- About this list
- Books
- What is engineering management?
- Engineering Management Topics
- 1-1
- Antipatterns
- Biases
- Career growth and job ladder
- Code reviews
- Communication
- Conflict resolution
- Decisions
- Delegation
- Delivery
- Diversity and inclusion
- Emotional Quotient (EQ)
- Employee handbook
- Escalations
- First-time manager
- First days on the job
- Feedback and performance
- Hiring
- Incident prevention and response (on-call, outages)
- Learning, retro, postmortem
- Management style
- Meetings
- Mentoring
- Mindset and attitude
- Motivation
- Onboarding new team members
- Organization structure
- Production and productivity
- Personal productivity
- Planning (roadmap, goal setting, KPI, OKR, etc.)
- Presentations, design and public speaking
- Problem solving
- Processes for engineering
- Product management
- Project management
- Release management
- Remote teams
- Team vision
- Technical strategy
- Team culture
- Scaling an organization
- Strategy
- Team dynamics
- Training
- Work ethics & work/life balance
- Workshop facilitation
- Writing
- Other sources
- Keeping up-to-date: blogs and newsletters
Items:
- 🧰 : list of resources
- 📖 : book
- 🎞 : video/movie extract/movie
- 🎤 : slides/presentation
- 🎧 : podcast
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 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!
- 📖 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.
- 📖 The Manager's Path , Camille Fournier. A very practical book with lots of down-to-earth advices.
There are some other more specific books quoted below.
- Jason Evanish's list (Lighthouse founder) is quite comprehensive.
Here are some generic resources:
- Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management
- Lars Dalgaard, Thoughts on Building Weatherproof Companies: while originally aimed at startups CEOs, this article from Andreessen Horowitz's blog is a very inspiring read on what it takes to scale your team.
- 14 Points for Management by W. Edwards Deming.
- Keith Rabois on the Role of a COO, How to Hire and Why Transparency Matters includes some nice management nuggets.
- 🧰 ksindi/managers-playbook: Heuristics for effective management
- The Evolution of Management, Kate Matsudaira, ACM Queue. A great compilation of advices for all management levels.
- Principles of Management a nice introduction for all management aspects for new managers.
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.
- The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development
- Mistakes of the First Twenty-five Years, in which Warren Buffet describes the "institutional imperative", or how an institution will amplify (not resist) a bad manager's irrational decisions.
- 44 engineering management lessons from the cofounder of RethinkDB. Very high-level, a pretty good summary.
- 21 management things I learned at Imgur
- The Rands Test, Rands in Repose. The equivalent of The Joel Test for management.
- Do you have a 1:1?
- Do you have a team meeting?
- Do you have status reports?
- Can you say No to your boss?
- Can you explain the strategy of the company to a stranger?
- Can you explain the current state of business?
- Does the guy/gal in charge regularly stand up in front of everyone and tell you what he/she is thinking? Are you buying it?
- Do you know what you want to do next? Does your boss?
- Do you have time to be strategic?
- Are you actively killing the Grapevine?
- What are the signs that you have a great manager? : great discussion on Hacker News
- A great manager is at the service of their team.
- You don't really notice a great manager.
- Communicate context as high level and as complete as possible.
- devtomanager.com: first-hand advice from seasoned experts
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.
- On 1-1s
- How to have an honest one-on-one with an employee
- Tool: Hold effective 1:1 meetings
- 21 Reasons You Should Start Having One on Ones with Your Team
- What is an Inquiring Leader?
- HBR, How to Ask Better Questions
- Mentor vs Advisor vs Coach
- How To Be Someone People Love To Talk To
- 🧰 Mega list of 1 on 1 meeting questions compiled from a variety to sources
- Seven Deadly Diseases of Management, Dr. Deming. Great video as well. I don't necessarily agree with everything but Deming is still one of the great management thinker.
- 📖 Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and published in 2012 is already a classic. It offers a whirling tour into our biases and the limits of human judgment. Truly amazing read.
- You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you, The Oatmeal (comics) about the backfire effect ("given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly", confirmation bias - Wikipedia).
Cognitive biases don't only apply to hiring... They can impact performance reviews, 1-1, team meetings, even small talk with colleagues.
- 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.
- Refactoring Our Engineering Skills Matrix
- How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time
- 🎤 Creating a Career Ladder for Engineers
- Gitlab Engineering Career Development, Gitlab
- Medium Engineering Growth Framework
Curated examples of job ladder/career development matrix:
- ⭐️ Songkick: concise, clear and includes examples.
- Expert360: pretty detailed, does not seem to have two tracks
- Medium: mixes all rubrics regardless of role
- Khan Academy
- Skills: maximise impact, be open, empathise and respect, have conviction, seek engineering maturity.
- Levels: beginning skillful, skillful, more skillful, super skillful, ludicrously skillful
- CircleCI: detailed and complete
- Basecamp: very concise
- Dropbox
List of lists:
- 30+ Engineering Career Ladders
- Another list of career pathways by a Progression, a tool to define and measure career growth
Concepts:
- Four stages of competence, Wikipedia
- Ask HN: How do you review code?: great discussion on HackerNews, full of interesting ideas.
- Maslow's pyramid of code reviews
- Code review in remote teams: very complete set of rules.
- Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward: a great post by Joel Gascoigne (CEO & Founder of Buffer) sharing some pretty tough news to the team and to the world. Great transparency, great message, great ownership. A model to follow.
- How To Pitch A Product, AVC.
- Ken Norton’s Discipline of No. #attitude #habits.
- Nonviolent communication (Wikipedia)
- Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful
- Breaking Bad News
- Operations and Internal Communication Strategies For Effective CEOs
- Narratives (not facts) are what move people
- The why always before the what
- Alignment is not one-way only
- Repeat, repeat, repeat
- Consider writing a personal weekly newsletter
- Tools for better thinking
- Decision matrix
- Ladder of inference
- First principles
- How To Say No. Templates for saying no to written interviews, going to an event, doing free work...
- Square Defangs Difficult Decisions with this System — Here’s How
- How to simplify complex decisions by cleaving the facts, Jason Cohen.
- Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (113 Models Explained)
- How to Make a Big Decision, the NYT.
- Principles for Decision-Making in a Flat Organization
- We risk more when we delay decisions in an attempt to reach total consensus.
- If there is a good enough solution X, don’t ask people what they think about it. Instead, ask everyone if they can live with it and if not, why.
- Consensus is the path, not the destination.
Arguments you should avoid using- that are logical fallacies “Because it’s always been done this way.” “Because we tried it before, and it didn’t work.” “Because company X uses this.” “Because {important person} said so.” Reason on tradeoffs, constraints, opportunities instead. Gergely Orosz
- The Counterintuitive Art of Leading by Letting Go
- Against micromanagement: "After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing", William Coyne, Head of R&D at 3M.
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%.”
- A primer on engineering delivery metrics
- Engineering productivity can be measured - just not how you'd expect. Interesting take.
- Non-measurement unfairly rewards people with charisma while productive but less-persuasive engineers wallow in frustration.
- Measure Blockers at the Team Level
- 📖 Breaking Through Bias: Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work
- Most men believe that they have no biases against women and that the organizations in which they work treat women and men equally. If senior-level men read this book, they will realize that neither of these beliefs is correct.
- 📖 Thinking, Fast and Slow, Wikipedia
- Project Include: an open community working toward providing meaningful diversity and inclusion solutions for tech companies. A great resource for anything diversity-related.
- Guess Who Doesn’t Fit In at Work
- Good Intentions Fail at Scale: great article about why you can't rely on good intentions to increase diversity.
- List of cognitive biases on Wikipedia
- 🎞 Making the Unconscious Conscious (Google Video)
- There’s no "silver bullet" to increasing diversity, but here's how we're making progress., Magoosh.
- Why Diversity Programs Fail
- 🎤 Diversity & Inclusion: Why and How
- 🎞 How microaggressions are like mosquito bites
Some great videos by PwC:
- 🎞 Blind spots: Challenge assumptions
- 🎞 Blind spots: Overcome stereotypes
- 🎞 Blind spots: Enhance objectivity
- Why Hiring for "Culture Fit" Hurts Your Culture
- Xavier Niel explains 42: the coding university without teachers, books, or tuition: a thought-provoking take on CS diplomas.
- A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving... and a great way to learn about confirmation bias (which is not only applicable to hiring but also to testing).
- The Diversity Hiring Playbook, LinkedIn. Pretty high level but probably a good start.
- 🎞 Hiring women at Klarna
- Clef's employee handbook has been open sourced on Github.
- Gitlab's handbook
- Valve's handbook
- Inaka's handbook
- Basecamp's handbook
- Mattermost's handbook
- Learn how to escalate issues
- Mental frameworks for making decisions: how to handle escalations as a manager.
- How to Ensure a New Manager Succeeds
- Six Recipes for Software Managers
- 1-1
- Team surveys
- A safe environment
- An informed department
- Resilient teams
- Self improvement
- The Problem with Tech Leads
- Trained Engineers - Overnight Managers (or, The Art Of Not Destroying Your Company)
- A Manager’s FAQ
- This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers
- The New Manager Death Spiral, Rands in Repose.
- Learnings from six months as a first-time manager
- How to fail as a new engineering manager
- Choosing the Management Track
- You won’t code anymore.
- Management forces you to care more about everything.
- Management creates an unavoidable power hierarchy.
- You need to be technical enough to intervene.
- Companies ultimately succeed or fail by their coordinated execution, culture and leadership.
- 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.
- 📖 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 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.
- I've been an engineer and a recruiter. Hiring is broken.
Checkout Diversity in hiring
- Vanquish whiteboard interview puzzles with test-driven development, Jocelyn Goldfein.
- Joel Spolsky, The Phone Screen
- 🎞 The pursuit of happyness' interview scene
- Real talk: the technical interview is broken
- Finding a Tech Leadership Job in Silicon Alley (interviewing seen from the candidate experience point of view).
- How I Interview
- What if companies interviewed translators the way they interview coders? - a great counter example of how interview can be disconnected from one's actual job.
- How to Interview Engineers: some pretty good guidelines with original research.
- Interviewing, Baron Schwartz. A good explanation why you should only ask behavioral question about the past.
- 🎞 Monthy Python: a terrible candidate experience
- Your interviews shouldn’t be spoilable
- How much should you share with the candidate? As much as an ethical person would share with a friend who they referred for the job.
- If an interview can be spoiled, it means that the answers can be memorized.
- Your spoilable interview is going to get spoiled. Some referred candidates are going to get the answers from their friends.
- If foreknowledge doesn’t reduce the quality of your interviews, it means that you have to change your questions less often
Specifics about hiring engineering managers:
- 45 sample behavioral questions for interview with developer
- 30 most common behavioral interview questions
- Behavioral interviews
- 🧰 MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview-questions: a list of list of interview questions.
- 40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know, First Round Review
- What do you want to do differently in your next role?
- Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now?
- Among the people you've worked with, who do you admire and why?
- What are you really good at, but never want to do anymore?
- How did you prepare for this interview?
- What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world?
- When was the last time you changed your mind about something important?
- What’s one misconception your coworkers have about you?
- What was the last thing you nerded out on?
- What are 10 ways to speed up Domino’s pizza delivery?
- Medium’s engineering interview process: Medium open sourced their hiring process.
- Gitlab, Hiring Principles. Their whole process is also open sourced.
- How Firebase Interviewed Software Engineers
- We looked for candidates who were friendly, smart, and motivated
- We looked for generalist, pragmatic problem solvers
- No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don't employers do it?
- Be clear that it’s a no-go.
- When you give suggestions, be specific and constructive.
- Make recommendations. Is there a book they could read?
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
- A guide to handling incidents, downtime and outages
- When the Sky Falls, Rands in Repose
- This is How Effective Leaders Move Beyond Blame
- A great description of what blamelessness actually means: How is team-member-1 doing? (team-member-1 is the name of the person that "gave the unfortunate command to delete our primary database" during the global Gitlab outage in Feb 2017.
- A list of postmortems on Github
- Debriefing Facilitation Guide: Etsy's guide to debriefing & incident review.
- General James 'Mad Dog' Mattis Email About Being 'Too Busy To Read' Is A Must-Read: "by reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men."
- You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential: forgive the clickbait link, it's actually a good article.
- Startup Graveyard – History Shouldn't Have to Repeat Itself
- Design critiques at Figma
- Pick the right format: standard, brainstorms, small groups, silent, printed, etc.
- Use smaller rooms
- Buy a timer and keep diligent time
- Remember to critique OUTSIDE of weekly meetings
Quotes:
- "Excellence is achieved by the mastery of fundamentals", Vince Lombardi, considered to be one of the best coaches in NFL history.
- 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."
- Managing Staff-plus engineers
- An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader, Gergely Orosz.
- One project, one engineering lead
- Mentoring, then coaching the first few leaders
- Transparency and accountability via weekly, written updates
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
- On Better Meetings: Lara Hogan shares tips about ensuring efficient meetings.
- 🎞 Almost Live! - Middle Management Suck-Ups: a great example of a terrible ineffective meeting.
- Run Better Meetings with This Expert-Level Advice, First Round Review
- Engineering Team Meeting: Format & Topic Ideas: lots of great ideas to start it.
- The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development looks into how to define a senior engineer.
- Advice is Cheap — Context is Priceless
- Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well, Gergey Orosz
- Provide context and perspective
- Leverage your network to help the mentee
- Be supportive
- Avoid giving answers on a silver plate
- Tailor your approach for technical vs non-technical topics
- People learn best when they help themselves
- 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."
- 🎞 Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (summary of Daniel Pink's book).
- The two-factor theory (Wikipedia) "states that there are certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction, while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction."
- Bored People Quit, Rands in Repose
- The Development Abstraction Layer, Joel on Software
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.
- 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.
- 🎞 Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load by the authors of team topologies.
- Organizing software teams (Team Topologies Book Summary)
- There should be no shared ownership of components, libraries, or code.
- If you have microservices but are still waiting to do end-to-end testing of a combination of services, you have a distributed monolith (a distributed monolith is when all changes in a service require updates to other services).
- Use software boundaries defined by business-domain bounded contexts
- Teams composed of only people with single functional expertise should be avoided at all costs.
- Four fundamental team topologies: stream-aligned, enabling, complicated subsystem, platform.
- Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL: A Guide to Building a High Functioning Data Science Department: the principles applied in this article are a great inspiration for functions other than data.
- Nobody enjoys writing and maintaining data pipelines or ETL. It’s the industry’s ultimate hot potato.
- Give people end-to-end ownership of the work they produce (autonomy).
- Engineers design new Lego blocks that data scientists assemble in creative ways to create new data science.
- Engineers should see themselves as being “Tony Stark’s tailor”, building the armor that prevents data scientists from falling into pitfalls that yield unscalable or unreliable solutions.
- We are sacrificing technical efficiency for velocity and autonomy.
- 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)
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, Paul Graham
- Why Are Maker Schedules So Rare?
- 📖 David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: while it could be much shorter, this book is probably the best way to learn about the GTD methodology.
- Productivity 101: A Primer to the Getting Things Done (GTD) Philosophy: a great summary of GTD.
- Zen Habits: a blog you can follow to get productivity tips and tricks.
- Zen To Done (ZTD): a simpler productivity system.
- 43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero: how to get and maintain your email inbox at a sane level.
- Busy to Death: a good story involving W. Edwards Deming.
- CannotMeasureProductivity, Martin Fowler (about how you cannot measure developer productivity.
- Makers, Don't Let Yourself Be Forced Into the 'Manager Schedule'
- Research shows that it takes as long as 30 minutes for makers to get into the flow
- Use maker-manager office hours
- Communication can happen at a quieter asynchronous frequency in the form of thoughtful, written discussions rather than soul-sucking meetings or erratic one-line-at-a-time chat messages
- Build a team knowledge base to minimize repetitive questions and allow self-onboarding.
- 🎧 How to Change Your Behavior, Coaching for Leaders
- It’s a myth that it takes 21 or 66 days to create a habit. Repetition doesn't create habits. Emotions create habits.
- Create a tiny habit through an ABC process: anchor moment, a tiny behavior, and instant celebration.
- Avoid raising the bar on the tiny behavior. Do more if you want to, but don’t change the standard.
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.
- How to Use OKRs for Quarterly and Annual Planning
- The Heilmeier Catechism: a crafted a set of questions to help DARPA officials think through and evaluate proposed research programs.
- With Goals, FAST Beats SMART: goals should be embedded in frequent discussions; ambitious in scope; measured by specific metrics and milestones; and transparent for everyone in the organization to see.
- 🎞 Startup Lab workshop: How Google sets goals: OKRs
- How to Make OKRs Actually Work at Your Startup, First Round Review
- 🎞 Why the secret to success is setting the right goals, John Doerr
- The Fundamentals of Roadmapping
- With constant innovation, new market entrants and potential black swans like a global pandemic, the best a leader can do is set a 12–18 month strategic plan that is directionally aligned with the company’s true north. That plan should be broken down by quarter with the assumption that the degree of confidence in achieving goals within each quarter will decline over time.
- Expect each team across the organization to cascade their operational roadmaps from these strategic foci. Operational roadmaps should identify key initiatives and milestones.
- A Modern Guide to Lean OKRs (a three-part series)
- OKR: The Ultimate Objectives and Key Results Resource
- OKR Examples (And Tips for Creating Your Own)
- How to measure and improve success in your engineering team
- Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How Early Stage Startups Should Think About Goal-Setting
- Objectives and Key Results, GitLab Handbook
A goal without a plan is just a wish. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. Francis Bacon
- 🎞 Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen Talk (Talks at Google)
- 📖 Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen book
- Garr Reynolds, Top Ten Slide Tips
- 🎤 You suck at PowerPoint
- 📖 Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a classic book on how to present data.
- 📖 The Non-Designer's Design Book - despite its clickbait title, it's actually a great book with a very memorable acronym to learn about how easy it is to design great documents.
- 📖 William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler, Universal Principles of Design.
- A Five Minutes Guide to Better Typography
- Presentation Zen: Living large: "Takahashi Method" uses king-sized text as a visual
Some great examples of presentations:
See my engineering-management section about problem solving
- The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
- Simple Rules Set You Free, from the Friction podcast with Bob Sutton
- Constructive Chaos vs. Clusterf***s, from the Friction podcast with Bob Sutton
@samkottler: No amount of process will ensure the right work is getting done.
- The most important thing Dropbox did to scale Product Management: a very simple model for stating the stage a product is in.
- How Amazon Web Services (AWS) Achieved an $11.5B Run Rate by Working Backwards: which explain Amazon's product management process.
- 📖 The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks is a classical book about software project management.
- Now I do not think software managers have less inherent courage and firmness than chefs, nor than other engineering managers. But false scheduling to match the patron's desired date is much more common in our discipline than elsewhere in engineering.
- The boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve.
- Jason Yip, It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings: standup are a pretty controversial topics. This article on Martin Fowler's blog provides a good list of patterns and anti-patterns to ensure they're a good productive use of everybody's time.
- 15 Fundamental Laws of Software Development
- How we structure our work and teams at Basecamp
- Will your project be a success? Find out in five minutes.
- Project Smart, Project management tools
- How should deadlines be used in software engineering?
- My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies: includes a great poster about different project management methodologies.
- JIRA is an antipattern, Jon Evans.
- Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout
- Who are you trying to impress with your deadlines?
- Deadlines set wrong expectations for what's good
- People are going to cut corners if you put them to tough deadlines.
- No one is going to experiment with new ways of doing things if you fetishize finishing under deadlines. We'd still be doing MVC in frontend apps if someone at Facebook didn't miss a deadline.
- Have deadlines, but fuzzy. How fuzzy should be decided by your goals. If missing a deadline could potentially lose you a million dollars, the fuzziness factor for that should be zero.
- WaterfallProcess, Martin Fowler
- Efficient Software Project Management at its Roots
- The key for a successful kickoff meeting is the interactivity.
- With good milestones in place, it makes no difference whether the team uses story points, engineer-days or any other way to measure progress.
- Having a regular, no-BS update on where the team really is
- Dependency and Risk Management in a pragmatic way
- Celebrate after completion!
- How to Lead a Project - as a Software Engineer, Gergely Orosz
- Setup a framework for collaboration
- Communicate status to stakeholders
- Help the team focus - and don't be afraid to delegate
- The article includes a short checklist for first-time project managers: kickoff meeting, milestones, design process, weekly update emails, daily standups, weekly goals, demoing progress.
- Directly Responsible Individuals
- Yes, You Should Estimate Software Projects, Gergely Orosz
The ultimate inspiration is the deadline. — Nolan Bushnell
- How to Work Faster in a Remote Team
- Notion, Remote work wiki
- Gitlab, Remote work emergency plan: What to do (and where to start)
- A guide to distributed teams, Increment: Teams.
- The ultimate guide to remote work, Zapier. Includes topics such as:
- How to brainstorm remotely
- Remote team activities: how to have fun when you work from home
- The best online whiteboards
"Starting with the why" is one of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People's best chapters.
- Seth Godin, A manifesto for small teams doing important work: really inspiring list of short cultural values for a team. Craft your own!
- Seth Godin, Big questions before little ones
- 🎞 Focusing is about saying no (Steve Jobs)
- 🎞 Vision is about perseverance (Steve Jobs)
- 🎞 Bryan Cantrill (Joyent VP of Eng) about the importance of why.
- The primary motivator is mission and purpose. Software development is about delivering utility to humanity.
- The soul is what motivates. You need to be able to explain the "why".
- 🎞 Steve Jobs on the same topic.
- Focus on the gems.
- 🎞 Start with why, TED talk by Simon Sinek.
- 🎤 Insist on Focus, Keith Rabois
- The reason why this [forcing people to focus and work on only one important problem] was such a successful strategy is that most people tend to substitute from A+ problems that are very difficult to solve to B+ problems for which they already know a solution to.
- Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I: Joel explains why (according to him) you should never rewrite a codebase.
- 🎤 Choose Boring Technology, Dan McKinley.
- Stevey's Google Platforms Rant: how Amazon became a platform.
- Letter to Shareholders, Jeff Bezos: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” So much is packed in this letter. Day 1 is about true customer obsession, resisting proxies, embracing external trends, high-velocity decision making.
- 5 Red Flags Signaling Your Rebuild Will Fail
- Polyglot programming in startup environments
- Never introduce a new programming language in an existing code-base because of personal preference. Building software is a team effort. Globalize your code languages. Team cohesion is what matters the most.
- You must have production experience in the programming language you want to replace or complement with another one
- A decision to introduce a new programming language must be based on non-functional requirements, measurements or other relevant arguments, and not personal opinions.
- Always think about the team and company, and especially about hiring and expanding the team.
- A programming language is just a tool to deliver software. Don’t be in a tight relationship with your screwdriver.
- Tech Migrations, the Spotify Way
- Ruthlessly prioritize
- Product-ify migrations: accountability, test first, train, lead with value, KYC, gamify
- Automate, automate, and move up the stack!
- Lessons from 7 highly successful software engineering cultures
- Engineering a culture of psychological safety
- Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast
- Habits of High-Functioning Teams
- High Psychological Safety
- Good hygiene practices
- Active redistribution of “experience points”
- Communicating generously
- Principles trump processes
Those are considered classics:
- Valve Employee Handbook
- 🎤 Netflix Culture Deck
- Gitlab's employee handbook (includes cultural values)
- The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love
- Don’t pave the path used by the unhappy cows
- Amazon's leadership principles
culturecodes is a repository of culture deck from companies (including the ones above).
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.
- Write five, then synthesize: good engineering strategy is boring, Will Larson.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Virtues of Laziness and Impatience: "there are two areas I encourage you to practice showing, right now: figuring out what’s important, and going home."
- Lazy Leadership: "entrepreneurship is really just a fancy word for delegation".
- Your non-linear problem of 90% utilization, Jason Cohen: why constantly running at 90% utilization is actually counter-productive.
- Evidence-based advice on how to be successful in any jobs: most self-help advices are not research-based. The ones listed in this article are.
➡️ See also my professional-programming list
- The 7 Emails You Need to Know How to Write
- The Inverted Pyramid or BLUF (bottom line up front) (Wikipedia): a method to prioritize and structure information in a text.
- How to say you’re sorry, Jason Fried (Founder & CEO Basecamp)
- How to write with style, Kurt Vonnegut.
- A blogging style guide
- How Jeff Bezos turned narrative into Amazon's Competitive Advantage
- Writing is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence
- Paul Graham, How to Write Usefully
- Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.
- Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay.
- Importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay
- Encouraging a Culture of Written Communication
- Easy to Search. Single Source of Truth.
- Balancing Async and Synchronous Communication
- Thinking Out Loud
- Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing - aka RFCs, Gergely Orosz
- Do planning before building something new.
- If everyone agrees how the project should be done then writing the approach down should be a piece of cake.
- The type of information pushed to people in an organization shapes the culture considerably.
- Lightweight RFC Process, Apache Software Foundation
- 6 Lessons I learned while implementing technical RFCs as a decision making tool
- 🧰 92bondstreet/cto: a curated list of CTO resources
- 🧰 mateusz-brainhub/awesome-cto-resources: a community-curated list of awesome resources to help you grow as a CTO
- kuchin/awesome-cto
- 🎞 Moneyball. What's the problem?
- 🎞 Office Space
- 🎞 The Pursuit of Happyness contains some great lessons about hustle. Watch the interview scene.
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.
The Office is a great satire of a dysfunctioning office.
Here are some blogs and newsletter I follow.
- Software Lead Weekly (Oren Ellenbogen): a short curation of great management articles. Also include some videos, and some less serious, funny material. A lot of the links founds in this repo appeared in Oren's weekly email.
- HBR's Management Tip of the Day
- Tech People Leadership (Joe Dunn): Links, notes and opinions for leaders in the tech industry.
- 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).
- FRICTION with Bob Sutton. This podcast does not have any new episode since 2017, but it has some really great content. Great conversations. Lots of stories.
- Part organizational design. Part therapy. Organizational psychologist and Stanford Professor Bob Sutton is back to tackle friction, the phenomenon that frustrates employees, fatigues teams and causes organizations to flounder and fail.