From Geek to Star #36 - 2026, Time to SHINE!

If you missed the previous episodes, you can access them online here.

🗓️ This Week – Episode 36: your time to SHINE!

First of all, I would like to wish you all the best for 2026 to you and your loved ones! We often forget what is most important in life until we miss it: health for example, we mostly remember how incredible it is to be in good health… when we fall sick. So let's remember Gandalf's quote “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”, whether in our personal life or in our professional life. For me, at 51 years old, I feel that being more intentional on my health is getting more and more important if I want to continue to be able to take care of my family in the long run, as well as having different options for my career as technology is evolving so fast. 

As we enter 2026, it feels like a good moment to take a step back first before looking at the horizon.

Over the past few years, I’ve observed that tech functions have evolved, although not at the same pace across companies and industries - startups often leading the charge as usual. What used to be primarily about delivery, execution and systems has increasingly become about impact, influence, and judgement.

This newsletter is about making sense of that shift and offering a compass to navigate what comes next.

A short look back: how tech functions have evolved

A few trends have shaped tech roles in recent years from my perspective:

• From "code monkeys” to builders / enablers.

  In many traditional non tech-driven companies, people in tech departments have long been considered somewhat like “code monkeys”(in French would be “pisseurs de code", pardon the slang but very revealing for the French audience) that you could interchange. 

  Where C-level thought you could just replace a developer with another one cheaper, outsourced, offshored for example. The danger with AI has become greater in such organisations, where C-level may think you can now just get rid of most developers. Which will become true if the mindset of tech teams are still in a  “support function” mode, waiting to execute. 

  Tech leaders and tech teams need to think about how to be now embedded in value creation or optimisation, revenue generation, and customer experience. Some startups I know have erased the frontier between Product Owner, Software Developers, QA, Ops, defining their people as end to end builders able to discuss with clients, capture needs, turn them into user stories, develop them, add automated tests and ship to production - all of these augmented with GenAI coding assistants and with human upskilling.
  

• From delivery to decision-making.
  
  Tech leaders are increasingly expected to weigh trade-offs, manage risk, and explain consequences, not just deliver solutions. 2025 has seen both strong investment into AI but also challenges by companies into getting concrete effects, especially in large scale companies. 

  There is no magic: large organisations have complicated (often badly documented) processes, technical debts with a spaghetti type of interdependencies, and a complex human dynamic where change management is often overlooked. 

• There is an opportunity for Tech leaders to step up and give leadership an understanding on what the way forward may be.
  

• From scarce skills to amplified leverage.
  
  AI, automation, and platforms can reduce dramatically some execution bottlenecks, while dramatically increasing the importance of where and how effort is applied. Small tech startups - often led by a founder with a tech profile - are really reaping the benefits of AI at a x10 scale. Large organisations not yet, again it is where as a tech leader you have an opportunity in 2026 to show a realistic but ambitious way forward.
  

• From local optimisation to system thinking.
  
  Organisations are learning (sometimes painfully) that optimising one team, one system, or one KPI rarely leads to overall success. A global thinking is needed to paint the big picture and then identify the steps that can be taken. It is no surprise, if you are in a tech-driven company, leadership will be more naturally geared towards such a global approach. If you are in a more traditional company, there will need to be much more education, while managing the impatience of your leadership on “but I was told AI can do amazing things rapidly!”

Is AI pushing a “Shift Left” of tech roles?

We often talk about “Shift Left” in engineering: moving testing, security, or quality earlier in the SDLC. I think that AI may be doing something similar to roles and expectations around tech jobs.

What I increasingly observe is:

• Junior and mid-level execution tasks being accelerated or partially automated / replaced

• Decisions, framing, and problem definition moving earlier

• Senior tech leaders being pulled upstream into strategy, governance, and ethics discussions - if they have relevant thoughts on this.

In other words, value is shifting left toward:

• Understanding the problem, in a holistic way

• Framing the right questions and making sense of the complexity

• Anticipating second-order effects

• Aligning stakeholders early, mastering the tech aspects but making them understandable for non tech leaders and audience.

AI doesn’t reduce the need for tech leaders. It raises the bar. For example, in re-inventing the SDLC in a world of skilled end to end engineers augmented with AI, starting from the business framing down to the production environments and with AI agents triggered through the SDLC.

SHINE as a compass for 2026

This is where SHINE comes in. Over the past year, in this newsletter From Geek to Star, I have shared this framework I call SHINE as a practical way to think about sustainable tech leadership:

• S as Soft skills: communication, influence, facilitation, trust
  

• H as Hard skills: continue to build up your technical strength either as individual contributor or manager, augmented with AI
  

• I as Industry knowledge: understanding how value is created in your sector
  

• N as Network: relationships across functions, levels, and ecosystems
  

• E as Experience: pattern recognition, judgement, lived complexity. Your unique perspective that no other human or machine can replace.

SHINE is not a checklist. It’s a balance to grow as you move into your career and imbalance is often what holds tech leaders back. It can help you to decide where to be intentional in your personal growth and to prioritize your upskilling and actions to navigate your career in this fast-changing times.

A simple SHINE self-assessment (you can reuse this)

Here’s a lightweight way to assess where you stand today as of early 2026. Just take a piece of paper and draw out a pentagon with a rough scale of 1 to 5 on each axis.

Rate yourself from 1 (low) to 5 (strong) for each dimension.

S for your Soft skills

• Can I influence decisions without authority?

• Can I facilitate alignment across conflicting viewpoints?

• Do non-tech leaders seek my perspective?

H for your Hard skills

• Do I still have credible technical depth?

• Can I reason about AI beyond tools and hype?

• Do I understand architectural trade-offs?

I for your Industry knowledge

• Do I understand my company’s business model?

• Can I connect tech decisions to revenue, cost, risk, or customer impact?

• Could I explain industry dynamics to a newcomer?

N for your Network

• Do I have trusted relationships outside tech?

• Can I pick up the phone to unblock situations?

• Am I exposed to perspectives beyond my organisation?
  

E for your Experience

• Have I lived through complexity and ambiguity?

• Do I recognise patterns faster than before?

• Do people rely on my judgement, not just my expertise?
  

👉 The goal is not to score 5 everywhere. 

👉 The insight lies in where you are strong and where you are exposed. 

This framework is one I regularly use in mentoring and leadership conversations.

A small but important change for 2026 about this newsletter

Starting this year, From Geek to Star will move to a bi-weekly cadence. More space for reflection, integration, and meaningful conversations on my side that I will bring into the bi-weekly newsletter to keep it relevant.

2026 will likely be another year of acceleration. But acceleration without direction rarely leads to impact: it looks more like the movie “Fast and Furious” except that in real life people don't get out of big crashes without a single scratch! 

My hope is that SHINE can serve as a compass, helping you navigate not just what you do, but who you are becoming as a tech leader or as an impactful individual contributor..

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You

Looking at your piece of paper with your SHINE as of January 2026: do you feel that in 2025 you moved the needle on one of the dimension? Which one and how?

Reply to this email, I read every note.

Follow me on LinkedIn for more reflections and “behind-the-scenes” thinking between newsletters. Don’t hesitate to comment or reshare,  it’s one of the best ways to grow your SHINE 🌟. If you want to know more about how I can support you or your teams to thrive in a tech career in this AI-age, have a look at my offerings here.  

P.S. Referral Pilot 🚀

Forward this email to one engineer or tech friend who could also benefit from this newsletter: sharing is caring - a little gesture can go a long way to strengthen bonds.

✨ May the SHINE be with you!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward