The Hands-On Leader: Technical Mastery as Strategic Leverage

If you're a tech, product, or AI leader focused on delivery, whether for growth or an exit - can you afford not to get down in the trenches?

In the modern corporate landscape, leaders often migrate into a purely strategic lane once they reach a certain level of seniority. After years of commercial growth, regulatory oversight, and board-level decisions, the tech trenches feel like a distant memory.

If you're in a more theoretical or academic role, maybe that's fine, but if you're accountable for shipping does it still work? I've found that staying hands-on, particularly during shifts in disruptive technology, isn't a distraction from leadership - It's an essential component of it.

This time it's AI, though I found blockchain fascinating too (the tech, that is - distributed systems are just brilliant). Maybe more on that another time.

 

Avoiding "Hand-Wavy" Strategy

The goal of a leader returning to code isn't to ship production systems, it's to gain perspective. Recently, I've been exploring AI-assisted coding with Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT, mainly to build prototypes - But I ended up building small apps for myself and my family. It turns out, while there's an app for everything, our use cases were just different enough that existing solutions didn't quite work - so I built them.

 

Here's what happened: Building those apps gave me a tangible understanding of where AI assistance genuinely accelerates work versus where it hallucinates solutions or suggests architectures that make no sense. I found myself literally saying to Cursor, "What are you doing? In which scenario is your approach okay?"

That hands-on frustration translated directly into better conversations with engineering teams. I could suddenly speak their language again, not because I'm going to out-code them, but because I understand the real-world trade-offs and constraints they navigate daily.

 

Perspective as Leverage

Prototyping an idea end-to-end within a few hours allows a leader to:

• Test feasibility at a concrete level rather than relying on second-hand reports
• Identify the boundary between market hype and technical reality, especially critical when every vendor claims their AI is "production-ready"
• Make decisions rooted in actual evidence rather than high-level assumptions
• Have credible conversations with your Product and Engineering teams about what's realistic versus what's marketing fluff

For example, I burned through £50 in Cursor credits over a weekend building a couple of small family apps. Suddenly, all our cost-effective AI tooling projections looked wildly optimistic - what would our engineering team of 30+ developers actually consume at scale? I went back to finance with realistic numbers based on actual usage patterns, not vendor estimates.

 

Why This Matters Now

Technology is moving at a velocity that exceeds the comprehension of many leadership teams. AI is the obvious example, and there's massive pressure to "do something with AI," but the gap between launching a pilot and delivering real value is enormous.  Leaders who can't distinguish between the two end up either paralysed or chasing shiny objects.

 

If you lead teams in tech, product, or AI, here's my challenge to you: Pick one emerging tool this quarter and build something small with it. Not a strategy deck about it. Not a vendor evaluation. Actually build something - even if it's just for yourself or your family.

 

You'll be surprised which decisions suddenly become clearer.