How being a music director and a technical leader actually relate

People hear “music director” and “tech leader” and assume I’m stretching for a LinkedIn parable. Cue the orchestra / cue the sprint. Conduct the team. Whatever.

I’m not doing that. I’m saying the jobs share structure, even when the artifacts look nothing alike.

Both are program management in a noisy room

As an MD in musical theater, my job is not “play pretty music.” It is keeping the musical program coherent: cuts, vamps, cues, call times, the version of the truth that survives tech week when the “final” cue sheet is already out of date before it was sent out. Texts, email threads, reprints. I’ve written about that splinter elsewhere.

As a technical leader, my job is not “type the fastest.” It is keeping a technical program coherent: priorities, dependencies, what “done” means, which fire is actually the fire, and what we will not pretend is fine. Slack, tickets, docs that lie by being stale.

Different mediums. Same failure mode: truth fragments across channels until nobody can find the downbeat.

Listening is a technical skill

In the pit, if you only hear your own part, you miss the stage. Breath, footsteps, a late set piece, a singer who needs time. You adjust without turning the adjustment into chaos.

In engineering leadership, if you only hear your own stack preference, you miss the constraint that actually matters: a flaky sync path, a customer promise, a security door someone left open for convenience. You adjust without turning the week into vibes-driven thrash.

Listening is not softness. It is instrumentation.

Version control without calling it that

Shows have versions whether you name them or not. Cut A, vamp B, “the Tuesday ending.” Good MDs make the current version legible to the people who need it. Bad weeks are archaeology: which PDF, which text, which memory.

Good technical leaders do the same for systems and decisions. Decision logs, gates, “we are not shipping that until hygiene exits.” Not because paperwork is holy. Because future-you will otherwise invent a past that never existed.

Leadership under irreversible time

A musical number happens in time you cannot Ctrl-Z. A release window is softer than a downbeat and harder than a blog draft. Both punish the fantasy that you can keep every option open forever.

That is why I care about thin slices, seats earned on a bench, and humans owning dangerous verbs when agents are in the loop. The pit taught me that “we’ll fix it in the next take” sometimes means “there is no next take tonight.” Engineering taught me that “we’ll pin versions later” sometimes means “later never clocks in.”

What does not transfer

Theater hierarchy is not a template for org charts. Art is not a substitute for incident response. Applause is not a KPI. If you flatten everything into “it’s all storytelling,” you get posters, not programs.

The transfer is craft under constraint: keep the living program honest while the room changes.

Why I keep doing both

Because each one makes the other less abstract. Tech weeks make me allergic to fake “final.” Shipping makes me allergic to chaos that could have been a checklist. Four-hour commutes and late deploys both ask the same rude question: is this worth the cost?

The answer is almost always the same: YES. It’s worth it.
Instruments, not vibes. In either room.

~ Trish