Kris Drouet
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
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Buy the vendor’s AI for the seventy percent every lender needs, document intake, underwriting signals, compliance logging, and build custom only at the one exception queue that is actually yours. Most engineering leaders pick one extreme or the other. The pattern that actually works sits in … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Fintech engineering teams keep velocity through an audit by making evidence a byproduct of the pipeline, tiering changes by risk instead of reviewing everything equally, and documenting a break-glass path before they need it. Three patterns. I have shipped under all three, auditors have signed off … Read more
