Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Technical competence gets you started, but lasting impact requires product thinking, project execution, people skills, and high agency backed by feedback and humility.
Unsettled core questions about belonging trigger self-defeating spirals that drain focus; the piece shows how tiny interventions can break the loop and launch positive spirals for better performance and well-being.
High agency beats talent alone: people who treat obstacles as puzzles and own outcomes consistently outperform, and the article shows how to identify and grow this trait in yourself and teams.
Motivation equals Value x Probability x Return on Effort / Distance, so leaders can boost team drive by increasing perceived value, success likelihood, effort payoff, or shrinking psychological distance.
Accountability often fails for coordination challenges and mis-calibrated risk models, as shown by the OceanGate disaster, highlighting the need for cross-functional oversight and better risk thinking.
Software teams suffer needless anxiety when they work on high-risk 2X4 plank pipelines; adding test suites, automation, and blameless processes makes failure cheaper and morale higher.
Capacity allocation is about a team's true ability to deliver, not just counting hours. Mixing it with time allocation wastes money; separating the two lets leaders discuss real impact.
A balanced legacy modernization strategy lets tech leaders cut cost and risk by choosing remediation, rewrite, or hybrid paths, using AI-driven testing and characterization tests to keep downtime and defects low.
Smart people with deep context already know the right move; the most uncomfortable option is usually correct, so leaders must act fast and listen to nearby experts instead of over-analyzing.
Non-technical managers can still drive results by admitting gaps, asking the right questions, and channeling team expertise, turning lack of expertise into a super-power.
Vogels stresses that technical leaders must chase real problems, not hype, prioritize reversible decisions, bake security from day zero, and use AI to reclaim time while owning critical services and managing cost.
Structured, attention-aware prompts let engineers get reliable, focused LLM outputs, turning prompt writing into a maintainable asset that saves time and reduces costly iteration.
When you inherit a newly restructured department, quickly assess goals, team fit, alignment, perceived barriers, and culture to set a clear path forward and boost performance.
A collection of organizational heuristics-from Brooks's coordination cost to Conway's law-shows how mental models can diagnose dysfunction, curb scope creep, and keep software teams lean and effective.
Chasing only the 'best' engineers stalls startups; focusing on great, realistic hires and adjusting expectations unlocks speed and preserves precious time.
Direct communication cuts bureaucracy, speeds decisions, and builds trust by letting anyone talk across org boundaries without hierarchy.
Turn chronic complainers into contributors by shifting from fixing to inquiry, rewarding ownership, and addressing underlying need for agency and belonging.
Identifies nine recurring org-design patterns-from power politics to fad-driven restructures-and gives concrete survive/thrive hacks for leaders navigating constant re-orgs.
Guaranteed, life-changing money can breed complacency and hurt performance; leaders should enforce accountability to avoid comfort-induced decline.
Ask for a raise with a stoic mindset: lower expectations, know the review process, and prove impact through goals, extra work, relationships, and visibility.
Changing authority so nurses can enforce hand-washing cut mortality rates within a week, proving that fixing the system beats blaming people.
Turn post-mortems, retrospectives, hiring blunders, and missed goal follow-ups into actionable learning to boost team ROI and stop repeating mistakes.
When frustration spikes, choose the "Third Response" - a clear, direct, emotionally steady reply that holds people accountable without damaging morale, and use five quick questions to craft it.
Effective managers own their mistakes, explicitly apologize, and change behavior, turning errors into trust-building opportunities rather than morale killers.
Imposter syndrome plagues tech leaders because management styles are ambiguous, leading to self-doubt; the article shows how recognizing multiple valid approaches can reduce anxiety and improve leadership effectiveness.
Ask "What can I do?" and "Why will this work?" to shift from feeling stuck to actionable confidence, turning overwhelm into clear next steps.
Fear of punishment and belief that nothing will change keep healthcare staff silent, stalling safety improvements; building psychological safety and visible action restores engagement.
Use the outbox pattern correctly by keeping dispatchers simple, avoiding DB contention, treating the DB as a short-term buffer, batching deletes, and continuously measuring to prevent scaling pain.
AI will amplify existing software development practices, so multidisciplinary, ownership-driven teams can speed delivery, while siloed, under-resourced teams risk worsening code and outages.
Translate technical debt into business terms by framing maintenance, evolution, and true debt as friction reduction, cost-benefit moves, and velocity trade-offs to win stakeholder support.
Lead senior engineers by dropping the need to out-tech them, setting clear expectations, providing focused feedback, and staying present enough to unblock without micromanaging.
Glue teams own cross-cutting product features that directly impact users, while back-office teams serve internal needs; the piece argues you should prioritize glue teams early and add back-office only when ROI justifies it.
Explores how leaders can avoid overextension, set healthier boundaries, and model sustainable performance for their teams.
Slow feedback loops waste engineer time and capacity; the article quantifies the hidden cost and shows how building a fast local verification loop can recover a full engineer's productivity.
Treat technical debt as a partnership with product: make it visible, measure its business impact, and use product initiatives to pay it down so engineering can ship faster and more predictably.
Career myths like the promised playbook and total control blind professionals to systemic factors; adopting bounded accountability and process orientation restores realistic agency.
Team-owned OKRs turn strategy into actionable outcomes by giving teams autonomy to define, commit, and measure results, avoiding top-down checklist rituals.
A decade-long personal roadmap shows how moving from coding basics to engineering management reveals concrete practices that drive growth, leadership, and sustainable impact.
Office politics is the default when decision rules are vague; explicit metrics, titles, and reward systems keep it in check and let teams focus on real work.
Unreasonable founders who dictate product vision create faster, higher-impact outcomes than endless collaborative debates, but only when they pair obsession with care for their people.
Coaching gives tech leaders forward-looking, goal-focused guidance, while therapy heals past trauma and mentoring shares experience; picking the right support cuts burnout and speeds career growth.
Committees can sabotage standards when a minority vetoes progress, turning communication structures into design dead-ends; the article shows why technical leaders must recognize and counter the fifth-column problem.
Treat a job offer like a VC due-diligence exercise: evaluate market size, team capability, business model, equity terms, and personal fit before committing your time and reputation.
Developers waste time searching dense API docs; concrete, real-world examples cut context switching and make documentation instantly useful.
Sorting Slack channels by how often you read them lets you tackle urgent messages first, cuts noise, and lowers burnout.
A curated list of seminal software essays, each dissected for the concrete leadership lessons they taught-respecting developers, using type systems to enforce safety, separating essential from accidental complexity, and avoiding hidden test logic.
Free weekly online chat about a book chosen by the cohort, hosted by Blackmill.
Blog posts about the challenges faced by engineering leaders, from culture, to delivery, to conflict and communication, and everything in between.
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.