We envisage tech leaders as specialists – masters of a craft of their own picking. Some are better at developing, other at coding, and then there are those who are best at solving problems. But then there’s those like Brian Fox, CTO at Sonatype – certified jacks of all trade, whose role at companies in his early techie days was to do pretty much everything. Fast forward to today, and you have a tech leader who knows and understands the work developer does, and masterfully navigates teams through projects and problems. 

“People management is not something that’s easy to learn, but get this – it’s better to find leaders that understand the engineering side of things, rather than the people-management side. Why? Understanding. Understanding lies at the bottom of every successful team, story, company.“

From ensuring his teams are at their best personally and professionally, all the way to underlining the importance of strong, secure software, Brian’s MO and perspective is something we feel every techie out there can learn quite a lot from.