About
I'm Raleigh Schickel. I've been in engineering organizations long enough to know the difference between a team that looks healthy and a team that is healthy. They're not always the same team.
I've been VP of Engineering at Stoplight (acquired by SmartBear), Head of Engineering at Indy Cinema Group (acquired by Fandango), and spent 8 years at uShip. Across all of those roles the question that kept coming back was the same: 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've now productized it as Ometo, an engineering health platform built to help leaders coach their teams and debug their organizations.
What I write about
Engineering team health and the metrics that actually matter. AI tools in engineering organizations: what works and what doesn't. Culture, organizational dynamics, and why Westrum was right. The craft of engineering leadership in the age of AI.
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.
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.