Engineering Manager Resources

A list of engineering manager resource links.

Follow Ryan Burgess on Twitter

Mentoring

• Plato
• SCORE
• Tech Leader Mentoring Group
• The Mentoring Club - A non-profit mentoring group.

Books

• Talking with Tech Leads: From Novices to Practitioners
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
• The Advantage
• Managing Humans
• Thanks for the Feedback - A great book for understanding how to best provide and receive feedback.
• Good Boss, Bad Boss
• The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business - This is a great book if you work with people from other countries.
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
• How to Win Friends & Infl​uence People - This is a great book for helping you to lead and influence others.
• Search Inside Yourself
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
• Rising Strong
• What Works for Women at Work
• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
• Influence: How and Why People Agree to Things
• Crucial Conversations
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
• Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams
• Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
• The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders - A good book for leaders on how to give control rather than taking control and creating leaders rather than forging followers.
• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
• Building Great Startup Teams
• Leading Snowflakes: The Engineering Manager Handbook
• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
• Quiet Leadership
• HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself - A book with HBR's 10 must read articles on managing yourself.
• Originals - How Non-Conformists Move the World
• What Every Body Is Saying
• What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How successful people become even more successful
• Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley - Provides insight into D&I history
• Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
• Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead - Work at Google
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking - A book with helpful information on leading introverts
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable - This book highlights what causes a dysfunctional team and how you can improve a team's relationships
• Everybody Matters - This is an excellent book for how to think about treating people in your organization with more empathy
• Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework - The book helps understand software delivery metrics and how to measure them to organize software teams around the value stream
• Indistractable - A great book with helpful tips on how to manage your attention.
• The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well - Another great book from Michael Lopp on leadership
• The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded - This is an excellent book if you're starting a new role.
• The Experimental Leader: Be a New Kind of Boss to Cultivate an Organization of Innovators - Helpful tips on how to be an innovative leader and avoid the faults of historical leadership
• The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age - A new way of thinking about management and thinking of your employees as allies
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Learning how to overcome obstacles is no small thing. This book is about how to develop the right mindset to help you become better every day. Daniel Pink cites Carol Dweck in a book on this list - Drive
• The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You - Great book for those moving into a leadership or management role. It provides helpful tactical advice for management
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management - Written by a fellow Engineering Manager, Will Larson shows the challenges and demands of the discipline of engineering management viewed through the prism of systems thinking
• Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces - The Better Allies is a great read on how to help build a more inclusive environment.
• Resilient Management - Fantastic, quick read on people management. Especially effective for new managers, but great for all levels.
• Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change - Ellen Pao shares her experiences in her career and focuses on the fight to make an more inclusive industry
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business - A great book meant to help entrepreneurs and business leaders create a system that works. It champions metrics, processes and putting the right people in the right seats.
• Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager's Guide to Getting Results - This book goes into managing, hiring, firing, performance, and also has helpful cheat-sheets and worksheets for tough situations.
• The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations - Book that elaborates on 5 key leadership principles aimed to find and grow successful leaders.
• Nonviolent Communication - This is an excellent book to help communicating with people and better understand being more empathetic to situations.
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - An interesting read that provides a lot of great insights into specialists and generalists and how think about them when building teams.
• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track - A great book for an engineer wanting to level up their leadership skills but not head down the management track.
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success - A book that covers some interesting insights for leadership in the short-term vs the long-term.
• The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You - This book provides a lot of practical tips for early management.
• Becoming a Manager - A book full of useful tips for new managers.
• Leading the Unleadable: How to Manage Mavericks, Cynics, Divas, and Other Difficult People - This book provides tips for dealing with the difficult people on your team.
• Just Work: Get Sh*t Done, Fast & Fair - Kim Scott (the author of Radical Candor) revisits the advice of her first book through a lens of inclusion. It carries the tag-line 'How to root out bias, prejudice, and bullying to build a kick-ass culture of inclusivity.'
• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win - This book provides a lot of insights on how ownership is a key success factor. Jocko Willink shares his experiences as a Navy SEALs but gives a lot of enterprise examples on how we should push for more ownership as leaders.
• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - A good book that highlights the importance to being open to new ideas and rethinking assumptions.
• Multipliers - How The Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
• Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager: How to Be the Leader Your Development Team Needs - This book focuses on specifics for engineering managers.
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management - This book does a good job focusing on the challenges of being an engineering manager and provides examples of solutions.
• The Phoenix Project - This book teaches about DevOps practices and looks at managing teams from perspective of inputs and outputs.

Videos

• Ryan Burgess' Manager Videos - A YouTube playlist of short video clips that cover a variety of leadership topics focused on engineering management.
• David Grady: How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings
• How great leaders inspire action
• Female Career Advancement Summed up in One Usable Diagram // Janice Fraser // Calibrate 2016
• The Vegetable Talk (Leadership. By the numbers.) // Michael Lopp // Calibrate 2016
• Rory Vaden - How To Multiply Your Time
• Lara Hogan - Demystifying Public Speaking
• Camille Fournier - Building a High-Performance Team is Everyone's Job
• Camille Fournier - Building and Motivating Engineering Teams
• Cloning Yourself Isn’t an Option – Camille Fournier at The Lead Developer 2015
• Rethinking the Developer Career Path
• Collaborative Development: The Only CD That Matters - Brent Beer (GitHub) at Codemotion Italy 2017
• The power of vulnerability - Brene Brown - A video that helps outline why it's important as a leader to be vulnerabile with your team
• Dare to Disagree - This is a good TED talk on how to avoid the echo chamber and learn to disagree to help improve ideas
• On being wrong - This is a great TED talk on highlighting how it's ok to be wrong
• Ignite the Fire - How Managers Can Spark New Leaders - A video of a talk about three ingredients for inspiring non-manager leaders to emerge and provides simple techniques any team member can apply
• How vulnerability makes you a better leader | Tracy Young - TED Talk by Tracy Young who shares her story and demonstrates vulnerability and how important it is as a leader.
• Patty McCord: 8 lessons on building a company people enjoy working for - An excellent TED talk by Patty McCord providing short tips for a better company working enviornment
• How to transition to a new manager role moving from an individual contributor? - A short video with useful tips when you're making the transition from an individual contributor to a manager role.
• Guidance Counselor 2.0 w/Ryan Burgess on Hiring and Leadership in Tech - An interview with Ryan Burgess talking about hiring.
• Unicorn Finders w/Ryan Burgess + Netflix Engineer Manager on Leadership in Tech - A panel discussion talking about Engineering Management.

Podcasts

• Front End Happy Hour Episode 17 - managers - In this episode of FEHH the panelists talk about being an engineering manager. A lot of great insights!
• UNSTUCK: The Tech Lead Q&A Show
• Manager Tools - Manager tools prodcast is always covering topics that any manager deals with.
• HBR episode on interviews - In this episode, HBR talks about how to run an effective interview and get answers to tough questions.
• HBR episode on feedback - In this episode, HBR talks about how to effectively give feedback.
• Endless Rewrites and Fake Deadlines
• The Full Ratchet: VC | Venture Capital | Angel Investors | Startup Investing | Fundraising | Crowdfunding | Pitch | Private Equ
• HBR Ideacast - Hiring the Best People - Patty McCord, Netflix’s former Chief Talent Officer, talks about how to hire and retain top talent
• CTO Think - How important is a work-life or non-tech balance for a technology career? - This episode talks about the importance of work-life or non-tech balance for someone building a career in technology
• WorkLife with Adam Grant - A great podcast episode around how important it is to give critical feedback
• Randy Shoup on Creating High-Performance Cultures - A podcast episode on how to build high performance cultures
• Manager's Table - A podcast talking with engineering managers and the challenges they face
• Freakonomics - How to Make Meetings Less Terrible - This podcast episode has some great ideas for improving meetings
• Front End Happy Hour - Tech lead engineer - herding cats & drinks - This episode has a lot of great insights into what it's like to be a lead and how it's different than a manager
• Manager's Table - Growing Engineers - A good discussion on ways to grow engineers on your team
• The Elegant System of Management /w Will Larson - Joel Hooks, from Egghead.io, sits down with Will Larson to discuss systems for engineering management
• Teams at Work Episode 3 - How to build successful engineering teams - Dizzy Smith, VP Engineering of Packet, shares insights from his 15+ year career in engineering about culture building, communication structures and diverse leadership in distributed teams.
• Front End Happy Hour - One on ones - This is a good podcast episode discussing how to make one on one meetings more effective
• Front End Happy Hour - Good manager, bad manager - tasty drink, bland drink - A panel discussion sharing opinions on what makes good and bad managers
• Front End Happy Hour - Transitioning to a new role - There's some good information on preparing for a new role.
• Front End Happy Hour - Remote interviewing - An episode talking about remote interviewing during COVID.
• Super Managers - A podcast from Fellow that focuses on management topics.
• Super Managers - Embracing Transparency, Iteration, and Asynchronous Workflows in a Remote World - Darren Murph, from GitLab, shares how remote work empowers people at work, and also in their everyday lives.
• Happy Path Programming - Vulnerability & Additive Hiring with Dianne Marsh - Some great insights into leading through vulnerability from Netflix Engineering Director, Dianne Marsh.
• Leading leaders who lead engineers - A podcast episode that discusses growing leaders with Lara Hogan, author of Resilient Management
• Front End Happy Hour - Individual contributor to manager - This podcast episode provides a lot of great insights and tips for transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager.
• The Tech Exec Podcast - A podcast for CTOs, VPs, and other leaders in Tech wanting to instill vision instead of running a kindergarten, and working on creating high performant autonomous teams
• alphalist Podcast | Technical Leadership and Technology for Technical Leaders - Learn about technical leadership, technological trends and more from top CTOs and other technical leaders. A podcast for CTOs, VPs, and other leaders in Tech wanting to improve and grow their knowledge through interviews of top tech thought leaders.

Articles

• Radical Candor - This is an excellent article on how to provide direct feedback
• Forget Technical Debt — Here's How to Build Technical Wealth - An article with some good ideas on how to avoid tech debt in your team's work
• 10 things you should never put in your inmails - 10 useful pieces of feedback that may save you from getting into trouble
• The Pivotal Stories Every Startup Leader Should Be Able to Tell
• Becoming the Boss
• Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure
• Medium’s engineering interview process - Medium shares some insights into their engineering interview process.
• The One Cost Engineers and Product Managers Don't Consider - This article talks a lot about how code complexity can be a large expense to a team and their ability to be productive.
• Here’s Google’s Secret to Hiring the Best People - Some useful tips on how Google hires hire performers
• F*** You, I Quit — Hiring Is Broken
• The best coding interview I ever took - An article about what a good code interview should look like
• Want to Be an Outstanding Leader? Keep a Journal.
• Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary. Here’s the data.
• What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
• Facebook’s HR chief conducted a company-wide study to find its best managers — and 7 behaviors stood out - A good article about the best managers at Facebook and the behavior they exhibit.
• The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time - Some good advice for focusing on one task at a time.
• Should Companies Get Rid of Performance Reviews? - A good article talking about the pros and cons of performance reviews.
• How to Spot and Magnify the Powers of Your Engineering Superheroes
• The Keys to Scaling Yourself as a Technology Leader - Some good tips on ways to help scale yourself as a leader.
• Meetings that don't suck - Some good tips on how to improve meetings.
• The Art of the Awkward 1:1 - A good article on improving 1:1s
• 101 Questions to Ask in One on Ones - Some helpful ideas for what questions to ask in a one on one.
• Hire a Top Performer Every Time with These Interview Questions - Example interview questions to help find the top performers.
• The biggest lie in HR: “People quit managers - This article shares some good insights into how important a manager is for people.
• Want to hire faster? Write about “learning,” not “brilliance” - This article has some great advice to help you communicate in your job posts to reflect your company culture.
• Shocker: Tech’s widening gender gap is all about the bro-ification of Silicon Valley
• What's More Distracting Than A Noisy Co-Worker? Turns Out, Not Much - This article talks about how noise can be a big distraction in open concept offices.
• This is what work-life balance looks like at a company with 100% retention of moms - This article does a good job outlining ways to foster a good work-life balance for parents.
• If there's a tech skills shortage, why are so many computer graduates unemployed?
• Research: We Drop People Who Give Us Critical Feedback
• Netflix CEO reveals how much vacation he takes, and it's a lot more than most people take off - An important reminder that it's important for everyone to take vacation to recharge.
• How Loss Aversion and Conformity Threaten Organizational Change
• 10 Candidate Questions That’ll Make You Squirm (But Earn) - This article has some good questions you might want to ask of a candidate who's interviewing for an opportunity on your team.
• The Future of Tech Recruitment: Sourcing, Hiring and Retaining Top Talent
• Engineering Growth Framework - A series of articles around how to think about growth for engineers on your team.
• Why time management is ruining our lives
• Regardless of seniority, every good manager will
• W.A.I.S.T. The art of opening your ears and listening has never been so powerful
• How to Improve, Not Kill the Annual Performance Review
• Things I have learnt as the software engineering lead of a multinational
• How Lever Got To 50–50 Women and Men
• Force-feeding your hiring managers diversity is a bad idea
• Why Diversity Programs Fail
• Leadership Comes From Everywhere
• How These Seven Tech Leaders Are Tackling Diversity in 2017
• Diversity Doesn’t Stick Without Inclusion
• Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish
• First Round Management Articles
• First Round Review's 6 Must Reads to Run Fast, Efficient Meetings
• How I share information with my team
• Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite
• Joel on Software: Tech Lead reading list
• Should engineering managers write code? Wrong question
• Manager Energy Drain - This is a good article sharing ideas to avoid burnout as a manager
• We Need to Talk About Servant Leadership - An interesting article on leadership
• How to Run Inclusive Meetings - Helpful tips to run more inclusive meetings at your company
• Clean Up Corrosive Interpersonal Dynamics on Your Team with This System - A good article on how to help foster a good culture for your team
• The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework - A good perspective on take-home exercises for interviews
• Managers Can’t Be Great Coaches All by Themselves - A good article outlining ways to grow as a manager and as a team coaches
• Say the Hard Thing - The article provides some good insights into how to deliver direct feedback, but also how to receive feedback
• Reaching Peak Meeting Efficiency - Some helpful tips on improving your meeting efficiency
• Research: To Be a Good Leader, Start By Being a Good Follower - Some good points to be more relatable with your team
• Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think - Why it's important to not get caught up about what others think
• How to Give Feedback to People Who Cry, Yell, or Get Defensive - A good article on helpful tips for giving feedback
• How to counteract 3 types of bias and run inclusive meetings - A good article to help run more inclusive meetings
• Is Your Hiring Process Hurting Diversity? - There are some good ideas on making sure the hiring process is helping diversity
• The Feedback Fallacy - This article outlines some interesting perspectives on the positives and negatives of providing real time feedback
• How People with Different Conflict Styles Can Work Together - This is a good article to help dealing with various types of conflict when working with others
• Give Compassionate Feedback While Still Being Constructive - A good article with helpful tips on how to give constructive feedback while being conpassionate
• What most managers don’t know about leading diverse teams - Some helpful insights in leading more diverse teams
• Twitter Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis on building the most diverse team in tech - Some interesting thoughts on why it's important to have a diverse team and how to build a diverse team.
• How to decide when to fire someone - This is never an easy decision to make, and this article has some helpful tips on when to decide to let someone go.
• Coaching people through the Change Curve - A helpful article that provides insights into how to prepare teams for an organizational structure change
• How I Approach the Toughest Decisions - A great article from Barack Obama about how he approaches making tough decisions.
• Feedback In Times of Crisis - Some great insights into providing feedback during times of a crisis.
• Why Constraints Are Good for Innovation - An article that suggests that managers can innovate better by embracing constraints.
• Are You Leading Through the Crisis … or Managing the Response? - Helpful tips and insights into how to lead during a crisis.
• Mistakes I’ve Made as an Engineering Manager - Vulnerability as a leader goes a long way. This article shares mistakes to avoid.
• How Great Managers Give and Receive Feedback - Helpful tips on giving and receiving feedback.
• Should You Rehire an Employee Who Left Your Company? - Interesting perspectives on thinking about hiring someone who had previously left the company.
• No, I’m not fine: A leader’s guide to building a culture where it’s ok to not be ok - This article shares some helpful insights into building trust and vulnerability in your team.
• How to Build a Culture of Ownership, and Other Engineering Leadership Tips from Plaid & Dropbox - This article shares tips for getting alignment in a team.
• 9 Tips for Effectively Sharing Peer Feedback in the Workplace - Helpful tips for giving someone feedback.
• 1 Top Priority About Remote Work That Most Managers Are Forgetting - How to improve remote work for your team.
• You're not just a manager, you're also a boss - This article helps to identify the power dynamics that come with being a manager.
• Too Many Meetings? Here’s How to Scale Back - There are some good tips for scaling back on the number of meetings you attend.
• How can managers create a culture for women to thrive? - Tips to be more inclusive to women in your teams.
• Closing the gap: A manager’s guide to advancing gender equity in the workplace - Suggestions for managers to help reduce gender gaps in the workplace.
• “I Quit!” How to Tactfully Handle Employee Resignations - Helpful tips for dealing with someone leaving your team.
• Let's talk about the D-word: DELEGATING - This article provides some tips for delegating as a manager.
• How to hire - A good article on ways to think about hiring for your team.
• When Do We Actually Need to Meet in Person? - An article that helps provide insights into the types of meetings that should be in person.
• Don’t Lose the Democratizing Effect of Remote Work - A good article on remote work covers some interesting points on the hybrid work and how to avoid on-site favoritism.
• Don’t Underestimate the Power of Silence - A helpful article on goal setting and planning
• Manager Interview Questions - A helpful list of example manager interview questions.
• Better Engineering Management: Top 3 Things Product Managers Dislike About Engineering Managers - This article shares what engineering managers can do to better their relationship with product managers.
• The 3 Ways An Engineering Managers Role Differ Between a Startup and a Corporate - This article covers the 3 ways the engineering manager’s role differs between a startup and an established corporation.
• How to Intervene When a Manager Is Gaslighting Their Employees - A good article outlining what to look for when a manager might not be working collaboratively with their team.
• 10 Things I Wish I Knew as a New Manager - A good article that helps prepare new managers
• The Top 5 Engineering Management Questions Answered - An article highlighting 5 engineering management values.
• High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It - Five helpful tips in this article to help build trust in a team.
• 5 New Rules for Leading a Hybrid Team - Some great ideas for improving the hybrid working model for your team.
• Managering in terrible times - An article with some good insights into how to manage during difficult times
• Forget New Year’s Resolutions and Conduct a ‘Past Year Review’ Instead - An interesting perspective on New Year's resolutions and focusing more on the year in review from the past year.
• Ruthless Prioritization - An article outlining how to prioritize better as a leader.
• Overcoming Imposter Syndrome When Starting a Career in Tech - An interesting article that may help some managers who may be suffering with imposter syndrome.

Newsletters

• Software Lead Weekly
• Marcus Blankenship's Tech Leader Newsletter
• Better Allies - This is a must have resource in your inbox. Each week there are five great tips to help foster a more inclusive environment.
• CTO Insights with Tosho Trajanov - Weekly reading on software engineering & technical leadership.
• Fellow TLDR newsletter - Helpful leadership tips in a regular newsletter.
• Level Up - A curated newsletter for leaders in tech.

Communities

• Rands Leadership Slack - Created by Michael Lopp, the Rands Leadership Slack exists to help longtime, new, and aspiring leaders to learn through conversation and sharing of ideas.
• Engineering Managers Slack group - A Slack group for Engineering Managers to connect and learn from one another
• Zumvie Slack Community - Created by Zumvie, This Slack community is for Engineering Managers to connect and learn from one another-With AMA's, Lean coffees, etc.
• alphalist Community | Network for Technical Leaders - A community where technical leaders (e.g. engineering managers, CTOs etc.) share ideas and advice on an active Slack group and at events. Ideal for those with a tech product (e.g. They discourage CTO consultants, recruiters, and agencies from joining).

Courses

• Engineering Management Interview Course - This Try Exponent course on engineering leadership has a lot of useful topics to help prepare anyone for interviewing for an engineering manager role.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Run npm install
3. Add your resource to list.json
4. Run node index to update README.md with your changes
5. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
6. Commit your changes (git commit -am "Add some feature")
7. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
8. Create new Pull Request