Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Remote engineering teams aren't harder to manage. They just expose the communication gaps that in-person meetings used to paper over.
Rippling deliberately understaffs every project because constraint forces clarity and busy teams eliminate the low-value work that fills available capacity.
If you could say the same praise to a dog who fetched a stick, it's probably useless feedback for your engineer.
Effective managing up means giving concise, anticipatory updates, understanding your boss's priorities, and offering solutions, so you build influence, avoid surprises, and advance your career.
Most Definitions of Done only check if features work. They should also check if your architecture can survive the next six months.
Engineering dogmas exist because they solved a real problem once. Then they became unquestionable gospel that solves yesterday's problems while creating tomorrow's headaches.
Flexible work policies, mental-health resources, and engagement measurement cut burnout and turnover, giving leaders concrete ways to keep talent and boost productivity.
Your quick decision-making saved your startup but will sink your Fortune 500 one-way door. The superpower that got you promoted becomes your Achilles heel when the context shifts.
AI tools let engineering managers shrink the costly ramp of junior developers, turning them into faster-learning, higher-return hires.
LLMs can generate code, but that's not the job anymore. The job is delivering code with proof it works: manual testing you can show in the PR, automated tests that would fail without your change, and taking full accountability for what ships.
Good architecture upgrades the problems you solve, turning simple tradeoffs into richer challenges that deliver higher impact, as shown by Netflix's shift to global personalization models.
Technical leaders should treat themselves as a three-quarter-full cup, keeping space for external input while still projecting confidence when optics demand a full cup.
A curated list of real-world career ladders from companies like Figma, Wise, GitLab, and Meetup, showing how they structure roles, expectations, and compensation to guide growth and fairness.
Don't let meetings overlap on your calendar. Resolve conflicts immediately or pay compound interest on the chaos later.
The burnout that shows up even when you love the work is the quiet kind where passion stops protecting you and your brain goes null.
Six dimensions that compound: joy sustains energy, trust accelerates decisions, purpose focuses effort, safety unlocks candor, ownership drives execution, growth keeps improving.
Leaders often dodge feedback because it feels personal, but the article gives five concrete ways to ask for input that boost meetings, align with values, and improve team performance.
Tech debt is a strategic signal about trade-offs and system health, not a moral failing; treat it with intent, visibility, and business impact.
Engineering managers must shift from shielding teams to proving impact, shipping visible value, and owning customer dialogue in the post-ZIRP operator era.
Effective decisions need three elements-trigger, desired future, and action-plus context, conditions, scenarios, and analysis, a simple model technical leaders can apply to any choice.
Strategy is a decision-making framework that defines what to do and what to skip; the article gives a crisp definition and three actionable models-Rumelt's Kernel, Playing to Win, and Three Horizons-to turn vague "be more strategic" feedback into concrete trade-offs.
A tech lead succeeds by raising the technical bar, mentoring engineers, and building autonomous teams-delivering clear architecture, intentional debt, and fast decision-making without becoming a bottleneck.
Labeling the relationships between goals, initiatives, and other operating-system elements exposes hidden assumptions that shape strategy execution, helping leaders pick models that scale and avoid misaligned cascades.
The difference between useful and useless feedback is specificity. Ask concrete questions that force concrete answers, not vague prompts that get vague responses.
Technical debt is a purposeful shortcut to get feedback fast, not a bug; treat it like a credit card and refactor quickly to avoid costly interest.
Productivity gains come from eliminating developer friction-slow pull-request cycles, clunky infrastructure, and high cognitive load-rather than chasing raw output metrics.
Apply Charlie Munger's inversion mental model to engineering planning: flip success into failure scenarios to uncover blind spots, avoid optimism traps, and ship more reliable features.
Incidental complexity in code accumulates like a fern's massive genome, and leaders must favor simple, maintainable solutions over quick fixes to keep velocity and product health.
Managers can stay effective by writing small, high-impact code pieces using AI assistants, focusing on low-interrupt, high-value tasks and applying strict rules to avoid time-sensitive or low-value work.
Manager READMEs often create an info bubble; senior leaders get better results by using simple templates and regular ceremonies that surface wins, challenges, and decisions without over-structuring communication.
Software is getting cheaper and easier to build, causing startups to postpone development; leaders must shift from rapid building to distribution and differentiation.
Engineering predictability collapses when 30-40% of capacity is spent on unplanned work; categorizing and eliminating controllable incidents restores velocity and morale.
Build an inner album of 8-10 biggest ideas you can connect to any topic. When you speak, you're not improvising. You're performing your greatest hits.
AI has made code production cheap and abundant. The scarce skill is now judgment—knowing how to combine, shape, and architect AI-generated code into something meaningful and enduring.
Board meetings are quarterly governance reviews that shape company direction; understanding their flow helps CTOs translate tech impact, avoid surprises, and align with leadership.
Interruptions and recovery time fragment work; modeling them with three parameters (interruption rate, recovery minutes, focus threshold) shows how they collapse productivity and how small changes can dramatically increase deep work.
Most knowledge workers hit deep focus for just 3-5 hours a day; aligning work with natural energy cycles, setting boundaries, and giving rest boosts productivity.
Embracing being bad at new skills removes pressure, sparks curiosity, and accelerates recovery from burnout by turning small failures into growth.
Track interruptions instead of time to surface hidden context-switch costs, spark focus conversations, and help leaders prioritize work.
Increasing release velocity inevitably drops quality; leaders must build slack, ownership, and feedback loops to absorb the turbulence and keep teams healthy.
Toxic coworkers derail teams; the article gives concrete negotiation-style tactics for narcissists, drama-seekers, bullies and perfectionists so leaders can keep work moving without burning out.
Nice managers who lower expectations create a Golem effect, causing engineers to underperform and stall their careers.
Teams drown in data, fatigue, and fake alignment, leading to poor choices; the article shows how consent-based decision making and clear trade-offs restore focus and execution.
Asking "What would you like to do, and how can I best support you?" stops managers from creating dependency and builds the team's confidence to make decisions on their own.
Leadership works like a lab: form hypotheses, run small experiments, learn fast. Treating leadership as continual testing builds psychological safety, speeds decisions, and avoids costly certainty traps.
Success narrows your options; the article shows how mastering a niche can trap you and offers practical ways to keep optionality through curiosity, experimentation, and role shifts.
Your manager told you to do something. Two weeks later: "I never said that." The wanderer problem happens when leaders drift into storytime mode during 1:1s and lose track of what's guidance vs narrative.
Tech's low-trust climate makes leading hard. The antidote isn't complicated: authenticity beats hiding behind prepared remarks or playing victim.
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.