Xavier Bertels

I hold people to a high bar, especially at work. That means I get disappointed. A lot.

Not because I expect perfection, or think everyone should move mountains. Just . . . a basic level of care about the work. Forward motion. Trying.

Some people take the opposite approach: they keep expectations low. That way, when someone does something great, it feels like a win. Fewer letdowns. More pleasant surprises.

I’ve thought a lot about that tradeoff. It sounds emotionally efficient. But I’m not sure it sits right with me.

To expect more from people—even if it means getting let down—is, in a weird way, a kind of optimism. It says you think people can do meaningful, thoughtful work. It speaks to the human potential you believe is there.

I guess the part I’m still working on is how to deal with the gap between what I hope for and what actually happens.

When all you have is an LLM, then all you see are language problems. And while many things are language problems, there are many more things that look like language problems that are actually people problems, design problems, math problems, economics problems, or incentive problems, to name a few.

Even with the enormous help of AI, we must still follow the problem—solution chain and first be very clear about the problem we’re solving, and then work on an appropriate solution.

We’ve become so obsessed with process in the product world that it’s making me a little dizzy sometimes. There’s an almost endless debate on social media and at meet-ups about the best way to do this or that, about waterfall, agile, scrum, and god forbid: SAFe. Especially at bigger orgs this seems to be a real topic.

What happened to two engineers, a designer and a PM simply trying to have at it and ship the best possible software they can?

Sit in a room, jump on a call, do whatever you need to do. Simply ship software.

Every flat org I’ve encountered has invisible mountains in the form of paychecks twice as heavy for some as for others. But that’s not what truly bothers me.

What truly bothers me is that senior leaders frequently demand from their teams standards they themselves don’t consistently uphold. They criticize others for not communicating proactively while comfortably hiding in their own information bubbles.

This is the authority trap. I’ve seen it almost everywhere and it’s deeply toxic. It breeds resentment, fractures trust, and slowly poisons team cohesion.

The solution is simple: leaders must visibly practice the behaviours they demand from everyone else. You can’t just point to transparency and accountability as occasional virtues when something isn’t going your way. They must be daily habits.

Anything less isn’t leadership.

It’s hypocrisy.

“When a faucet drips 1ml of water every 5 seconds, how much water have you lost at the end of the week?”

That’s the assignment we got as eleven year olds. Safe to say most of our class got it wrong because they couldn’t believe the number was so big. It was a great experience to learn to trust the numbers over your gut feeling.

A common trope in business is that reputation is gained over years and lost in a second. While it’s certainly true that there are spectacular examples of instant reputation loss, I’ve found that more often reputation slowly drips away. One millilitre at a time. Until the vat is empty. So when we’ve sprung a leak, it’s often best to fix it immediately.