afternoon / engineering-management-resources

A list of resources for engineering managers of all levels

Engineering Management Resources

Please help me build this list. Send me pull requests for great resources you've found.

Top K

• High Output Management - "A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence." Andy Grove's classic text on management practices. Ben Horowitz raves about it. Lighthouse have a handy top 10 quotes which gives you a flavour.
• Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. This book is an entire theory of organisation design. It's aimed at enterprises, not startups, but it is packed with ideas and case studies for applying lean principles to software organisations. Contains many jumping off points, e.g. to continuous delivery, to lean, to psychological safety. Highly recommended. #book #mustread
• Google re:Work. "Let's Make Work Better. Practices, research, and ideas from Google and other organizations to put people first." A data-driven approach to understanding teams, managers, goal-setting, hiring, everything.
• First Round Review. An excellent blog on building tech startups from VC firm First Round Capital. Follows the template of "Get person who's best at X to blog about X" where X is hiring, giving feedback, product management, pricing, and so on. #blog
• Software Lead Weekly. Weekyl email of management resources curated by Oren Ellenbogen, VP Eng at Forter. 10,000 subscribers.
• Harvard Business Review. An incredibly deep well of business knowledge, including management.

Culture

• How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg (key early product guy at Google): a journey through how Google is structured and how it got there #book.
• Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility. A classic from Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO

Teams

• Tuckman's Forming Storming Norming Performing model of team development.

Models of management

• What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy at Work (Buffer).
• I'm Not a Servant - I’m a Host! A New Metaphor for Leadership in Agile?

Motivation

• Drive by Dan Pink: autonomy, mastery and purpose #book #mustread

One-on-ones

• High Output Management has a great chapter on this. One key idea for me: make them at least an hour long to avoid superficial status updates and get into the big topics.
• A Step-By-Step Guide To Better One-On-Ones - Officevibe.
• How to Make Your One-on-Ones with Employees More Productive
• Conducting Effective and Regular One-on-Ones
• Instrument-Rated Management: Treating Conditions vs Symptoms. Touching blog post on helping people in your team who aren't satisfied, which may mean them moving on. This conversation is very familiar.

Coaching

Giving feedback

• Radical Candor: The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss

Goal setting

• Getting started with OKRs

Career development

• Rent The Runway's Engineering Ladder. Classic post from Camille Fournier sharing RTR engineering's role definitions.
• Spotify Technology Career Steps. Spotify's career path/ladder.
• Bad Managers: 5 Signs You Shouldn’t be a Manager
• 15 Signs Your Employee Is Ready to Become a Manager

Training (budgets, etc)

Compensation

• Introducing the New Buffer Salary Formula, Calculate-Your-Salary App and The Whole Team’s New Salaries (Buffer)

Operations

• How to write a post-mortem (Server Density)

Hiring

Diversity and bias

Teams

• What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team: Google crunched lots of data about 180+ teams. They found that psychological safety is far and away the most important team dynamic. Teams that listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs are the most successful (see also the Google re:Work blog post the five keys to a successful Google team)

Delivery

• Working Backwards. Post from Werner Vogels about how Amazon thinks about the outcome for the customer before building something.