Leadership - Scaling Engineering Team From 3 to 40

  No scaling story is clean. If you are managing 30 or 40 programs, you are statistically guaranteed to face a crisis. Programs fail. Customers escalate. Deadlines, even the "sacred" ones, are missed. On the good days, leadership is about strategy and vision. But on the bad days, leadership is about thermodynamics . It’s about how you handle the heat. In the moments when a program is crashing, your leadership is visible in a way that no dashboard or success story can ever reveal. The question isn't whether you’ll face a failure, but who you become when you do. When a Tier-1 or an OEM customer is on the phone demanding answers for a missed milestone, the natural human instinct is to pass that pressure down. We want to find who is responsible. We want to demand immediate fixes. We want to "fix" the discomfort we feel by making the team feel it even more. But panic is a contagion. If you react with blame or withdrawal, you aren't solving the problem, you are pa...

By the time you’re leading 30 or 40 Project Managers, the "whiteboard phase" of leadership is over. You’ve got the dashboards. You’ve got standardized workflows. You’ve got review cycles. On paper, the machine is built. But here’s the reality,  The dashboard is a liar . I’ve seen it time and again, two teams using the exact same Jira workflows, similar goals, yet one hits every milestone, while the other is in total chaos. The difference isn't the tools. It’s the culture. Specifically, it’s what your people do when the playbook doesn’t cover the crisis . Culture isn’t a set of lofty values or a catchy vision statement. It’s a set of instincts, the ones that guide decision-making in the heat of the moment. It’s that critical choice a PM makes on a Thursday afternoon, 2 hours before a steering committee, and 4 hours before the weekend starts, when they realize a key deliverable is going to be delayed, or QA found a new bug in the version we just delivered. In a protectionis...

  At around 15–20 project managers, the ground shifts beneath your feet. You aren’t leading PMs anymore, you’re leading PM Leads. It’s a transition that catches even the most seasoned leaders off guard, mostly because the skills that got you here, technical precision and tactical oversight, suddenly become the very things that hold you back. At this scale, your success isn’t measured by how well you manage tasks. It’s measured by how well you manage intent . Context Over Instructions Leadership in this space is about providing context, not giving orders. You’ll find yourself spending significantly more time explaining the "why" than the "what." You invest your energy in calibration: defining what "good" looks like, deciding where acceptable risk ends, and clarifying exactly when an issue needs to reach your desk. This requires a new kind of discipline: the power of restraint. Not every mistake needs your correction. In fact, some mistakes must run their ...

After scaling your team and building trust, a new challenge emerges: multiple programs, multiple OEMs, each with their own priorities, expectations, and timelines. Suddenly, your team isn’t just managing ten projects, it is managing ten projects for three different OEMs , spanning legacy programs, new launches, and proof-of-concept initiatives, all competing for attention. Everything feels urgent, and pressure comes from all directions. This is the stage where many PMs and even experienced managers get stuck. When every customer thinks their program is the most important, it’s easy to default to reactive mode, answering the loudest voice, firefighting whichever crisis surfaces first. The result is chaos, misaligned priorities, and exhausted teams. The first step to handling this is objective prioritization . Not “I feel like this matters more,” but systematic evaluation of impact, risk, and dependencies . Questions that help: Which program has the most critical deadlines for certi...

  Scaling from three project managers to ten changes everything. Suddenly, you can’t attend every meeting. You have more than one or two OEMs to serve, often across several different programs, some legacy, some the next production production, some at the POC stage. You don’t see every email. You start hearing about problems second-hand, and that is deeply uncomfortable. Up to this point, visibility was total. You knew the customer mood. You knew the weak spots. You knew when something felt off before it showed up in a report. Scaling breaks that illusion immediately. Many people fail at this stage because they cling to control. They jump back into details, override decisions, and reinsert themselves into conversations that no longer require them. The message sent is rarely intentional, but it is received clearly: trust is conditional. The outcome is predictable. The team stops owning outcomes. Decisions are delayed. Escalations increase. People start managing upward instead of m...

Managing a team of three project managers working with a single customer, like Audi, sounds simple. It isn’t. In many ways, it is one of the most exposed positions a PM can have. When the team is small, there is nowhere to hide. Every PM is visible. Every weakness is amplified. Every success or failure reflects directly on how the team is run. There are no buffers, no layers, and no place to dilute accountability. At this stage, the work is hands-on by necessity. Details are reviewed. Customer meetings are attended. Coaching happens in real time. The goal is not scale yet, it is craftsmanship. You are building a shared language: how to escalate, how to report, how to say no without damaging trust. The biggest challenge here is alignment. Three PMs can easily become three different voices to the same customer. That is unacceptable. Consistency matters more than creativity. The team must sound like one voice, even when individual styles differ. This exposure becomes even sharper when...

  Hello, I’m Yair Han. I spent my days at the intersection of AI, automotive safety, and high-stakes program leadership. This blog is where I step back from the roadmaps to explore the philosophy and logic behind the technology and leadership. Pleased to e-meet you. With over 15 years of experience at the forefront of AI-driven mobility and safety-critical systems, I am a Senior Technical Leader dedicated to bridging the gap between complex engineering and global business success. My career is defined by navigating the high-stakes intersection of hardware, software, and automotive regulation, having led over 30 global production programs from initial proof-of-concept to mass market Start of Production (SOP). As a Senior Director at Mobileye, I have built and mentored multidisciplinary divisions of over 40 professionals, fostering a culture of execution excellence and radical transparency. I specialize in "rescue operations", restoring trust with global OEMs like Ford and Audi...

Project management looks clean on paper. Gantt charts, milestones, KPIs, risk matrices. Automotive project management looks similar, until you actually do one. In general terms, project management skills are well known, scope definition, planning, communication, risk management, stakeholder alignment, and execution discipline. These are universal and transferable across industries. Enough pages where written about that to circle the earth. Automotive project management si similar, but it doesn’t forgive shallow understanding and it amplifies every weakness. Automotive projects live at the intersection of hardware, software, regulation, and long-term liability . A delay is not just a delay, it can mean missing a model year. A design flaw isn’t a patch, it’s a millions of US Dollars recall. Decisions made early echo for a decade. What does that mean for a project manager? First, process literacy is non-negotiable . ASPICE, ISO 26262, PPAP, SOTIF, these aren’t buzzwords. They shape ho...

Leadership is one of those words everyone uses, few define clearly, and almost nobody agrees on. Over the years, I’ve seen leadership described as vision, authority, inspiration, decisiveness, empathy, courage, or simply “getting things done through people.” The truth is uncomfortable: leadership is all of these, depending on the moment, and sometimes none of them when you least expect it. At its core, leadership is not a role. It’s not a title on a business card or a box in an org chart. Leadership is a relationship. It exists only when other people choose, consciously or not, to follow your direction, trust your judgment, or rely on your decisions. What makes someone a leader in general? Three things stand out consistently. First, clarity . People don’t follow perfection, they follow clarity. A leader doesn’t need all the answers, but must be able to articulate where we’re going, why it matters, and what “good” looks like. In uncertain environments, clarity is calming. It gives pe...