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Table of Contents

About this list

Items:

  • 🧰: this resource is a list of resources
  • 📖: bool
  • 🎞: video/movie extract/moovie

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

Other books

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

  • Titles are Toxic, Rands in Repose. A pretty interesting take on titles.
  • Engineering Growth Framework, Medium pulls back the curtain on how they do career growth.
  • Square’s Growth Framework for Engineers and Engineering Managers
    • Have two tracks
    • Becoming a manager is not a promotion
    • Organized into two major sections: Scope & Impact and Behaviors
    • No strict minimum requirements for years of experience at any given level
    • Promotions are descriptive not prescriptive
    • Promotion decisions are structured and rigorous
  • Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
    • I’ve chosen to cultivate a path for myself that enables me to dig into complex technical and product problem spaces and help lead technical and strategic direction for my organization, as an engineer but not a manager.

Code reviews

Communication

Conflict resolution

Decisions

Delegation

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

Hiring

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

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

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.

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

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)

Onboarding new team members

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 (reviews, OKR, etc.)

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

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.

Programming languages

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).