Resources for new engineering leaders

This is list of books, articles, and other useful resources for new engineering managers, team leads and early stage CTOs. And generally, for everyone who directly manages a small team of technical folks.

If you are a new engineering manager or someone who’d like to up their leadership skills then this is for you. My goal is to keep the list short and useful. With the new role you are already overwhelmed and there’s no point throwing 10 different books onto your reading list you never reading them.

Before diving deeper, it’s good to realise that leadership and management are performed in a certain context. Engineering manager might be a completely different job in an early stage startup and a big tech company. And they will have different priorities in times of cheap and accessible capital (e.g. hiring, growth) and global economy downturn (e.g. efficiency, performance). Understanding author’s circumstances is as important as the advice itself.

Books

My go-to learning platform are books so let’s start with them.

The Manager’s Path

This is the best resource for new engineering managers. The book bridges the gap between technical and people leadership. And it walks you through the whole tech management journey.

It is organized by increasing levels of management complexity — starting from how to be managed well yourself, then mentoring, tech lead, people management, team management, managing multiple teams, managing managers, and finally senior leadership. You can read it in stages as your career progresses and return to it when you hit each new level.

It’s practical. And the advice is coming from someone who’s been through it.

Camille’s experience is from a startup she joined as a manager without a team and she grew into a CTO running the entire engineering over a 4-year period.

The Making of a Manager

In contrast, Julie’s book is written from a perspective of a new manager in big tech. She was a design lead at Facebook and focuses on the early stages of the transition from individual contributor to a manager in great depth.

The book covers the full emotional and practical side of early management. Julie shows that great managers focus on three areas: purpose, people, and process — the why, the who, and the how.

It’ll help you with your first role. Your first hard conversation. Your first performance review. And as with Camille’s book this one comes from a first-hand experience.

The two books work well together. Camille gives you the full career map — from tech lead to CTO. Julie focuses on the early days: the self-doubt, the hard conversations, and the emotional side of the transition that most management books skip.

If you’d like to go above and beyond on the general management side you can pick one of the following books:

• Mythical Man Month
• High Output Management
• Engineering Management for the Rest of Us
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
• Managing Humans

And from there I suggest you start targeting your current pain point. It could be understanding the company domain (Trading & Exchanges for me). Or a team process and metrics (Accelerate). Perhaps you need to start scaling the organisation (Team Topologies). Maybe you need to learn about accounting (Finance and Accounting for Nonfinancial Managers). Or it’s an audit time and you are responsible for risk and security (CISSP course material).

Articles

Running a curated leadership newsletter, I’ve read a fair share of articles. A lot of them are interesting at the time but there’s a few excellent ones that are worth revisiting and sharing.

But firstly, sign up to Leadership in Tech and you’ll get a curated list of the best leadership articles twice a week alongside industry and security news.

The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

A lot of folks are scared that stepping into management is a one way door. But being a manager makes you a better engineer, and being an engineer makes you a better manager. This is a useful early read because it reframes the transition away from giving up coding forever toward something more fluid and deliberate.

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Paul Graham makes a sharp distinction between two ways of structuring time: the manager’s schedule, broken into one-hour slots, and the maker’s schedule, where deep work requires half-day blocks at minimum. A single meeting can derail an entire afternoon for someone on the maker’s schedule. As a new engineering manager, understanding this difference is essential — your team is on the maker’s schedule, and every meeting has a real cost.

How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors

This article identifies four common ways new managers let their reports down. Doing all the technical design work themselves. Handling all the project management rather than teaching it. Neglecting non-technical feedback, and hoarding information rather than giving the team context for their work.

Some Mistakes I Made as a New Manager

Similar to the previous article Ben shares his experience at Anthropic. He writes about the loss of motivation that comes from losing fast feedback loops, the trap of staying on the technical critical path, managing too loosely out of fear of micromanaging, and procrastinating on difficult conversations.

Being Glue

Glue work keeps teams functioning but rarely gets credit. This article makes the case for doing it deliberately — and for making sure the people doing it on your team don’t go unrecognised.

Good Engineering Management Is a Fad

Will shares the contrast between management best practices during the hyper-growth era of 2010s and the efficient operators of 2020s. Best practices change and you need to evolve with your company needs.

Choose Boring Technology

As an engineering manager, you’ll face constant pressure to adopt the latest tools. But teams should default to well-understood, proven technology rather than chasing novelty — not because innovation is bad, but because every new technology comes with unknown failure modes that consume the team’s finite capacity for change. This article gives you a clear mental model and vocabulary for pushing back when it matters.

Podcasts

Dave Smith’s and Jamison Dance’s Soft Skills Engineering is super fun and considerate advice from multiple angles. There’s one new episode coming out every week. Great for your morning commute.