About
I'm Raleigh Schickel. I've spent the last 15+ years leading engineering organizations, building teams, fixing broken ones, and trying to figure out what actually matters when it comes to engineering health.
I've been VP of Engineering at Stoplight (acquired by SmartBear), Director of Engineering at Nirvana Health, and spent 8+ years at uShip. Across all of those roles, the question that kept coming back was the same one: how do you know if your engineering organization is actually healthy?
Not productive. Not fast. Healthy.
The industry is full of tools that measure output. Pull requests merged, velocity, cycle time, deployment frequency. Those things aren't useless, but they answer the wrong question. A team can look productive on paper while burning out. A team that looks slow might be making exactly the right calls. I've seen both, more than once.
Over the years I've developed a methodology for diagnosing engineering team health that combines execution metrics, quality signals, organizational patterns, and culture assessment. I wrote about why predictability matters more than velocity on the Stoplight engineering blog, and I've spoken about rethinking developer productivity on the Ambassador Labs podcast.
I'm now building that methodology into a product. An engineering health diagnostic platform designed as a coaching tool, not a surveillance tool.
What I write about
This blog is where I think out loud about engineering leadership, the tools we use to build software, and the ways we take care of (or fail to take care of) the people who do the building. Topics include:
- Engineering team health and the metrics that actually matter
- Using AI tools as an engineering leader (what works, what doesn't)
- Culture, organizational dynamics, and why Westrum was right
- The craft of engineering management in the age of AI
- Lessons from 15 years of getting things wrong and occasionally getting them right
The short version
I believe engineering leadership is fundamentally about taking care of people. I think the industry has become too mechanical and needs to remember the humans. I'm an introvert who gives talks anyway. I'm building a small, sustainable business on the side because I think this methodology should exist as a product, not just as my personal collection of spreadsheets.
If any of that resonates, stick around.