ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER
For leaders who got here by being great at something else.
WEEKLY | TUESDAYS | EST. 2026
You were excellent at doing the technical work, so they made you the boss. Now you’re responsible for people doing the work you used to do and you’re graded on skills you likely didn’t study or practice in a structured way.
Altitude is a weekly letter for technical professionals: engineers, scientists, designers, researchers, and the many others who transitioned from rock star individual contributors to managers. Not necessarily because they wanted to lead but because they were good enough at their craft to be given a team.
This newsletter exists because most management and leadership content didn’t feel written for me. It felt written for people who studied this on purpose and often…and I didn’t. I was trying to be excellent at one thing and ended up doing a second thing, often figuring it out as I went, often alone. This is a place to be honest about that and give / receive support from everyone going through the same exact thing.
What you’ll get
A field guide, not a curriculum
What you can expect from me
Every Tuesday, you’ll get something in your inbox worth reading. Most weeks, that’s a free issue of this newsletter: real stories, concrete frameworks, the kind of thing you can actually use in a conversation on Wednesday. Once a month, paid subscribers get a bonus: the deployable templates, tools, and frameworks I actually reach for when things get complicated.
Paid subscribers also gain immediate access to The Manager’s Conversation Toolkit. Most of us inherited our management style from whoever managed us. For 1-on-1s, that usually means awkward check-ins, surface-level status updates, and that nagging feeling that this meeting could have been an email. The Toolkit is built to change that. It includes four ready-made 1-on-1 templates for the conversations managers face most often: career development, performance improvement, navigating change, and rebuilding trust, plus two bonus frameworks for moments that I felt were hardest to navigate in real time when I experienced them first-hand.
A final note on subscriptions: Altitude is a paid newsletter with a free tier. The free issues are real content, not teasers. But the paid tier goes further and whenever upgrading makes sense for you, it’s available. If your company has a learning & development reimbursement program, I encourage you to review the reimbursement guidelines and submit your subscription receipt for reimbursement (if eligible!)
About the Author
Your leadership community gets you through the tough stuff
Your experiences, favorite resources, advice, and questions are all welcomed. Feel free to participate in the comments section and/or consider supporting this work with a subscription.
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