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Addy Osmani's engineering leadership principles after 14 years at Google
Source type Practitioner
Confidence Medium
Last verified 2026-03-22
Topics design-leadership design-engineering

Insight: The engineers who thrive aren't necessarily the best programmers — they're the ones who navigate everything around the code: people, politics, alignment, ambiguity. Key principles include: user obsession over technology love, "being right is cheap — getting to right together is the real work," bias towards action over perfection, and strong opinions weakly held. These apply directly to design engineering leadership where bridging design and code requires navigating organizational complexity.

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