Culture as an operating system represented by a bonsai tree shaped like a distributed systems diagram

Culture Is the Operating System: How Engineering Leaders Build, Scale and Renew Great Teams

Cover image attribution: The bonsai pruning person illustration is an AI-generated artwork, created from a prompt. If your culture only works when twelve people are in the same Slack channel, it isn’t a culture. It’s a group chat with payroll. There’s a particular kind of magic in a five-person engineering team. Everyone knows everything. Decisions happen in the corridor. The codebase is small enough to hold in your head, and so is the organisation. Then you hire person number six, and the magic wobbles. By person sixty, the corridor has become a confluence of Slack channels, and somebody is seriously proposing that you “document your values.” ...

August 15, 2026 · 20 min · 4257 words · Eakan Gopalakrishnan
Engineering leadership

Evolving your Leadership Style as you scale your organisation

I was curious about the title - As your team gets bigger, your leadership style has to adapt. I am not Julie Zhuo, and I am not a Vice President of an organisation just yet. But as I started working at Kaluza, leading multiple teams, I felt like I had to evolve my leadership style accordingly too. The article was reassuring as I feel like I did get some things right. ...

December 14, 2024 · 5 min · 1064 words · eakangk