Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Leaders who define clear, semi-stable lanes, assign owners, and enforce weekly rituals can turn messy workstreams into high-performing teams that continuously adapt without losing focus.
A staff engineer's year is split between strategy, hands-on execution, and growing people, showing how influence, code, and mentorship combine to drive impact across multiple teams.
In SaaS the only teams that drive core value are engineering and sales; all other functions are secondary, so leaders must align around those two to maximize impact.
Best friends at work boost engagement sevenfold, add a 20% salary premium, and improve retention, making friendship a strategic lever for leaders.
Technical leaders boost throughput by constantly identifying the single biggest constraint in their system and focusing all effort on fixing it before moving to the next.
Treat problems as gaps between perception and desire, then choose to move the world, reframe perception, or change the goal-showing leaders when saying no or redefining a problem saves effort and drives smarter trade-offs.
A daily standup focused on sharing interesting updates, not reporting, builds empathy, knowledge sharing and team cohesion while staying brief and flexible.
Great engineering teams stay stable by obsessively maintaining fundamentals-uptime, security, compliance, and quality-rather than chasing flashy features, turning chaos into predictable performance.
Specific, transparent communication of why a reorg happens and exactly what changes for each individual cuts productivity loss and morale dip.
Developers facing burnout need to reclaim relationship-building, systems thinking, judgment, and creativity to thrive amid AI-driven change.
A step-by-step 90-day playbook shows new engineering managers how to shift from individual contributor metrics to team-level outcomes, using clear expectations, guardrails, capability maps and early wins.
Avoiding tough feedback creates managerial debt that later forces costly PIPs; run clarity, resource, signal, and blocker tests to surface expectations and reset accountability before escalation.
High-quality, internal knowledge bases are the missing link for trustworthy AI; without clean data and API-first design, AI projects flounder, waste developer time, and erode trust. Leaders must prioritize data hygiene, API quality, and realistic AI scopes to boost adoption and productivity.
Shift all effort to the single system constraint to unlock throughput; spreading work across many fronts creates inventory and stalls progress.
Shift the goal from proving an idea is perfect to asking "why won't it work?" to lower speaking anxiety, get early feedback, and spark more productive conversations.
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Senior engineers often stay silent on bad projects to protect influence; the article shows how to treat influence like a bank account, pick battles wisely, and decide when to intervene for maximum impact.
Staff engineers broaden scope beyond senior by shaping architecture, leading cross-team initiatives, and influencing leadership, offering a path for senior engineers who want more impact.
CTOs have a default leadership style that surfaces under stress; recognizing it and building a flexible toolkit of micro-behaviours lets them lead more effectively across situations.
A first-person account of stepping into a head-of-engineering role at a fintech, exposing imposter syndrome, chaotic processes, and practical tactics for aligning agile, OKRs, and cross-functional communication.
Regular reflection keeps senior leaders from slipping into autopilot, sharpening decision-making and sustaining personal growth even when the job feels easy.
Effective prioritization compares ideas against each other, forcing trade-offs and preventing good but mistimed work from stealing focus.
Engineers need a translation layer to frame proposals in business terms, anticipate exec questions, and tie technical work to company outcomes.
Staff engineers must stop reacting and intentionally schedule focus time; pausing before acting turns attention overload into deliberate prioritization, enabling higher-impact work.
Purposeful kindness builds trust, boosts morale, and makes teams up to 12% more productive, giving leaders a measurable edge.
Good advice isn't luck; it's a repeatable process. Pick a topic, interview four proven leaders, ask laser-focused questions, and prep a one-pager to turn every call into actionable insight.
Engineering leadership is a pendulum: alternating between hands-on coding and people management builds stronger leaders, and management is a lateral track, not a promotion.
Maintenance matters: this book reveals how caring for objects-from coffee machines to satellites-exposes ethical and political dimensions, urging leaders to value longevity over planned obsolescence.
Starting meetings at five minutes past the hour creates a guaranteed break, reduces spillover, and improves focus for engineers.
ICs can multiply their impact by delivering rapid breakthroughs, acting like leaders, owning outcomes, sending concise bi-weekly updates, and building relationships with senior leaders.
Turn mundane tasks into high-impact work to accelerate growth and get noticed, even when managers can't provide opportunities.
Effective habit change comes from identifying the single root cause-the "stick"-and removing it, turning effort into instant, visible progress.
Great engineers win by solving user problems, aligning teams, shipping early, and valuing clarity over cleverness-practical habits that boost impact and career growth.
Promotions come from consistently acting in your manager's role for months, not from one-off wins; take ownership, propose solutions, and demonstrate the mindset before the title arrives.
Clear policies like email curfews, transparent decision channels, and small recognition gestures can dramatically boost remote team morale, reducing burnout and lifting performance.
Executives promote engineers who deliver business impact, not just code; the article distills five traits-shipping complete products, speeding the org, doing dirty work, growing others, and anticipating problems-that fast-track promotions.
Boris shows how to run multiple Claude Code agents in parallel, use plan mode, slash commands, a shared CLAUDE.md, and verification hooks to turn AI into a reliable teammate for faster, safer code reviews.
I think the center of software work is moving.
Leaders shift from executing concrete tasks to shaping strategy: directors must focus on the Why, scale the How across teams, and use influence rather than authority to drive outcomes.
Leaders must model values daily, call out misaligned behavior, and use transparent communication and deliberate acknowledgment to embed an engineering culture that scales.
Leaders must balance direct visibility with empowerment; the piece shows how micromanagement fears arise from MBO misuse and offers a mission-command lens to keep leadership close to reality without stifling teams.
AI makes radiology and software work cheaper, which drives more imaging and more engineering, proving efficiency creates demand and amplifies the value of human expertise.
Amazon's senior engineering open house shows how clear role hierarchies and one-way decision gates enable massive scale, giving leaders concrete rules for balancing reversible speed with irreversible choices.
Every process decision is a decision about autonomy. Good processes clarify boundaries so teams move faster. Bad processes add gatekeepers who make everyone wait.
Detached leaders create friction-filled teams because efficiency without humanity weakens performance. Full attention, positive assumptions, and inviting early disagreement build the connections that make hard work easier.
When your CEO demands productivity metrics, offer them something better: a shared vision of excellence they can actually invest in.
Managers interrupt because they're being interrupted. They make bad technical decisions because they're pressured to make any decision. Understanding why doesn't excuse it, but it points toward what actually works.
Static analysis shows you exactly where your codebase is bleeding. The trick is making your team actually care about stopping it.
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.