What Technology Leadership Means in a Small Company
What technology leadership looks like in small organisations: making architecture decisions, growing people, managing risk and staying close to customers.
About Rohit
Working principles
Not rules for everyone. These are the habits that have held up across software projects, businesses and clinical training.
Quick answer
Quick answer
What principles guide Rohit's work?
Start with the situation rather than the solution, look for the exception rather than the average, prefer simple systems that people will actually use, keep humans accountable for consequential decisions, say plainly what you do not know, and stay willing to be a student again.
The six principles
Start with the situation, not the solution
Whether it is a warehouse or a patient, describe what is happening before deciding what to do about it. The first proposed fix is usually a guess.
Look for the exception
Averages hide the cases that matter. Billing systems fail on the unusual record, and treatment fails on the symptom nobody asked about.
Prefer simple systems that people will use
A modest tool used every day beats an impressive one that staff quietly work around. Adoption is part of the design, not an afterthought.
Keep humans accountable for consequential decisions
Automation and AI can prepare, suggest and check. Decisions that affect someone's money, health or livelihood need a person who owns them.
Say what you do not know
In a proposal or a consultation, honest uncertainty builds more trust than confident overstatement, and it leads to better follow up.
Stay a student
Every field changes. Being willing to start again, even at the level of a school subject, is a professional skill and not an embarrassment.
How they show up in practice
In a technology project these principles usually mean a smaller first version, a written description of the current process before anything is built, and a review step wherever an error would be expensive. In clinical training they mean longer case taking, a written record that keeps the patient's own words, and asking one more question before concluding.
They also explain things this site does not do. There are no guarantees of outcome, no invented statistics and no claims about work that cannot be described accurately in public.
Insights
Related essays
Before You Automate, Draw the Process on Paper
A practical method for digital transformation: map the real process, find the friction, redesign with the team, then choose automation or AI.
Where AI Agents Help, and Where They Should Stop
A practical framework for agentic AI: which tasks suit AI agents, how to set levels of autonomy, and why people should approve consequential actions.
Questions
Questions about working principles
Are these principles applied to healthcare too?
Yes, with the difference that clinical decisions belong to qualified professionals who can examine the patient, and that uncertainty is stated rather than smoothed over.
Which principle is hardest to keep?
Preferring the simple system. Building something more ambitious is more enjoyable, and it is usually the wrong answer for the people who have to use it every day.
Conversations
Have a question about this?
A short message with some context is the best way to start.
- Working principles