Hey there, digital warriors! ⚔️

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth:

Most tech leaders wouldn’t recognize true software excellence if it walked into their office.

And that’s not a personal jab 🥊 It’s a wake-up call. A warning flare. Because what you’re calling “best practices” might actually be just popularized dysfunctions. It’s the consequence of an industry led by slides, not standards. Where hype overshadows craft, and leaders have never seen what real engineering excellence feels like.

How could you expect to lead it if you’ve never witnessed it? 🤯

🚪 The Leadership Illusion

If you lead a tech organization today, chances are you think you’re doing… fine. You believed in your people. You hired sharp minds through rigorous, pedigree-based HR pipelines. You brought in Agile and DevOps coaches with the best of intentions. You even onboarded renowned consultants, decorated your walls with SAFe posters, and invested in rigorous Scaled-Agile training cycles. You committed to OKRs. You explored GenAI pilots to unlock potential and free up human brilliance. All of it, driven by the honest hope that your company would rise from its ashes and become extraordinary.

But behind the scenes?

• 📉 Delivery is fragile

• 📉 Engineering morale is cratering

• 📉 Your “walking assets”, your best talents, are quietly scanning the market

• 📉 Customer satisfaction is draining. And with it, your cash flow and credibility.

Why?

Because, like so many others, you’re making high-stakes decisions without ever having witnessed true engineering excellence in Software and IT. You’ve never been inside a Formula 1 pit crew. You’ve never stood in a surgical theater where milliseconds and precision mean life or death. You’ve never felt the tension and trust of a world-class research lab. Because that level of craft has been absent from your industry. And, no one’s showing it to you.

“Everything in modern IT was made under the anti-pattern ‘from science to sales.’ Both start with S, but they have very different social behaviors.”

Instead, you’re navigating by market propaganda. Slides over substance, frameworks over feedback. All while feeding the growing machine of techno-feudalism, where big vendors profit from your blindness and your people quietly give up.

“A lot of leaders think they are doing software in the right way, but the problem is that they don’t even know what it looks like.”

This is the leadership trap that most probably you fell into:

You copy what worked elsewhere, hire based on logos and resumes, and hope that culture installs itself. But culture doesn’t install. It’s modeled. It’s practiced. It’s engineered! And when it’s missing, your best people leave.

🐘 The elephant in the room

As we discovered in the previous episodes. Here’s the black fever no one wants to talk about:

• We expect founders, CXOs, and senior leaders to scale complex organizations without ever putting themselves under a microscope.
• Investors run due diligence on deals.
• Companies invest (even if modestly) in team development.

But the same leadership was granted money to create a great company?

• 🙊 No structured coaching

• 🙈 No performance mirror

• 🙉 No engineering excellence compass

“In the Software Industry. There’s no common standard. No common practice.” — Alexander Steeb

And because there’s no common reference of what good really is, people play along, silently. No one says the emperor has no clothes. Until one day, the best ones walk.

“This is the elephant in the room. Everyone knows it. But it’s not being faced.” — Alexander Steeb

🧬 Why This Hurts More Than You Think

This kind of blindness isn’t just a leadership problem. It’s a compounding system failure.

You keep hiring people to “bring in the culture,” thinking the next smart hire will solve it. You keep investing in ”digital transformation,” hoping the next one will fix your mediocracy.

But without visible, tangible excellence, the smart ones get frustrated. They learn just enough to leave, and move on to a place that actually invests in people and engineering excellence.

🥇 Craft and mastery as the meritocracy meter.

“You cannot achieve greatness without great people. If you don’t build an environment where they can be great, they will walk.” — Alexander Steeb

This is how good companies stall. How Series A never makes it to Series C. How PE portfolios plateau. How boardrooms transform over time into a warroom.

🪞What You Need Is a Mirror

You can’t build what you can’t see. And you can’t lead what you’ve never practiced.

Most leaders aren’t impostors. They’re genuinely unaware.

Unaware that they’re leading engineering teams without having ever experienced software excellence firsthand. Unaware that their good intentions are now producing silent disengagement.

But now? You’ve seen it. You know. And that’s the line. Because once you see the mirror, staying blind becomes a choice.

That’s why we created the Unicorns’ Ecosystem, to support your awakening:

To give leaders a mirror that reflects how far they are from excellence. A system to evolve toward it, together. With data-driven objectivity.

1. 📊 The Organizational Assessment exposes the hidden behavioral signals shaping your mediocre outcomes.
2. 🥋 The SW Craftsmanship Dojo® becomes your in-house upskilling engine, developing the socio-technical traits nurturing true engineering excellence.
3. 🎯 The Leadership Coaching puts the spotlight on what’s really blocking growth: unpracticed leadership.

This isn’t transformation theatre.

This is technical due diligence for your culture.

This is your org’s first real mirror.

This is behavioral neuroscience, refined and tailored to your exact dysfunction.

🫵 Now you need to know what “Good” Looks Like

We’ll show you. No fluff. No jargon. No sugar-coating.

Choose what fits you best, and take the first step out of blindness:

• 🔎 Request a full Organization Assessment
• 🥋 Or try the SW Craftsmanship Dojo® Diagnostic
• 💬 And if you’re still doubtful, book a private Leadership Reflection Session

Your people already know whether you’re serious about excellence.

It’s time to prove it 🫵

🎧 Full Interview with Alexander Steeb

Still think your org is on track? Listen to the investor’s perspective that will make you rethink everything.

To stay in the loop with all our updates, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter 📩 and podcast channels 🎧:

📰 LinkedIn

🎥 YouTube

📻 Spotify

📻 Apple Podcast