break things.” You might be realising the solo-hero act is what’s burning you out. You might be moving from individual contributor to management and discovering your job is no longer to ship code, but to build the conditions where others can. You might be fifty-three, with thirty years of expertise 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’ve finished becoming it?
If that question lands, this publication is for you.
How it works
Free subscribers get the essay and the practice, alternating every Tuesday, plus Notes throughout the week — short observations, genuine questions I don’t have the answer to, and the occasional thing that couldn’t wait until Tuesday.
Paid subscribers also get Patching the Verb (the mechanics beneath the practices), Writing the Verb (the book as it’s being written), and the chat — where I post the questions the essays raise but don’t answer, and reply personally to everyone. The chat is not a forum. It’s where people who are tired of carrying these questions alone find out they’re not the only ones.
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 a time.
Diamantino
P.S. — 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.
