78 books

Books

Books on management and engineering leadership that I keep coming back to, with a few notes on each.

Your first team

New managers

The ones I hand to someone the week they become a manager.

  • The Manager’s Path

    Camille Fournier

    A map of every rung, from mentoring an intern to running a department. I mostly reread the early chapters now. What I like most is that it quietly treats staying on one rung as a perfectly good choice, which most career advice doesn’t. It’s the first book I give a new manager. More on the blog.

  • The Making of a Manager

    Julie Zhuo

    Honest about how awkward the first year is, and how long it takes to stop feeling like an impostor. The idea that sticks is that you’re judged on the team’s results now, not your own. Obvious on paper. Surprisingly hard to feel in your gut when you used to be the one shipping.

  • Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager

    James Stanier

    Very practical, almost a manual. I borrowed the habit of looking back at my week and asking which parts only I can do. The answer is usually fewer than I’d like, and that’s useful information.

  • Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

    Sarah Drasner

    Short and kind, and easy to read in an afternoon. The chapter on values is better than it sounds. Values aren’t the posters, they’re what a team falls back on when nobody is checking.

  • Managing Humans

    Michael Lopp

    Funny, a little cranky, and full of characters you’ll recognize from real teams. A lot of what I believe about one-on-ones started here. Mostly that people problems are usually information problems, and the one-on-one is where you find out what you don’t know.

  • Resilient Management

    Lara Hogan

    Compact and full of tools you can use the next day. The one I use most is the difference between mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring. Now I ask which one someone actually wants before I start helping, which saves both of us a lot of time.

  • The One Minute Manager

    Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

    Tiny and dated, and you can read it on a short flight. Clear goals, quick praise, quick correction. It still works. “Catch people doing something right” is probably the cheapest management habit I have.

  • The Effective Manager

    Mark Horstman

    Weekly one-on-ones, every week, even when there’s nothing urgent to talk about. That’s most of the book and most of the value. The consistency is the point. The week you skip is the week someone needed it.

  • The First 90 Days

    Michael D. Watkins

    Worth rereading before any new role, not just a management one. The big idea is to diagnose before you change anything. Is this a turnaround, a startup, a team that’s doing fine and wants to be left alone? Each one wants a different first move, and getting it wrong early is expensive.

Hard conversations

Every stage

Feedback, coaching, and the talks everyone would rather postpone.

  • Radical Candor

    Kim Scott

    Care personally, challenge directly. I was good at the first half long before I got good at the second. Being nice in the moment and sitting on feedback felt kind. It wasn’t. The book gave me a name for that, which made it harder to keep doing.

  • Crucial Conversations

    Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

    When a conversation goes sideways, fix the safety first and the content second. I started noticing the moment people go quiet or get sharp, and pausing there instead of pushing through. Sounds simple. It takes practice.

  • Thanks for the Feedback

    Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen

    Receiving feedback well is the harder skill, and this is the best book I know on it. It breaks down why feedback stings, and why we dismiss it even when it’s right. Getting better at hearing criticism turned out to matter more than getting better at giving it.

  • The Coaching Habit

    Michael Bungay Stanier

    A very short book built around seven questions. “And what else?” might be the most useful thing I ask in a week. The first answer is rarely the real one. I give a lot less advice than I used to, and people solve more on their own.

  • Humble Inquiry

    Edgar H. Schein

    A thin book with a big point. A title changes what people are willing to tell you, and the higher you go, the more filtered everything gets. Asking real questions, the kind you don’t already know the answer to, is about the only fix I’ve found.

  • Never Split the Difference

    Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

    Hostage negotiation turns out to be oddly relevant to offer calls and roadmap debates. Name the feeling, mirror the last few words, then be quiet. It feels a little silly the first few times. Then it works and you stop feeling silly.

  • How to Win Friends and Influence People

    Dale Carnegie

    Old and a bit corny, with examples from a world of telegrams and salesmen. Also still right about almost everything. People want to be heard, remembered, and taken seriously. None of that has changed.

Teams and trust

Team leads to directors

What makes a group of people into a team, and what breaks one.

  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

    Patrick Lencioni

    A business fable, which I didn’t expect to like. The pyramid is simple: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, results. When a team avoids conflict or nods through decisions it doesn’t believe in, I look for missing trust first. It’s usually there.

  • The Culture Code

    Daniel Coyle

    Lots of stories about groups that work well, from kitchens to special forces. The part that changed how I act is vulnerability going first. Admitting your own mistakes out loud does more for a team than most offsites.

  • The Rocket Model

    Gordon Curphy and Robert Hogan

    Less famous than it should be. It walks through what a team needs, from context and mission to talent, norms, buy-in, and resources. I use it as a checklist when a team is stuck. The cause is usually upstream of the people.

  • Turn the Ship Around!

    L. David Marquet

    A submarine captain stops giving orders and the crew gets better. The small trick is replacing “may I” with “I intend to.” The big idea is pushing decisions to whoever has the information, and then making sure they have the context to make them well.

  • Extreme Ownership

    Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

    Intense in tone, and you have to get past the combat framing. The core idea holds up though. When something goes wrong on your team, start with what you could have made clearer. It’s almost always something.

  • Leaders Eat Last

    Simon Sinek

    A bit long for its main point, but the main point is a good one. People do their best work when they trust that their leader has their back. A big part of the job is absorbing chaos from above so the team doesn’t have to.

  • Multipliers

    Liz Wiseman

    Uncomfortable in a good way. Some leaders make everyone around them sharper, and some, often with good intentions, make people smaller. I recognized myself in the accidental diminisher chapter, mostly from answering too fast and rescuing too early.

  • Impact Players

    Liz Wiseman

    A follow-up to Multipliers, this time about contributors instead of leaders. It gave me good language for what sets strong senior people apart. They go find the work that matters instead of waiting to be handed it, and they make the people around them better without being asked.

  • Dare to Lead

    Brené Brown

    Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. That one line is worth the book. Being vague to dodge an awkward moment feels considerate, and it usually costs everyone more later.

  • Give and Take

    Adam Grant

    Givers, takers, and matchers, with a lot of research behind it. The surprise is that givers end up at both the top and the bottom. The ones at the top are generous but choose where. That distinction changed how I protect my calendar.

Knowing yourself

Every stage

Leading other people starts with managing your own head.

  • Emotional Intelligence

    Daniel Goleman

    The book that made self-awareness a leadership topic. The thing that stuck for me is how contagious a manager’s mood is. A short, tired reply lands much harder than you mean it to, and the team spends the afternoon wondering what they did.

  • Primal Leadership

    Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee

    Goleman again, applied to leaders. The section on leadership styles is the useful part, especially the idea that each style has a time. Pacesetting is my default under stress. It feels productive and it quietly wears people out.

  • Humble Leadership

    Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein

    Schein’s argument for leading through real, personal relationships instead of transactions. Know people as people, not as roles. It takes more time up front. Every hard conversation later gets easier.

  • The Leadership Moment

    Michael Useem

    Case studies of people making big decisions under pressure, from firefighters to executives. Not a how-to. More of a rehearsal. Worth thinking through hard calls before you’re the one who has to make them.

  • Mindset

    Carol S. Dweck

    Fixed versus growth mindset. The research has been debated since, but the practical advice holds up. Praise the process, not the talent. Same goes for how you talk to yourself after a bad week.

  • The Organized Mind

    Daniel J. Levitin

    Why our brains are bad at juggling, and what to do about it. The short version: write everything down and stop pretending to multitask. My head is for thinking, not for remembering what I promised on Tuesday.

  • Managing Oneself

    Peter F. Drucker

    A short essay, more a long article than a book. I reread it at career decisions. What are your strengths, how do you work, where do you belong? Even knowing whether you’re a reader or a listener changes how you should ask for information.

  • That’s What She Said

    Joanne Lipman

    Practical and well reported, aimed at men who want to help close the gap at work. I pay closer attention now to who gets interrupted and who gets credit in meetings. Small things, but they add up fast.

  • Inspire

    Adam Galinsky

    Recent and research heavy, about what makes leaders inspiring and what makes them infuriating. The thread I took from it is that people remember how a leader made them feel long after they forget the plan.

  • The Power of Mattering

    Zach Mercurio

    About the difference between being valued and being noticed. Telling someone specifically how their work made a difference is cheap, fast, and underused. Generic praise doesn’t count.

Running engineering

Managers of managers

When the job becomes designing the system the teams live in.

  • An Elegant Puzzle

    Will Larson

    Org design with actual models instead of gut feel. Team sizing, managing tech debt, when to reorg. I still use the team sizing ideas. It reads like a notebook from someone who has done the job, which is a compliment.

  • High Output Management

    Andrew S. Grove

    Still the best management book I’ve read, and it’s from 1983. A manager’s output is the output of their team plus the teams they influence. Once that sinks in, you look at your calendar differently. Meetings, decisions, and one-on-ones stop being interruptions and start being the work.

  • Peopleware

    Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

    Software problems are mostly people problems. Written decades ago and still mostly true. It made me protective of focus time and suspicious of anything that adds interruptions in the name of process.

  • The Mythical Man-Month

    Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

    Adding people to a late project makes it later. Fifty years on, someone still has to explain it every year. The essays on conceptual integrity and the second-system effect are just as good and get quoted less.

  • Managing the Unmanageable

    Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty

    More of a reference book than a read-through. It’s full of concrete practices, like how to run a reference check or plan a new hire’s first week. I reach for it when I want a checklist instead of a philosophy.

  • Becoming a Technical Leader

    Gerald M. Weinberg

    Weinberg on what changes when you move from solving problems to helping other people solve them. The lesson for me was that leading engineers isn’t about being the best problem solver in the room. It’s about setting things up so everyone else can be.

  • The Engineering Leader

    Cate Huston

    One of the better recent books on the job. Reads like advice from a sharp peer who has seen a few things go wrong. Especially good on managing up and keeping a pace you can actually sustain.

  • Scaling People

    Claire Hughes Johnson

    An operating manual for building a company, written by someone who did it. My main takeaway was to write down how your team operates, decisions, rituals, expectations, instead of hoping people absorb it. New people especially.

How work flows

Every stage

Delivery, estimation, and figuring out what to build in the first place.

  • The Goal

    Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

    A novel about a factory manager, which sounds dull and isn’t. Find the bottleneck first. Speeding up anything that isn’t the bottleneck just makes a bigger pile in front of it. I think about this every time a team wants to optimize the wrong step.

  • Theory of Constraints

    Eliyahu M. Goldratt

    The method behind The Goal, without the story. Short and dry. The five focusing steps are worth knowing by heart, especially when delivery feels stuck and nobody can say why.

  • The Phoenix Project

    Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

    The Goal, retold for IT and operations. The idea I kept is that unplanned work is its own category. Track it like any other work, or it quietly eats your roadmap and nobody can explain where the time went.

  • Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

    Robert L. Glass

    Short claims, some well known, some uncomfortable, each with a bit of evidence. It made me humbler about estimates and a lot more skeptical of anything that promises a step change in productivity.

  • Software Estimation

    Steve McConnell

    The thorough one. An estimate, a target, and a commitment are three different things, and most painful conversations come from mixing them up. Keeping them apart saves a lot of awkward meetings. Ranges help too.

  • Continuous Discovery Habits

    Teresa Torres

    How a product team can talk to customers every week and turn what it hears into decisions. Very concrete. I’d like engineers in those conversations too, not just hearing a summary later.

  • The Right It

    Alberto Savoia

    Most new ideas fail, even well-executed ones, so test them cheaply before you build them. The question I ask now before almost any project is what the fastest, cheapest way to find out is. Often it’s a fake door or a spreadsheet.

  • Measure What Matters

    John Doerr

    The OKR book. My take after using them for a while: the objective is where the real conversation happens. Writing one sentence about what matters this quarter forces the disagreements out. The key results are the easy part.

  • How to Measure Anything

    Douglas W. Hubbard

    A whole book arguing that if you care about something, you can measure it well enough to make a better decision. Roughly is often enough. It cured me of saying “you can’t measure that” in planning meetings.

Strategy and the business

Directors and up

Seeing engineering the way the rest of the company sees it.

  • The Effective Executive

    Peter F. Drucker

    Short, old, and still right. Know where your time goes, focus on contribution, make fewer and better decisions. I check my calendar against it every so often and always find something to stop doing.

  • Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

    Peter F. Drucker

    Dense, long, and not a casual read. A lot of later management books feel like footnotes to this one. I dip into it more than I read it straight through.

  • Good Strategy Bad Strategy

    Richard Rumelt

    Most strategy documents are lists of goals with a nice cover. A real strategy is a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and actions that fit together. I write the diagnosis first now, and it’s usually the hardest part.

  • Financial Intelligence

    Karen Berman and Joe Knight

    Enough finance to read a P&L and understand why the CFO is worried. It made me useful in budget conversations instead of just nervous in them. Every engineering leader should read something like this.

  • The Outsiders

    William N. Thorndike

    Eight CEOs who didn’t fit the mold and did very well by allocating capital carefully. Headcount is capital too. Asking what the return on a team is feels cold at first, but it leads to better decisions for the team.

  • The Innovator’s Dilemma

    Clayton M. Christensen

    Why good companies lose to cheap, simple products they ignore. Take the unimpressive competitor seriously, especially when your best customers say they don’t care about it.

  • Good to Great

    Jim Collins

    Some of the companies in it didn’t age well, which is its own lesson. Still, “first who, then what” stuck with me. Getting the right people in the room matters more than having the perfect plan.

  • Start with Why

    Simon Sinek

    One idea, stretched to book length. It’s a good idea though. Explain why at every kickoff, even when it feels obvious. It rarely is to everyone in the room.

  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things

    Ben Horowitz

    Candid about the worst parts of running a company: layoffs, firing friends, nearly running out of money. There’s no good way to deliver bad news, so be direct and get on with it. The chapter on peacetime and wartime leaders is the one I think about most.

  • The Art of War

    Sun Tzu

    Short, ancient, and quoted far more than it’s read. Most of it is about avoiding fights. The best ones are the ones you set things up to never have.

Other companies’ playbooks

Directors and up

How some well-known companies say they run, read with a grain of salt.

  • Work Rules!

    Laszlo Bock

    Google’s former head of people on hiring, performance, and culture. The part I use is the evidence for structured interviews. Unstructured ones mostly measure whether the interviewer likes the candidate.

  • How Google Works

    Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

    Good on hiring and on making decisions as a group. Some of it only works with a search business behind you, so read it with that in mind. The bits about smart creatives aged better than I expected.

  • No Rules Rules

    Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

    Netflix’s culture of freedom and responsibility, written with an outside researcher who pushes back here and there. Context over control is the idea I took. It’s hard to copy without Netflix’s talent density, or its pay, and the book is fairly honest about that.

  • High Growth Handbook

    Elad Gil

    Advice and interviews on scaling a startup after it finds its footing. I keep it around for the chapters on hiring and org design. What works at one size breaks at the next, usually sooner than you expect.

How organizations really work

When you are ready

The less comfortable shelf: power, bureaucracy, and why plans fail.

  • Moral Mazes

    Robert Jackall

    A sociologist spends years watching how managers in large companies actually get ahead. Bleak and important. It helped me understand the incentives behind behavior I used to take personally.

  • Power

    Jeffrey Pfeffer

    Blunt and a little uncomfortable. Good work doesn’t speak for itself. Someone has to say it out loud, in the right rooms, and for my team that’s my job. I used to think that was politics. Now I think it’s part of looking after people.

  • The Peter Principle

    Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull

    Satire, mostly. People get promoted until they reach a job they’re bad at, and then they stay there. It’s also a good argument for a real senior track for engineers who don’t want to manage.

  • Seeing Like a State

    James C. Scott

    Not a business book, and it’s long. But it’s the best explanation I’ve found of why grand top-down redesigns fail. Making things tidy and legible from the top often makes them worse on the ground. I think about it every time someone proposes an org-wide reorg.

  • The Empowered Manager

    Peter Block

    Peter Block on choosing to act like an owner instead of playing it safe in a bureaucracy. Odd title, good book. The gist: stop waiting for permission to care about your part of the org.

  • Flawless Consulting

    Peter Block

    For when you have expertise but no authority, which describes most staff engineering and platform work. It taught me to agree on what help is actually wanted before giving any. That alone fixed a lot of friction.

  • Stewardship

    Peter Block

    The third Block book here, and the most idealistic. A team is something you hold in trust, not something you own. I don’t live up to it every week, but it’s a good standard.

Lives

Any time

Biographies and memoirs, for perspective.

  • Shoe Dog

    Phil Knight

    Phil Knight on the early, messy years of Nike. Money problems, lawsuits, near misses, and a lot of luck. Most success stories skip this part. It’s comforting to read how long it was chaos.

  • The Ride of a Lifetime

    Robert Iger

    Bob Iger on his years running Disney. The business stories are fine. What stayed with me was how much he talks about decency, and about being the same person in every room.

  • Steve Jobs

    Walter Isaacson

    The authorized biography, and a long one. Take the focus and the taste, and leave the rest. The book makes it pretty clear they were never a package deal.

  • Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

    Walter Isaacson

    Printer, scientist, diplomat, and relentless self-improver. He tracked his own virtues week by week on a little chart, which is basically a personal retro. He also mostly failed at it, which I find encouraging.

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