Kris Drouet
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 SOC 2 compliance changes four things for engineering teams day to day: every production change needs a documented approval trail, access reviews become a recurring calendar item, logging can’t get switched off to chase a bug, and someone owns evidence collection as a real job. That’s … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An incident review changes behavior when it ends with three things: a written timeline of what people actually knew, action items carrying a named owner and a date, and no defendant. The rest of the template exists to make those three things happen. I wrote a … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 AI implementation cost after a successful POC usually lands at three to five times the pilot price, because inference at real volume, data work, evaluation, and the people who run it are never inside the demo number. The pilot priced a rehearsal. Production prices the run. … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Yes, engineering managers should still code, but keep it under 40% of your week and off the critical path. Your team size sets the number, not a rule you read somewhere. He told me he was still shipping. That was the word he used, and he … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 When you inherit an engineering team you did not hire, diagnose the system before you judge the people. Most of what reads as individual underperformance is your predecessor’s operating model still running, and it will produce the same results with anyone sitting in those seats. The … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Team Topologies is an org-design model with four team types, stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem, plus three interaction modes. Most companies need two of them. You split a team when its cognitive load outgrows one complex domain, not when its headcount crosses a number. A CTO … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Four delivery metrics predict engineering velocity: change lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, and failed deployment recovery time. Story-point velocity and sprint completion rate predict almost nothing, because both are calculated from the estimate rather than from the delivery. I sat in a quarterly business … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An engineering budget gets approved when every line names an owner, a unit of measure, and a date. Finance rarely rejects the work itself. It rejects requests it cannot audit, rank against a sales hire, or defend to a board. Twenty-five years in and I have … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Selling tech debt to executives fails because the phrase names four unrelated problems at once. Split it into security exposure, delivery cost, key-person risk, and a growth ceiling, then bring the one your CFO already funds. I have watched the same request get denied and then … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 AI code review works for engineering teams when a VP assigns a named human owner to every risk tier, sets a review SLA the team tracks weekly, and reserves final judgment for changes touching trust boundaries, money, or production access. That’s the entire operating model in … Read more
