Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Human bias and overconfidence cause teams to miss estimates, yet studies show we estimate familiar work within 20-30% and can boost accuracy to 80%+ with feedback and training.
Use plain language, metaphors, and active listening to turn stakeholder resistance into collaboration, giving technical leaders a practical playbook for winning support for digital transformation.
Great candidates combine sharp perception of the problem with broader perspective on business impact, especially as AI reshapes work, making curiosity and adaptability more valuable than résumé polish.
Ten concrete habits-growth mindset, purposeful 1-on-1s, a curated reading list, embracing imperfection, feedback loops, mentorship-that help new engineering managers quickly build effective teams and avoid common pitfalls.
A data-driven playbook showing founders how to hire, retain, and lead teams at hyper-growth, using research from 200,000 profiles across 210 startups to turn chaos into scalable success.
Leaders must shift from panic to a controlled emergency mode, set clear short-term priorities, and reshape routines to keep momentum and avoid burnout during crises.
Managers who make every decision for their team stifle learning and motivation; creating policies that give staff choice builds better decision makers and prevents burnout.
Effective managing-up means shaping your manager's decisions with clear data, forward-looking trade-offs, and proactive communication, turning a boss-report relationship into a strategic partnership.
Obsessive productivity hacks backfire, driving burnout and reducing real output; strategic breaks and outcome-focused work boost sustainable performance.
Sadness is a hidden driver for leaders; the piece offers ten practical tactics to acknowledge it, stay in control, and turn the weight of caring into clearer decisions and steadier resilience.
Cycle time varies wildly; a large study shows tiny effects from PR count, comments, coding days, and defects, urging leaders to focus on system-level improvements rather than individual blame.
Engineering leaders need concrete ways to gauge impact beyond velocity metrics; this piece shares real company measures-press releases, billable features, competitive advantages, and project counts-and offers a framework for tracking big bets, experiments, and fires.
Optimizing workspace, hardware, tooling, and processes cuts context-switching and waste, delivering higher developer productivity and ROI.
Avoiding tough feedback kills performance and innovation; the piece shows how to create a culture that forces those critical talks.
Coaching works best when it balances sincere praise with clear, accountable improvement steps; misuse turns it into conflict avoidance, wasting feedback opportunities.
A painfully detailed postmortem shows how a heavyweight change-management process added massive toil without improving release stability, and why engineering leaders must replace one-size-fits-all gatekeeping with bottom-up, resilient practices.
Spend a couple hours prepping a rubric and focused follow-ups to turn flaky behavioral interviews into reliable hiring signals.
Leaders waste time by ignoring intuition, pretending to be data-driven, hoarding expertise, delaying expert help, and forgetting they're business leaders-not just engineers.
A collection of hard-earned ops maxims that expose hidden failure modes, cultural blind spots, and practical warning signs every technical leader should internalize to improve reliability and decision-making.
Bad onboarding kills trust and retention; a structured, empathy-first process that includes a buddy, clear expectations, knowledge gathering, and confidence-building turns first-day jitters into lasting performance.
Metrics become harmful when leaders confuse why they measure-exploration, optimization, or standardization-leading to perverse incentives and stifled innovation.
Learn how new tech leads can stop drowning in tasks by using a delegation matrix and urgent-important triage to focus on high-impact work and avoid burnout.
Adopting Spotify's Squad model lets small cross-functional teams own missions, but it demands culture, leadership, and technical autonomy-this article shares real-world experiments, concrete benefits, and pitfalls to watch.
Personal growth hinges on accountability; by declaring self-iterations you track improvement and act on feedback, turning coaching into real progress.
New managers often feel unproductive because their feedback loop is longer and invisible compared to developers, who see immediate results from code changes.
Breaking work into small, frequent slices keeps teams motivated, reduces risk, and aligns delivery with how our brains process progress, a principle Charles Dickens used with serial publishing.
Trunk-based development isn't just pushing straight to main; it works with short-lived branches, code reviews, and staging, debunking common myths that block teams from adopting it.
Combining OKRs with Jobs To Be Done lets teams translate deep customer motivations into measurable objectives, ensuring product strategies target the right behavior and can be tracked as key results.
AI coding tools promise speed but often slow developers; leaders should stop chasing code generation and instead use AI to cut boring tasks, reduce bottlenecks, and improve quality.
A collection of Revolut ebooks, frameworks, and on-demand webinars that give leaders concrete tools for performance reviews, talent assessment, scaling culture, and AI-driven HR.
Even after 300k big-tech layoffs, hiring stays hard because most cuts aren't pure engineering roles, laid-off talent lands jobs fast, and the remaining pool is limited-so leaders must rethink sourcing and branding.
Reading content created for roles you collaborate with builds cross-functional empathy, uncovers hidden pain points, and lets engineering leaders work smarter with product, recruiting, and management.
A heartbeat metric that tracks the core user action tells you if your product is truly working, cutting through noisy uptime graphs and forcing teams to notice failures fast.
Learn how to ace SDM behavioral interviews by mastering Amazon's leadership principles and structuring stories that prove your leadership impact.
Don't learn Kubernetes on day one—premature optimization kills startups. Intercom's strategy: run less software, use boring tech, bake in security, build for today not someday
Tech leaders can boost intrinsic motivation by balancing compensation with mastery, responsibility, impact, and gratitude, avoiding the trap of over-relying on raises.
Psychological safety is the single factor that lets high-performing teams take risks, speak up, and innovate, and the article shows concrete steps leaders can use to build that safe environment.
We are relatively cautious about what we buy when the stakes are high. But do we apply the same level of scrutiny to the most important investments of our lives – choosing a partner or a career path? Divorce and turnover rates suggest not.
Good recruiters can speed hiring and share inside info, but you must weed out generic spam and scammers by looking for personalized outreach, realistic fit, and red-flags like money requests.
Leaders must intervene to stop high-impact mistakes-like launching unviable projects or over-prioritizing long-term vision-by staying engaged, clarifying goals, and coaching teams to self-steer.
Good strategy hinges on accurate diagnosis, clear focus, and concrete steps-illustrated by GIPHY's sticker initiative and Rumelt's critique of bad strategy.
A product brief aligns stakeholders, clarifies goals, and streamlines development by defining problem, audience, objectives, and prioritized features.
Product briefs force critical thinking upfront by defining what to build, why it matters, and how you'll measure success - alignment in one page
A product brief aligns cross-functional teams by summarizing goals, requirements, and timeline, cutting miscommunication and speeding up product launches.
A clear job ladder lets engineering leaders set promotion expectations, level hiring decisions, and align compensation, preventing confusion and unfairness across the team.
A framework that lets engineering managers hold concrete career conversations by mapping roles, levels, and five performance axes across four ladders.
Standardizing product roadmapping cuts wasted effort and boosts accuracy by 20% while improving team morale through clear roles and capacity planning.
The author recounts turning a hastily-made talk on retrospective antipatterns into a self-published book, then a traditional deal, exposing pitfalls of publishing, distribution, and audiobook narration for tech leaders.
The stdlib collection is a community-curated library of practical, immediately useful, battle-tested resources for technical leadership. Each resource is designed to be immediately applicable to your role. New resources are added based on community feedback and emerging best practices.