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A collection of inspiring resources related to engineering management and tech leadership

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Table of Contents

About this list

Items:

  • 🧰 : list of resources
  • 📖 : book
  • 🎞 : video/movie extract/movie
  • 🎤 : slides/presentation

Books

More than any other field, management is full of fluffy books that could be summarized in one 100-word article. That being said, there's a number of excellent books, listed below.

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders

📖 Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders is hands down my preferred management book.

This book made me truly understand what empowering local decision means. In particular, I liked how the author explains that the usual chain of command requires information to go up the chain, and decision to go down, which is insanely inefficient.

It provides great tools for managers to help their team members come up with their own decisions, in particular the notion of deliberate action. There's a also a presentation that talks about the main concepts the author developed.

There are numerous cheesy management books and this is not one of them. The narration is great as well and the explanations are short, and to the point.

You can find a short summary in video here

“Control without competence is chaos.”

— L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!

Other generalist books

  • 📖 The Advantage, Enhanced Edition: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business, Patrick M. Lencioni.
    • The only way for people to embrace a message is to hear it over a period of time, in a variety of different situations, and preferably from different people. That’s why great leaders see themselves as Chief Reminding Officers as much as anything else.
    • The best way to do cascading communication is face-to-face and live. Seeing a leader and hearing the tone of his or her voice is critical for employees, as is being able to ask a question or two.
    • But then again, most organizations are unhealthy precisely because they aren’t doing the basic things, which require discipline, persistence, and follow-through more than sophistication or intelligence.
  • 📖 Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager: "Read hilarious stories with serious lessons that Michael Lopp extracts from his varied and sometimes bizarre experiences as a manager at Apple, Pinterest, Palantir, Netscape, Symantec, Slack, and Borland. Many of the stories first appeared in primitive form in Lopp’s perennially popular blog, Rands in Repose."
  • 📖 Oren Ellenbogen, Leading Snowflakes: the Engineering Manager Handbook: some truly great content and concrete ideas to move from maker to manager mode, code reviewing your management decisions, delegating tasks without losing quality or visibility.
  • 📖 Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success: "This gem is a joy to read, and it shatters the myth that greed is the path to success.", Robert Sutton.
  • 📖 Ken Blanchard, Lead Like Jesus: Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time.
  • 📖 Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management. A landmark book by Intel CEO Andy Grove. Introduced many of the management best practices such as 1-1, OKR.
    • Managerial leverage measures the impact of what managers do to increase the output of their teams.
    • You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.
    • Every hour of your day should be spent increasing the output or the value of the output of the people whom you’re responsible for.
    • A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.
    • A genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).
    • A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.
    • League standings are kept by team, not by individual. Business—and this means not just the business of commerce but the business of education, the business of government, the business of medicine—is a team activity. And, always, it takes a team to win.
    • Your decision-making depends finally on how well you comprehend the facts and issues facing your business. This is why information-gathering is so important in a manager’s life.
    • The lack of a decision is the same as a negative decision; no green light is a red light, and work can stop for a whole organization.
    • Delegation without follow-through is abdication.
    • Any decision be worked out and reached at the lowest competent level. The reason is that this is where it will be made by people who are closest to the situation and know the most about it.
    • Self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled.
    • A successful MBO [management by objective] system needs only to answer two questions: 1.  Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.) 2.  How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones, or key results).
    • The one thing an MBO system should provide par excellence is focus. This can only happen if we keep the number of objectives small. In practice, this is rare, and here, as elsewhere, we fall victim to our inability to say “no”—in this case, to too many objectives. We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing. A few extremely well-chosen objectives impart a clear message about what we say “yes” to and what we say “no” to—which is what we must have if an MBO system is to work.
    • Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, “Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.” Or, we might say, on a balancing act to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage.
    • I would like to propose Grove’s Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.
    • When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.
    • That variable is the task-relevant maturity (TRM) of the subordinates, which is a combination of the degree of their achievement orientation and readiness to take responsibility, as well as their education, training, and experience.
    • When the TRM is low, the most effective approach is one that offers very precise and detailed instructions, wherein the supervisor tells the subordinate what needs to be done, when, and how: in other words, a highly structured approach. As the TRM of the subordinate grows, the most effective style moves from the structured to one more given to communication, emotional support, and encouragement.
    • The responsibility for teaching the subordinate must be assumed by his supervisor, and not paid for by the customers of his organization, internal or external.
    • At all times you should force yourself to assess performance, not potential.
    • A manager generally has two ways to raise the level of individual performance of his subordinates: by increasing motivation, the desire of each person to do his job well, and by increasing individual capability, which is where training comes in.
  • 📖 Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable.
  • 📖 Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, Laszlo Bock. A pretty interesting description of Google's processes. A bit long at times.

There are some other more specific books quoted below.

Book reading lists

What is engineering management?

Here are some generic resources:

General management resources

Tal Bereznitskey's awesome definition for managing engineers:

Hire motivated people. Trust them. Set high standards for everything. Lead by example. Get out of their way and let them be the heroes of the day. That’s it.

Articles

Tools

Engineering Management Resources

This is a list of inspiring articles related to engineering management. Those are usually short and concise articles that are packed with inspiring and concrete ideas. They have shaped my own management practice, and I hope they will inspire you as well.

I don't necessarily agree with everything listed here. Actually, you'll see that some of those articles have diametrically opposed opinions. I do believe those thought-provoking resources will help you in your manager journey.

1-1

Antipatterns

Biases

Cognitive biases don't only apply to hiring... They can impact performance reviews, 1-1, team meetings, even small talk with colleagues.

Career growth and job ladder

Examples job ladder/career development matrix:

Code reviews

Communication

Conflict resolution

Decisions

Delegation

The 70/10/80 Principle of delegation: “Find someone who can do what you do at 70% the success rate. Teach them the extra 10% and be okay with 80%.”

Diversity and inclusion

Emotional Quotient (EQ)

Employee handbook

Escalations

First-time manager

First days on the job

  • Will Larson, Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering.
    • Durable improvements depend on creating systems that create changes, not performing tactical actions that create the ephemeral appearance of improvement.
    • Figure out if something is really wrong and needs immediate attention.
    • Shadow customer meetings, partner meetings or user testing.
    • Find your business analytics and how to query them.
    • Shadow existing interviews, onboarding and closing calls.
    • Kickoff engineering brand efforts.
    • Build a trivial change and deploy it.

Feedback and performance

  • 📖 Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss
  • 📖 Amazon.com: Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson.
    • So the first step to achieving the results we really want is to fix the problem of believing that others are the source of all that ails us. It’s our dogmatic conviction that “if we could just fix those losers, all would go better” that keeps us from taking action that could lead to dialogue and progress. Which is why it’s no surprise that those who are best at dialogue tend to turn this logic around. They believe the best way to work on “us” is to start with “me.”
    • Respect is like air. As long as it’s present, nobody thinks about it. But if you take it away, it’s all that people can think about.
    • “One dull pencil is worth six sharp minds.” Don’t leave your hard work to memory. If you’ve gone to the effort to complete a crucial conversation, don’t fritter away all the meaning you created by trusting your memories. Write down the details of conclusions, decisions, and assignments.
  • Firing people: Zach Holman's talk about his experience being fired from Github offers some great insights into a process that is rarely talked about.
  • It’s Never Too Early to Fire, Andreessen Horowitz.
  • A Primer on Giving Critical Feedback
  • Feedback goes both ways: Tool: Try Google’s Manager Feedback Survey
  • Negative feedback antipatterns
  • Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time: a good contrarian take on formal performance reviews
  • The Open Feedback Circle (OFC), a great idea by Padmini Pyapali.
    • We met once a month, sat around a table, and shared feedback with each other in front of our other teammates. This gathering took feedback exchange from being a biannual activity we dreaded to a monthly ritual we looked forward to.
    • Vulnerability Cultivates Trust

Hiring

General

  • 📖 Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People, Johanna Rothman. A solution-oriented book.
    • Train your interview team to apply a limited-consensus approach to hiring. When groups use limited consensus, not everyone may agree with the decision, but each person should be satisfied enough with a particular candidate’s suitability not to block the decision to hire him or her.
    • What if the vetoer is someone I don’t want to keep in the organization?” The answer to this is simple: In the interview process, only involve employees whose work you respect and value. If an employee isn’t successful in his or her technical position, don’t make that employee part of the interview team.
    • Make sure members of your team interview an internal candidate the same way they would interview an external candidate.
    • Know why you’re hiring more people. Define your problems to define your hiring strategy.
    • Sometimes, the main reason a hiring manager doesn’t hire a candidate is that he or she has a gut feeling that the person just won’t fit well with the culture. But a “gut feeling” is not a good reason not to hire someone, so train yourself to articulate culture-fit differences.
    • I personally do not consider certification to mean anything much when I am hiring someone for a technical position. Because the knowledge tested is functional-skills book knowledge, make sure you understand what the person must do to maintain his or her certification and the value of that certification to your environment.
    • Too often, internal recruiters look for tool and technology expertise or for advanced academic degrees, rather than for functional skill or for product-domain experience.
    • If you feel the need to take notes, take them on paper, never on a computer. My reason for this is that when you use a computer, you have to sit behind a screen, which creates a barrier between you and the candidate.
    • Promising an unconditional promotion is not just risky; it is stupid. Circumstances within the company can change; the employee may not perform up to expectations; the economy may tank.
  • A good example of offer letter from eShares.
  • We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else, Jeff Atwood.
  • How to Hire: one of the best articles about hiring.
  • The hiring post: another truly awesome post about hiring by Thomas Ptacek.
  • This is why you never end up hiring good developers
  • The single most sure-fire hiring decision you will ever make is about establishing an intern program.
  • Engineering Management - Hiring explains why hiring should be your top priority.
  • When we only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest
  • How to Hire, Patty McCord (built HR function at Netflix).
  • Trouble hiring senior engineers? It's probably you.

Hiring: diversity and bias

Feel free to also checkout the general diversity section.

Hiring: interviews

Hiring: questions

Hiring: process

Hiring: sourcing

Hiring: quotes

If you can 'hire tough,' you can 'manage easy'.

Sue Tetzlaff, The Employee Experience: A Capstone Guide to Peak Performance

I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.

Lawrence Bossidy, GE

I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way.

Lee Iacocca, Ford

You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world... but it requires people to make the dream a reality.

Walt Disney

Hire character. Train skill.

Peter Schutz, Porsche

In technology, it's about the people. Getting the best people, retaining them, nurturing a creative environment, and helping to find a way to innovate.

Marissa Mayer

I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.

Jeff Bezos

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.

Michael Jordan, American former professional basketball player

Often the best solution to a management problem is the right person.

Edwin Booz

Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don't have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it's true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.

Warren Buffet

One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.

Peter Drucker

If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

Red Adair

Incident prevention and response (on-call, outages)

Learning, retro, postmortem

Quotes:

  • "Excellence is achieved by the mastery of fundamentals", Vince Lombardi, considered to be one of the best coaches in NFL history.

Management style

  • Humane Development: "we are humans working with humans to develop software for the benefit of humans."
  • Leadership is making a comeback : interesting article that proposes a model where the leader is neither a servant nor a hero, but a host.
  • Management Philosophy
  • 12 "Manager READMEs" from Silicon Valley’s Top Tech Companies
  • 🎞 What is your philosophy on leadership? How do you inspire your team to do their best?: beautiful sequence between Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) and François Pienaar (Matt Damon).
  • Why Software Development Requires Servant Leaders
  • Andreessen Horowitz, Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO
    • Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.
  • Excerpts from One From Many, Dee Hock, Zack Kanter on Twitter.
    • Your first responsibility as a manager is to manage yourself: your integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words and acts.
    • The second responsibility is to manage those who have authority over us.
    • The third responsibility is to manage your peers: without their respect and confidence, nothing can be accomplished.
    • The fourth responsibility is to manage those whom we have authority.
    • You can't manage your bosses, peers, regulators etc. But you can understand them, motivate them, influence them, forgive them.
    • "It is from failure that amazing growth and grace so often come, provided only that one can recognise it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and try again. True leadership presumes a standard quite beyond human perfectibility and that is quite alright, for joy and satisfaction are in the pursuit of an objective, not in its realization."

Quote:

  • "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.", Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  • "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.", Peter Drucker

Meetings

Mentoring

Mindset and attitude

  • Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want
  • Shreyas Doshi on Twitter: "Good managers, what they do, how they think & act
    • Good managers are skilled at asking questions that give their team members a new perspective on the problem and reach the right solution on their own.
    • Good managers address context first, then content.
    • Good managers know that, above all else, they are agents of their company. Their default mode is to make and facilitate company-optimal choices.
    • Good managers know that fixing broader company culture is an important part of their role as a designated leader within the company.
    • Good managers understand that the long game is all about people.
    • Good managers don’t have just one go-to management style nor do they have a notion of “THE ideal employee”.
    • Good managers can discern good intent from bad.

Warren Buffet, "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."

Motivation

Quotes:

  • "The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now", Chinese proverb.
  • "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are made for.", John A Shedd.

Onboarding new team members

Organization structure

  • Martin Casado, Hire a VP of Engineering on the Andreessen Horowitz blog
    • The most important function of a VP of engineering is to build out the engineering team and set a startup’s engineering culture.
    • Competent engineering management should therefore be able to push the team towards more practical, incremental designs that can garner useful external feedback quickly — without compromising the long-term generality of the system. The VP’s role here is not producing the architecture, but ensuring that incremental release is a real requirement in the design process.
    • Strong engineering management tends to give their teams enough ownership and latitude that they are happy and fulfilled in driving the product forward.
  • AVC, VP Engineering Vs CTO
  • Mark Suster, Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering?
  • 🎤 CTO vs VP Engineering Balancing Innovation, Bryan Cantrill, Jason Hoffman
  • Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals
    • Engineering managers in this model had little responsibility beyond the career development of the people they managed.
    • There was no single person accountable for the engineering team’s delivery or who could negotiate prioritization of work at an equivalent level of responsibility.
    • Autonomy requires alignment. Company priorities must be defined by leadership. Autonomy does not mean teams get to do whatever they want.
    • Business units, departments, teams, and managers more effectively communicate organization structure roles and responsibilities than Spotify’s synonyms and are not attached to a way of working that failed their creator.
  • Independence,autonomy,too many small teams
    • Every autonomous team is expected to generate direct business value all by itself, without a lot of overlap with other teams.
    • The team should be able to meets its goals independently (i.e. without reliance on or interference from other teams).
    • Coordination, also known as alignment, communication, shared roadmap, Gantt chart and many other positive sounding names, is the arch-enemy of the autonomous team.

Production and productivity

  • The Toyota Way, Wikipedia
    • Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.
    • Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.
    • Use "pull" systems to avoid overproduction.
    • Level out the workload
    • Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time
    • Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment.
    • Use visual control so no problems are hidden.
    • Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.
    • Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.
    • Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy.
    • Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.
    • Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation
    • Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly
    • Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen)

Personal productivity

In terms of software, I can't recommend Things enough (Mac and iOS only). It is a delightful piece of software that gets out of the way and lets you focus on your tasks.

Planning (roadmap, goal setting, OKR, etc.)

A goal without a plan is just a wish. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. Francis Bacon

Presentations, design and public speaking

Some great examples of presentations:

Problem solving

See my engineering-management section about problem solving

Processes for engineering

@samkottler: No amount of process will ensure the right work is getting done.

Product management

Project management

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline. — Nolan Bushnell

Release management

Remote teams

Team vision

"Starting with the why" is one of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People's best chapters.

Technical strategy

Team culture

Those are considered classics:

culturecodes is a repository of culture deck from companies (including the ones above).

Scaling an organization

Strategy

Shameless plug here, two presentations I contributed to:

  • 🎤 Amazon: the hidden empire
  • 🎤 Apple: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft
  • Michael Porter's generic strategies (Wikipedia)
  • Steve Jobs explaining why you should start from the customers, and go backward (video 🎞). He makes the point that stopping the OpenDoc project was the right thing to do because it was a technology without any customer.
  • Can Do Vs Must Do , AVC. "Doing a startup is like playing a video game. Each level requires you to master one thing and once you do that, you level up and then there is a new thing to master."
  • "Waterline principle" from Bill Gore: "Think of being on a ship, and imagine that any decision gone bad will blow a hole in the side of the ship. If you blow a hole above the waterline (where the ship won’t take on water and possibly sink), you can patch the hole, learn from the experience, and sail on. But if you blow a hole below the waterline, you can find yourself facing gushers of water pouring in, pulling you toward the ocean floor. And if it’s a big enough hole, you might go down really fast, just like some of the financial firm catastrophes of 2008. To be clear, great enterprises do make big bets, but they avoid big bets that could blow holes below the waterline.", How We Might Fall.

Team dynamics

  • Shields Down, Rands in Repose
    • Boredom in its many forms is a major contributor to resignations, but the truth is the list of contributing factors to shield weakening is immense.
    • Every moment as a leader is an opportunity to either strengthen or weaken shields.

Training

  • Great developers are raised, not hired
    • Take some money, energy, time that you spend on recruiting and invest it in teaching your best developers mentoring skills.
    • Adjust your interview process and give a chance to candidates that are not good enough yet, but are eager to learn and have a growth mindset.
    • Relax “hard requirements” in your job ads to avoid filtering out impostors.

Work ethics & work/life balance

Writing

➡️ See also my professional-programming list

Movies

TV Shows

Netflix's Chef's table profiles a couple world-renown chef. The kitchen world bears a lot of similarities with management. In the season two, I especially recommend episode 1 and 3:

  • Alex Atala's story shows that you need to constantly reinvent and disrupt yourself.
  • Dominique Crenn explains how she was given ownership over her work in her first kitchen experience (where she was basically given just a dish name, a list of ingredients, and was expected to invent the recipe with no kitchen training). She replicated that in her own kitchen.

Keeping up-to-date: blogs and newsletters

Here are some blogs and newsletter I follow.

Newsletter

Blogs

  • Hacker News: mandatory if you want to stay abreast of what's going in tech. There are some good management articles from time to time as well. Since it can be a pretty huge time sink, I subscribe to a curation of the top articles instead (RSS feed here).

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