Frontline Engineering Managers Resources
This is a curated list of talks, books, and other resources for front line engineering managers. Hopefully you can find them useful. Whenever I find another resource that is worth adding, I will update this list. Suggestions are always appreciated.
Books
- The Effective Manager The how-to guide for exceptional management from the bottom up that serves as a hands-on practical guide to great management at every level.
- Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead Drawing on the latest research in behavioral economics and human psychology, provides teaching examples of how businesses achieve spectacular results by valuing and listening to their employees.
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right Explains how simple checklists have prompted striking and immediate improvements in surgical and hospital settings, then goes beyond the field of medicine to explore how checklists have improved everything from homeland security to investment banking.
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Challenges popular misconceptions to reveal what actually motivates people and how to harness that knowledge to promote personal and professional fulfillment.
- Remote: Office Not Required Assesses the trend of working from home while explaining its challenges and benefits, posing arguments about why businesses should promote work-from-home models and how remote work setups can be productively accomplished.
- Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People Argues that prejudice toward others is often an unconscious part of the human psyche and analyzes the science behind biased feelings while sharing guidelines for identifying and learning from hidden prejudices.
- Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win Two highly decorated Navy SEALs, now successful businessmen, demonstrate how to lead and win in business and in life with principles learned on the battlefield.
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t The author uses his research on the Fortune 500 to create a blueprint for turning good companies into spectacular ones.
- First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently Explains how good managers can select, focus, motivate, and develop their employees in order to transform talent into performance
- The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t A business handbook on preventing and curing a negative work environment explains how to restore civility to the workplace by weeding out problem employees in order to increase profit and productivity.
- The Essential Drucker: In One Volume the Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management Twenty-six selections from six decades of consulting and advising companies and individuals introduces the seminal ideas of one of the nation’s greatest management gurus.
- Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter Categorizes the different styles of leadership, ultimately dividing them up into two groups: the negatively-impacting “Diminishers” and positively-impacting “Multipliers,” and explains how current and aspiring managers can think and operate like “Multipliers” to make their employees smarter and more capable.
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable Presents a workplace fable on dysfunctional teamwork, citing the fictional example of CEO Kathryn Petersen, who identifies five “corruptions” that get in the way of her company’s teamwork and how she implements action steps to overcome them
- Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People A noted brain scientist explains how managers can build a more effective workforce by studying what the latest research reveals about how people think.
- The 48 Laws of Power Draws on the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Von Clausewitz, and others, combining them with the legacies of powerful people throughout history to offer essential ideas of the ways of power.
- The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action “Did you ever wonder why so much education and training, management consultation, organizational research and so many books and articles produce so few changes in actual management practice?” ask Stanford University professors Pfeffer and Sutton.
- High Output Management In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company.
- The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done Peter F. Drucker’s timeless classic work on leadership and management, with a foreword by Jim Collins
- The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (J-B Leadership Challenge: Kouzes/Posner)
- The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
- Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
- The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company
- The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever
- My Years with General Motors became an instant bestseller when it was first published in 1963. It has since been used as a manual for managers, offering personal glimpses into the practice of the “discipline of management” by the man who perfected it.
Software Engineering Management Specific
There are not that many books specific to managing software engineering teams so I have tried to list all known books here.
- Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager 3rd ed. Edition 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.
- Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity A selection of essays that will appeal to programmers and their managers is culled from the author’s Web site which covers every imaginable aspect of software programming from writing code to designing an office in which to write code.
- Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams 1st Edition Counsels managers on how to minimize the costs of high turnover, low morale and poor collaboration associated with difficult employees, outlining strategies for attracting and attaining desirable job candidates, communicating effectively and establishing action plans for transforming problematic workers into positive performers.
- The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) A classic book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”.
- Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd Edition) A book on the social side of software development, specifically managing project teams.
- Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It In this book, leading thinkers offer essays that uncover the truth and unmask myths commonly held among the software development community.
- The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
- Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby
- Becoming A Technical Leader, An Organic Problem Solving Approach
- Managing Software Maniacs: Finding, Managing, and Rewarding a Winning Development Team
- The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
- Leading Snowflakes: The Engineering Manager Handbook
- How To Take Your Engineering Team From Good To Great
Hiring
- Topgrading, 3rd Edition: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance Describes how to use the Topgrading system to boost hiring success rates to find the highest performing prospective employees, helping to solve the problems of resume dishonesty, shallow interviews, and biased references.
- Who: The A Method for Hiring A manager’s guide to hiring the right employees draws on the expertise of hundreds of high-level executives to present a simple, easy-to-follow program to guarantee hiring success.
Influence
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion The classic book on persuasion which explains the psychology of why people say “yes”—and how to apply these understandings.
- Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade Examines the art of effective persuasion to argue that its secret lies in a key moment before messages are delivered, sharing strategies for how to psychologically prepare one’s listeners to render them most receptive.
- Swayed: How to Communicate for Impact A must read for anyone serious about the positive power of persuasion, from a leading behavioral change expert.
- How to Win Friends & Influence People For more than sixty years the rock-solid, time-tested advice in this book by Dale Carnegie has carried thousands of now famous people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives.
- Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations—whether in the boardroom or at home.
Communities
- Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community
- San Francisco Engineering Leadership Community (SFELC)
- /r/AskManagement/ on Reddit
- Rand Leadership Slack Channel
Other lists
- Awesome Leading and Managing
- Engineering Manager Resources
- A collection of inspiring resources related to engineering management and tech leadership
Assessment Tools
Videos
- Everyday Leadership
- Start with why – how great leaders inspire action | Simon Sinek
- Tribal leadership
- Dan Pink: The Puzzle of Motivation
- Chris Voss: “Never Split the Difference”
- Spotify Engineering Culture part 1
- The happy secret to better work | Shawn Achor
- How to speak so that people want to listen | Julian Treasure
- How miscommunication happens (and how to avoid it) - Katherine Hampsten
- How to Manage with Ben Horowitz
- Managing Software People and Teams - An Introduction
- If We’re Agile Why Do We Need Managers?
- Crash Course: Managing Software People and Teams
Podcasts
- Manager Tools Podcast
- HBR IdeaCast
- Simple Leadership – the podacst for technology leaders
Software Tools
- 1on1tracker.com One on one tracking app for managers
- Lighthouse Lighthouse helps you motivate your team, and prevent turnover, by helping you focus on the most important thing: Your People
- Vibe Morale Meter for Teams
- 101 questions Automatically pick three things to ask in 1 on 1 meetings
Presentations
- Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility
- The Hubspot Culture Code
- Engineering your culture: How to keep your engineers happy
Posts and Blogs
- This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers
- Google’s re:Work Manager Guide
- What Great Managers Do
- Average Manager vs. Great Manager Explained in 10 sketches
- Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss
- A Manager’s FAQ
- Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management (Part 1)
- You waste a lot of time at work Infographic
- Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
- Managing the Unmanageable: Resources
- Results Or People: Where Should A Leader Focus?
- Ron Lichty: Thoughts on random acts of software engineering management…
- Simple Leadership - Fast track to technology leadership
- What are good questions to ask employees in one on one meetings? I just want my employees to be happy and productive. How can I make sure we’re having good, honest, productive conversations?
- Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management (Part 1)
- Share your Manager README
Email Newsletters
- Software Lead Weekly
- Tech Leadership Weekly
- Leading Software People
- CTO Insights
- Picard Tips
- Thinkers50
Quotes
- “There are no bad soldiers, only bad officers.” - Napoleon Bonaparte
- “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” ― Archilochos
- “Reading a book about management isn’t going to make you a good manager any more than a book about guitar will make you a good guitarist, but it can get you thinking about the most important concepts.” ― Drew Houston
- “The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace.” ― W. Edwards Deming
- “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt
- “What’s measured improves” - Peter F. Drucker
Humor
- Dilbert cartoons tagged with management
