Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Leaders often get vague responses to "How can I help?". This piece offers 24 targeted questions that reduce mental load and surface actionable needs from team members.
When managers leave orchestration-heavy, top-down roles for senior, leadership-heavy positions, they must add problem discovery, solution framing, and narrative to their toolkit or risk stagnating.
Effective developer emails are clear, relevant, efficient, and succinct; the article shows how to front-load key info, use Markdown, split threads, and structure messages to cut noise and boost productivity.
Shipping tiny, usable increments each sprint lets teams validate assumptions early, cut waste, and boost morale faster than traditional two-week sprint waterfalls.
Decisions in software should be fast and reversible; unlike science or engineering, the low cost of failure lets leaders iterate instead of over-thinking, boosting speed and innovation.
Long internal memos go unread, and AI-written content deepens the problem by delivering opaque, unverified summaries that leaders still rely on.
Octopus Energy's CEO shows that trusting teams, limiting meetings, and a vivid shared mission create scalable culture that boosts autonomy and performance.
Code style reflects personal and cultural preferences, not an objective quality; leaders must recognize the trade-offs and align style choices with team goals and hiring standards.
A TikTok intern rewrote CPU-heavy Go payment endpoints in Rust, doubling throughput and cutting cloud costs by $300k annually.
Authority, accountability, and competence must align: give people authority only when they can competently decide, preventing mis-delegated decisions that cost quality and speed.
Managers can show empathy while avoiding emotional drain by setting limits, listening then steering conversations toward actionable solutions.
A practical framework turns dormant technical risks into visible "mines" you can prioritize, track, and defuse before they explode, boosting delivery reliability and team focus.
Bad meetings kill productivity; the article lists the worst practices and then offers five concrete steps to run effective meetings.
Senior engineers need focused coaching; the article identifies four archetypes and gives practical tactics to guide them without micromanaging.
Remote work strips away office boundaries, turning a manager's day into a formless blur that fuels burnout unless intentional structure is built.
Metrics only add value when they trigger clear actions; excess dashboards waste time and money, so focus on a few actionable metrics with regular reviews and explicit expectations.
The author claims microwaves will become the sole cooking method, forcing chefs to adapt or be obsolete, and uses extreme examples to illustrate why leaders must rethink operational assumptions quickly.
Tech leaders must replace raw developer productivity metrics with continuous impact intelligence, using impact networks to tie initiatives directly to business outcomes.
Moving from code to people means trading pull requests for coaching, meetings, and feedback; the article shares concrete steps and mindset shifts that helped the author succeed as an engineering manager.
Communication quality, not coding speed, is the biggest hidden cost in software estimates; AI tools don't reduce this tax, so leaders must focus on clear early collaboration.
AI can boost engineering leaders' productivity when used to edit drafts, sharpen feedback, and manage tone, but it also risks false confidence on unknown topics, so leaders must filter noise and validate output.
Roger Martin shows how treating strategy as a practiced heuristic-using analogy, trade-off, and anomaly searches-creates integrated choice portraits that survive competition and drive real results.
Leaders who are indifferent to personal glory earn deeper respect, build resilient teams, and avoid the hidden pitfalls of recognition-driven leadership.
Track AI progress by measuring which decisions experts hand off to AI, using adoption, frequency, share, assortment, and posture metrics to gauge trust and product maturity.
Engineering managers can avoid costly blind spots by applying second-order thinking-asking "and then what?" to forecast downstream effects before acting.
Designing AI tools that offload cognition lets teams treat machines as collaborative partners, turning mental fatigue into focused creativity and faster problem-solving.
Metrics work when framed as a tool to surface friction and guide system investment, not as a performance scorecard that developers can game.
Research on 2,000 executives shows the most successful leaders earn trust by consistently living their values, and the article distills concrete examples from Schultz, Chesky, Polman, and Nadella into actionable steps for today's leaders.
Leaders toggle between Problem-Solver and Designer modes; recognizing each and shifting deliberately prevents reactive cultures and builds lasting systems.
Leaders erode accountability by skipping check-ins, constantly shifting priorities, misaligned incentives, and broken org charts, and can restore it with regular updates, stable focus, sensible metrics, and clear responsibility.
Written engineering strategy turns implicit assumptions into clear guidance, reducing miscommunication, speeding onboarding, and aligning teams around decisions.
A personal system that turns daily note-taking into a gather-decide-execute loop, letting remote engineering leaders capture, prioritize, and act on information with tools like Logseq.
Bureaucracy spikes when orgs outgrow Dunbar's number and incentives push for formal processes; leaders can curb decline by keeping size low, enforcing clear ownership, and avoiding checklist traps.
Research shows that high-performing software teams combine lean practices, continuous delivery, and a generative culture, which directly boosts delivery speed and organizational performance.
Great CISOs act as business executives who own risk and strategy, while bad CISOs hide behind tools and excuses; the piece contrasts the two with concrete patterns to help security leaders improve.
Tech leaders can see which concrete metrics top companies use to measure AI tooling impact-adoption, time saved, change failure rate, PR throughput-and how to apply the same framework to balance speed, cost, and quality.
Practical tactics for breaking through personal resistance, from pinpointing why you lack drive to chunking tasks, gamifying, and using accountability to get things done.
AI compresses teams, turning managers into hybrid roles where coordination, purpose setting and process design fall to high-agency individuals; leaders must balance stability and flexibility while using AI tools for communication and decision-making.
Strategist CEOs spend their time solving the organization's biggest problems, while technocratic CEOs waste time managing people and processes, limiting growth.
Crises hide opportunities to evolve culture and trust; the author shows how a viral tweet and a security breach turned into openness, community, and stronger teamwork.
Guide leaders to resolve pairwise conflict by listening, steel-manning each side, flipping perspectives, and encouraging direct reconciliation, turning tension into productive insight.
AI only speeds teams that have strong testing, documentation, and fast feedback loops; without those foundations, adoption stalls and code quality suffers.
Leaders who claim strategy is impossible end up making unchecked choices that damage organizations; the article shows how strategic nihilism breeds delusion and destruction, and why explicit choice logic matters.
A curated list of practical engineering management document templates-from career plans and title ladders to decision briefs-plus tips on when and how to use them effectively.
AI amplifies what a team already has: strong teams become more efficient, weak teams see existing problems worsen. The DORA 2025 report shows AI boosts throughput but harms stability without solid platforms, feedback loops, and clear workflows.
Influence comes from framing a message to match your audience's needs and anxieties, using their own words and a simple three-point structure, rather than shouting louder.
Nemawashi shows how pre-aligning stakeholders before a formal pitch turns big technical proposals into approved decisions, converting silent resistance into collaborative momentum.
Influence is a set of five respectful persuasion styles-Rationalising, Asserting, Negotiating, Inspiring, Bridging-that let leaders build trust and genuine buy-in without manipulation.
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.