Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Analysis of infrastructure platform team organizational models and when costly re-orgs aren't needed
Why organizational structure often prevents companies from executing their intended strategy
Small, decoupled teams with clear business boundaries and stable communication pathways reduce cognitive load and let organizations behave like a living organism, aligning architecture with people first.
Two-pizza teams often lose their original purpose, leading to diluted missions, excess coordination, and stalled productivity as organizations over-split work.
Jeremiah Lee shows how Spotify's famed squad model collapsed under growth, exposing flaws in matrix management, over-autonomy, and missing accountability, and offers concrete lessons for scaling engineering teams.
Conway's law ties system design to team communication; the article shows how the Reverse Conway Maneuver lets you design teams to enable the desired architecture, with concrete examples from Team Topologies and IBM.
Practical strategies from engineers for rapidly learning new domains through strategic meetings, hands-on product use, and structured knowledge acquisition
Martin Fowler's analysis of onboarding bottlenecks that prevent scaleups from growing effectively
A 30-minute interview framework lets new leaders quickly map knowledge, priorities, and influence, turning early conversations into fast impact while avoiding common rookie pitfalls.
Medium Engineering revamped remote onboarding by adding recorded classes, dedicated checklists for managers and buddies, point-of-contact handbooks, and richer feedback loops, showing how structured processes cut stress and speed new-hire productivity.
GitLab's comprehensive engineering onboarding checklist template
Mattermost's structured 30/60/90-day onboarding framework for remote teams
GitLab cuts onboarding time with an issue-based workflow, dedicated buddies, early pairing, and weekly feedback, getting engineers to ship code in a week and stay longer.
Joel Spolsky's framework for shielding developers from organizational complexity
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Shreyas Doshi's practical breakdown of what makes good managers effective: asking questions that shift perspective, listening relentlessly, addressing context before content, and putting people's wellbeing above short-term OKRs.
How extreme ownership mindset empowers engineers to achieve their goals
Car metaphor for understanding different types of engineers and their optimal environments
Using a Mourinho-style analogy, the author shows how framing feedback as talent-maximizing helps a high-ego data scientist accept guidance and improve performance.
Engineers' top strengths often become their biggest weaknesses; recognizing this duality lets managers reframe feedback, set clear context, and pair complementary styles for stronger team performance.
Engineers accelerate growth by using structured mentorship practices-from onboarding buddies to formal cadences-so both mentors and mentees gain skills and confidence.
Effective advice hinges on context: be direct, signal importance, share common reference points, and frame questions around immediate action, so the receiver can act without waste.
Craft specific, context-rich questions for your mentor to turn a single session into actionable career guidance.
Simple Sabotage shows leaders how everyday behaviors sabotage teams and gives concrete tactics to spot and eliminate them, turning hidden friction into high performance.
Silence forces teams out of dependency; by resisting the urge to fill gaps, leaders build autonomous decision-making and stronger collaboration.
Meetings are real knowledge work; treating them as productive collaboration unlocks better decision-making, learning, and team performance.
Lenny Rachitsky shares a leadership team ritual: weekly "Fight Club" meetings where the explicit goal is to have productive conflict, from a conversation with Jira's head of product.
Andy Grunwald's pragmatic approach to reclaiming productivity by strategically canceling unnecessary meetings
Justin Garrison's insider view of Amazon's unique document-based meeting culture and decision-making process
Practical blueprint for transforming engineering team meetings into engaging knowledge-sharing sessions
Practical tactics from seasoned leaders show how to cut unnecessary meetings, run focused one-ons, and design all-hands, board, and sales meetings that drive alignment without draining energy.
Lara Hogan's strategic approach to transforming meetings from time-wasters into powerful collaboration tools
Martin Sustrik's analysis of how formal processes can strip human judgment and accountability from organizations
Executives who can switch between policy, consensus, and conviction leadership styles make better decisions and keep teams progressing.
Servant leadership boosts team performance by caring for employees, driving trust, collaboration and innovation while highlighting real-world examples from Oprah to Satya Nadella.
Rotating project lead responsibilities lets every engineer act as an owner, boosting execution speed, professional growth, and retention while reducing bottlenecks.
Shift from directing staff-plus engineers to sponsoring them, give frequent feedback, protect deep-thinking time, and align their work with business goals.
Dee Hock's visionary leadership principles from the founder of VISA on organizational design and management
Servant leadership lets engineering managers balance business pressure and technical reality by enabling teams, improving estimates, and removing blockers.
A curated list of 12 manager readme documents from leading Silicon Valley tech firms, revealing how they define leadership expectations, communication norms, and performance metrics for engineering managers.
Leaders are still essential; the article argues that empowering, non-interfering leaders enable self-organizing teams and that organizations must reclaim leadership roles to keep teams focused and effective.
Humane Development argues that software teams thrive when leaders prioritize people over speed, enforce sustainable pace, honest deadlines, and autonomy, rejecting hustle-driven crunch.
Figma's structured approach to conducting effective design critiques and feedback sessions
Intelligence can be trained: five evidence-backed principles-seek novelty, challenge yourself, think creatively, do things the hard way, and network-let leaders apply them to sharpen fluid intelligence and decision-making.
General Mattis's compelling argument for continuous learning and reading as essential leadership responsibilities
A concise guide that shows how to run structured debriefs after meetings or projects, turning raw discussion into actionable insights and preventing repeat mistakes.
Stop blaming individuals and replace postmortems with learning reviews that surface system fragilities, so teams can build real accountability and lasting resilience.
LFI demands more effort than RCA but forces teams to expose hidden mental model gaps, turning incidents into lasting system knowledge that improves future decisions.
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.