- Landing the plane
James Stanier and how the last 10% of a project is the hardest - The subtraction instinct
Mike Fisher on our propensity to solve by addition, and how we can miss better options that involve subtraction - The pitfalls of unlimited time off
Mathias Meyer shares his experiences of offering unlimited time off, what can go wrong and how to address it - Why we shouldn't kill the middle manager role
Ashley Herd makes the case against the 'Great Flattening' - Asking engineers
Luca Rossi highlights that good developer experience is almost always about removing friction and reminds us that we have a great resource for finding out what the friction is i.e. asking our engineers - The Vasa
Tom Geraghty shares some lessons to learn from the sinking of the Vasa nearly 400 years ago - Autonomy is overrated: Why alignment beats autonomy
Martin Dalmijn on how autonomy is often misunderstood in agile development - Leading through challenging times
Invaluable advice from Sally Lait on leading teams when the environment is challenging - Cheap turpentine
David Singleton shares practical advice from his experiences of leading in technology - Friction focused management
"The question is not whether friction exists. It always does. The question is whether you have a reliable way to surface the most important friction early enough to act on it." — Petros Bountis - Leading through scarcity: Building capacity in the team
Irina Stanescu outlines some of the key ways to build capacity in any team - Avoiding favoritism in the workplace: A leader’s guide
The pitfalls of favoritism (even if it is not deliberate) and how to navigate them - WIP it real good
John Cutler is great on why systems end up optimised for having lots of Work In Progress, how they resist change and how you might challenge this. - Stop copying the Nvidia CEO
"Don't design your company based on a headline you read about a Trillion-dollar company. Design it for the humans who are sitting in the room with you right now." — Rachel Turner - Is it the relationship or the idea that's the problem?
"...others are more likely to be aligned with the person they trust (regardless of if their idea is the best one or not)." — Nicola Lindgren - Couple’s therapy for product and tech
[BEHIND A PAYWALL]
Laura Dietze reminds us how productive a good relationship between product and tech can be and gives some great practical advice on how to invest in this relationship - Engineering leadership in 2025: Thriving when budgets shrink
[BEHIND A PAYWALL]
"Focus beats speed" — James Barnes - You might be carrying an invisible gun
Kelly Vaughn reminds us that the more senior we get, the more our words start to sound like orders - The social lives of ideas (Don't just do things, part 3)
"Not knowing how to communicate with our stakeholders has been the bottleneck in our impact for decades. If you want to stand out as a leader, this is where you need to start." — Pavel Samsonov - How to communicate difficult decisions at work without losing your team
David Dye and Karin Hurt's advice is on the money. - The RTO is gonna huRTO your business
Sergio Visinoni offers a summary of some recent research into Return To Office policies and their impact on businesses. - Voice
Esther Derby discusses the importance of voice and three things that you can do—from a position of formal or informal power—to make it easier for people to speak up. - Never waste a crisis
Cory Miller's welcome reminder that a crisis is often an opportunity for positive change - Don't let crisis become a compass
"If you only praise last-minute saves, you’ll keep getting last-minute problems. Make sure to recognize the engineer who reduced incidents, the PM who saw the risk a month out, the designer who caught the complexity before it shipped. Make that kind of foresight just as visible and valuable as triage and repair." — Tim Cheadle - The real work of leading in pairs
Alia and Fiona's excellent advice on maintaining your key partnership(s) at work - It’s time to be the bad guy
"Empathise, but don’t make promises to change something that is a reality of the job. What you’ll often find is that, over time, by being the bad guy and being upfront about these things, you are actually building trust." — Anna J McDougall - In praise of “normal” engineers
"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent software engineering skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week." — Charity Majors - [The CTO has] one job
"To give control, you have to create clarity and develop competence." -Paulo André - “Founder mode” and the art of mythmaking
Charity Majors wades through the bullshit that has been shared by Brian Chesky et. al. and provides a useful antidote to it all - What we talk about when we talk about leadership
Lena Reinhard's excellent talk encourages you to reflect on what makes a good leader, and on what makes you a good leader. What impact do you want to have on your teams, and on the small and big world around you? - The one way I know a team is in trouble
Suzan Bond highlights the dangers of false harmony in a team and gives advice on how to address this. - How hard should your employer work to retain you?
Charity Majors's advice is spot on for both employers and employees - The crucial difference between nice and kind leadership
Sergio Visioni explores the pitfalls of being 'nice' as a leader - Why empathy matters
Simon Sinek on humanizing the workplace - Task Relevant Maturity
Luca Rossi shares an excellent summary of the concept of Task Relevant Maturity from Andy Grove's book "High Output Management" - Briefly: Anonymous questions
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on making use of anonymous questions for Q+A of leadership teams. - Unexpected anti-patterns for engineering leaders
Will Larson outlines some ant-patterns to watch out for as an engineering leader - The purpose of a system is what It does
"When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken." -Anil Dash - Language of business
Mike Fisher's reminder that everyone speaks finance at a leadership level and so you will benefit from learning this language too - How to drive change beyond your role
Some excellent advice from Péter Szász for anyone wanting to make change in their organsation - Parkinson's Law: It's real, so use it
James Stanier on how setting deadlines helps with software development projects - What they don’t tell you about engineering leadership
Robbie Clutton's sage advice for engineering leaders, including "Stay curious longer" - Developing leadership styles
Will Larson describes different forms of leadership, and when they might best apply - The art of subtle influence
Casey Rosenberg offers advice on how to lead without control - Stop making people make up their mind
One of the biggest unforced errors that companies make is pushing people into making decisions when they don’t need to. - The Worry Police
"To be blunt, I am confident the Worry Police are doing more damage than good. And to be honest, I know the Worry Police because I’ve been them." — Rands - Skills that make a big difference — Empathy
Adrian Hornsby paints a picture of why empathy is essential for becoming a better engineer and gives advice on how to increase your empathy - No deadlines for you! Software development without estimates, specs, or other lies
Dan Milstein offers a really clear model of how to have conversations which put uncertainty and risk at the center of a conversation between the developers and the rest of the business (instead of everyone pretending such nasty things don’t exist). - Questions to ask yourself to become a better leader
Lena Reinhard provides an excellent framework to help you reflect on how you wish to develop as a leader. - "We’re all leaders” is a better way to work
Ari Weinzwe shares the power of working in an environment where everyone is a leader - Getting along with difficult coworkers
Amy Gallo offers excellent advice on the Women At Work podcast - How to plan?
Invaluable advice on planning from Kellan Elliott-McCrea - How to work with someone you can't stand
Amy Gallo offers practical advice on handling these difficult situations - Why loneliness in technology is a serious matter and how to support tech leaders
Amber O'Brien shares the reasons that technology leaders might feel lonely and how you can support yourself and others. - Be a better partner to product management
Frankie Nicoletti reminds us that we need to partner with product management to succeed and ahares some great advice on how to do this in this 10 min talk. - Use these tips to improve your executive presence
Practical communications advice from Jade Rubrick - Staff Engineer's Path resource list
Tanya Reilly's list of all the articles, books, talks etc. that are referenced in her book "The Staff Engineer's Path" - Leading below the surface
LaTonya Wilkins's book provides a useful framework for reflecting on whether, as a leader, you are building psychologically safe relationships with people and also concrete ways in which you can improve. - The thermocline of truth
Rob Miller on the risks of creating an environment where bad news is slow to bubble up through your organisation - 5 challenges startup leadership teams face & how to avoid them
Richard Hughes-Jones offers advice about how to navigate these challenges based on his experience helping leadership teams through this critical stage of growth. Scaleup leadership team - Book summary: The Advantage
Sean Craig summarises Patrick Lencioni's excellent book on the importance of organisational health and how to to develop it - How women rise: Break the 12 habits holding you back - A summary
Richard Hughes-Jones provides a helpful summary of Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith's book, "How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back". The advice it offers is valuable to everyone developing their careers. - Jessica Kerr: Software is not a craft (or an art)
"Most of the time what we do has no impact on the world but we can still be proud of the effect we have on people" - Jessica Kerr - Stuck in the middle: Mastering stakeholder management
Emily Tate shares her hard won experience in managing stakeholders - Software engineering practices to improve management
Nicky Thompson gives a great reminder that you can leverage many of the skills you learned as an engineer to make you a better manager - Being glue
So much of most valuable and essential work of software development is not coding and this work is often undervalued when it comes to gaining promotion. Tanya Reilly provides excellent advice to both engineers and managers on how to deal with this challenge. - How to hold your team accountable
Dave Bailey offers a summary of Jonathan Raymond's Accountability Dial framework to help you think about how you hold your team accountable. - Priorities: Rocks, pebbles, and sand
A useful metaphor for thinking about your time at work as well as in life. - I hate manager READMEs
"If you want to build trust, you do that by showing up, talking to your team both individually and as a team, and behaving in an ethical, reliable manner. Over, and over, and over again. You don’t get it from writing a doc about how you deserve their trust." — Camille Fournier - High output management
Anna Shipman gives a concise summary of the most useful book I have read on management, Andy Grove's "High output management" - Clear is kind. Unclear Is unkind.
Brené Brown on the importance of having tough conversations - Failure is yours, success belongs to the team
Tess Cooper's talk is brilliant and advises you to accept that you are part of any failure that happens and be specific about the issues that you face. This helps you to work through them as a team and sets an example for others to follow. - The Manager's Path
Camille's Fournier's comprehensive, practical guide to managing technology teams - 12 signs you’re working in a feature factory
John Cutler shares signs to watch out for - This is what impactful engineering leadership looks like
Jessica McKellar shares her experiences and gives an excellent outline of what we can aspire to be as leaders - BICEPS
Paloma Medina outlines a model of 6 core needs that can help you explore and understand people's motivations - Proceed until apprehended
Harriet Minter on the power of not waiting for explicit permission - Tear it down
"Leadership comes from everywhere" — Rands - Triggers
We have triggers. The people who work for us have triggers. They can be surprising when you hit them. Rands reminds us to notice when we are hitting them - The Rands Test
The Rands Test is a simple test to help you think about the health of communication in your company, - The power of small wins
Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer's research shows that progress in meaningful work boosts your inner work life. As a manager you can create catalysts for progress and remove blockers to progress - RSA Animate - Drive
Animation of Dan Pink's RSA talk about what motivates us: autonomy, mastery and purpose. - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Patrick Lencioni's fable of a leadership team provides a valuable model for thinking about how a team functions. - The Joel test: 12 steps to better code
Joel Spolsky's highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. - "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" by Richard P. Rumelt
This book is essential reading for anyone working on strategy. I wish I had read it earlier in my career. - CTO Levels™
A framework developed by Etienne de Bruin, Kathy Keating and Scott Graves to help you think about the practices that your tech organisation may need to adopt as you grow - Engineering Management Resources
A wide range of resources collected by Sarai Rosenberg - Rands Leadership Slack
This is excellent community of over 30,000 engineering leaders with over 600 channels covering every aspect of engineering leadership - stdlib
Andrew Murphy's community built collection of more than 1,000 resources for technical leadership
Productivity
Improving and measuring productivity
- How can I increase velocity when I’m already at full speed?
Some really great advice from Mathias Meyer on how to respond when when your CEO asks you and your team to "go faster" - Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey
Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck clearly lay out the challenges with measuring developer productivity and the dangers of following McKinsey's advice - Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey, Part 2
Part 2 of Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck's insightful articles on measuring developer productivity - Meetings *are* the work
Elizabeth Ayer challenges the trope that meetings aren’t work - Where we’re going wrong with developer productivity
Cat Hicks dispels some key productivity myths, and gives guidance on what to do instead - Measuring engineering efficiency at LinkedIn
[BEHIND A PAYWALL]
Max Kanat-Alexander gives some great insights into the pitfalls of measuring and improving developer productivity - Reduce friction
Minimising friction is key when it comes to helping your team succeed, and Ceej Silverio's guidance really hits the nail on the head - Cannot measure productivity
Martin Fowler's reminder of the issues with measuring productivity in software development
Personal development
Growing as a leader yourself — confidence, emotions, curiosity and finding your own style
- Sally Lait: Confidence is the real metric
Sally Lait joins Robby Russell and shares valuable wisdom about the very human work of building maintainable software and the teams that make it so. - Debugging self-doubt: A framework for building confidence
[BEHIND A PAYWALL]
Natalia Nazaruk's brief and entertaining talk includes lots of practical advice - Not technical enough
Many engineering leaders worry about not being "technical enough". Brienna Ransom shares her own journey with this question and how it is an area rife with bias and is really context dependent - The superpower of feeling your emotions
Evgeny Shadchnev shares the power of responding consciously to our emotions - There is no number one tip
James Stanier reminds us that there is no secret or silver bullet to becoming a good leader and so we have learn how to learn to be a better leader. - Finding your leadership style
There is no single way to be a good leader, and Sally Lait offers invaluable guidance to help you explore your own leadership style - How to Be a Career-Changing Mentor — 25 Tips From The Best Mentors We Know
All sorts of good ideas to consider how to approach different aspects of mentoring - Who I want to work for
Keavy McMinn's reflections on the sort of leader they want to work for is a useful reminder that this is a good way to start thinking about sort of leader you want to be
First time leaders
Advice for people newly stepping into a leadership role, whether as a first-time CTO, manager or tech lead
- What really happens in a board meeting
Kevin Goldsmith shares his experiences of being in board meetings as a CTO - 3 main soft skills a Tech Lead needs to develop
Anemari Fiser offers great advice on the core skills that you will need - The 10 most common mistakes of first-time CTOs
Sergio Visinoni's 5 part series really resonates with my own experience of becoming a CTO and the mistakes that I made - Don’t create chaos
Great practical advice for avoiding creating chaos in your teams - An in-depth guide to everything you should do in your first three months as a first-time manager of managers
Lena Reinhard shares a detailed guide to planning your first 3 months in this role, and offers plenty of advice and a reminder of many of the things you need to be thinking about. - If you want to be a terrible manager, focus on being a shit shield
Jade Rubick with a healthy reminder if you see your job as a manager is to "protect the team" you are likely to create a poor environment to work in