FrankNeff.com - Technology meets Leadership

Frank Neff
26 Sep, 2025

The 9 Talents in Software Teams

Job titles like “Senior Engineer” or “Principal Engineer” don’t explain how someone actually contributes to a team. Counting a candidate’s years of experience doesn’t tell you whether they’ll bring stability in a crisis, explore new ideas, or quietly hold a group together when things get messy.

After leading different engineering teams and organizations, I’ve seen the same profiles appear again and again, regardless of title or tech stack. These profiles shape how teams perform, where they get stuck, and how they grow. Over time, I began to think of them as archetypes of engineering talent: Patterns of behavior and impact that show up in every healthy software team.

Frank Neff
11 Sep, 2025

28 Days Later: Surviving Your First Month as a CTO

There’s a tired old trope in leadership circles: “Your first 100 days define your legacy.”

Cute idea. Presidential even. But let’s be real: in a tech org, 100 days is a lifetime. By the time you’re on Day 101, you’re not building credibility – you’re shambling through the hallways, moaning about roadmaps, and scaring interns. In other words: You’re already a Zombie CTO.

You don’t get 100 days. You get 28. Roughly three sprints if you’re on a 10-day cycle, and that’s all the slack you’ll ever get. If you don’t establish trust, show judgment, and land a couple of quick hits by then, you’re at best irrelevant – at worst, undead.

So here’s your 28-day survival guide – not theory, not TED-talk fluff, but field-tested tactics for how to stay alive (and keep your org alive with you).

Frank Neff
02 Sep, 2025

How to Map Your System Landscape in One Afternoon – The C1.5 Shortcut

You’ve just stepped into a new role – maybe as CTO, maybe as Head of Development – and as usual, the architecture is a maze or even completely missing. Documentation is outdated, knowledge is scattered, and no one holds the full picture. Without a map, you’re flying blind.

You could spend weeks reading thru confluence, readme and code, piecing things together, but there’s a shortcut:

In this post, I’ll show you how to map a “good-enough” system landscape in one afternoon using a lightweight, practical shortcut of the C4 framework I call C1.5.

Frank Neff
20 Jun, 2025

Is SAFe Just Waterfall Wearing a Hoodie?

SAFe gives leaders a comforting sense of order: roles, layers, roadmaps, and predictable increments. But too often, that “safety” hides something familiar – Waterfall dressed up with agile terminology.

On paper, SAFe promises agility at scale. In practice, it often turns into months-long planning cycles, extra layers of governance, and top-down control with new names. The labels change – “epics” instead of projects, “program increments” instead of deadlines – but the behaviors stay the same.

Which brings us to the real question: Is SAFe actually helping companies become agile, or is it just Waterfall in disguise?

Frank Neff
12 Feb, 2025

The Scalability Trap: How Premature Technical Excellence Kills the Product

The “Build it right the first time” mantra has sunk more startups than bad code ever did.

I’ve seen it firsthand: One developer built his own message broker in PHP because ActiveMQ “didn’t fit his needs.” Another rebuilt Ansible in Perl to provision VMs. And the wildest one? Someone started designing a version control system on top of Elasticsearch because Git was “inefficient.”

These weren’t feats of brilliance. They were ego-driven distractions that added fragility, wasted money, and created zero customer value. And they all happened because leadership failed to ask the only question that matters: “How does this help the user?”

Frank Neff
11 Aug, 2024

The No-Nonsense Definition of Ready & Definition of Done

Most agile teams say they use a Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD). In practice? They’re often ignored, overcomplicated, or so vague they don’t help anyone.

Over the years, I’ve refined a lean, practical version of both. It’s sharp enough to be useful across companies and simple enough that people actually use it.

Frank Neff
28 May, 2024

Stop Faking Agile: How to Actually Deliver Faster

Almost every company today claims they’re “agile.” They run standups, hold retros, track velocity. The word shows up in job postings, investor decks, and board meetings.

But let’s be honest: In 99% of cases, “agile” is just a buzzword. It’s a label slapped on the same old waterfall process, dressed up with sticky notes and Jira boards.

I’ve stepped into SaaS companies where work still moved in quarterly chunks, QA was a final-phase bottleneck, and priorities were dictated top-down. Nothing about that was Scrum or Kanban — it was waterfall in an agile costume.

Frank Neff
28 Mar, 2024

How a Strong Type System Saves You Documentation, Tests, and Nerves

I was recently inspired to finally write this post. Especially in weakly- or untyped languages, such as the JavaScript or PHP world, the added value of strict type systems is often not recognized. Instead, many discussions and comments revolve around the need for tests or code comments. Contrary to that, in the functional programming world, we leave such checks to the compiler. In this post I would like to give a short overview and explain how to use a strict type system for everyday checks instead of writing type checks, tests and documentation for it.

Frank Neff
13 Oct, 2023

How to effectively visualize an Application Landscape in Enterprise Architecture

In enterprise & solution architecture, connecting boxes with arrows is an often used and overrated visualization from high-level, thru component architecture, down to data and class diagrams. However, to create a holistic view on systems, component diagrams are not enough! When it comes to analysis or transformation of a high-level application- or service-architecture, I prefer to draw an Application Landscape Diagram, which I would like to show and elaborate on in this post.

Frank Neff
11 Sep, 2023

Securing isolated systems: Caveats of using plain OAUTH flows and how to solve them

While OIDC and OAUTH are well-known standards, they don’t fit every purpose “out of the box.” In businesses with special regulations like banking, health care, etc., non-functional requirements to auth can be challenging. Different solutions and ways were evaluated to create a new identity provider for a medical network. The first approach was “just” using simple OAUTH by its most famous Authorization Code Flow. Of course, it failed fast, and I’ll show why and how we solved it in this post.