Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Development races ahead then stalls because each new feature burns optionality, forcing trade-offs that slow future work; tidying code between features restores options and keeps velocity high.
Product managers can keep the roadmap healthy by treating tech debt and architectural work like any other feature, using prioritisation, dashboards and shared roadmaps to avoid hidden slowdown.
The article explores the concept of a leader's shadow, showing how a leader's mood and behavior can influence the team's energy and performance.
The article argues that mastering a new leadership role takes at least three years, and the time required grows with role complexity.
Leaders often sidestep public channels, sending private questions that hide decisions. The piece shows how modeling open conversations and posting quick public summaries turns hidden work into shared knowledge, boosting clarity and trust.
A weekly People-Product-Process script and Notion workflow that turns 1:1s into coaching, accountability, and alignment tools, preventing status-drift and building a searchable history.
Principal engineers must shift from hands-on coding to vision, influence, and scaling others, using communication and decision-making to drive impact across orgs.
People leave bad managers, not companies. When you lose one, it costs 6-9 months salary to replace them. But the real damage is the wave of turnover that follows.
Engineers can measure productivity without harming morale by using low-overhead, manager-driven signals like async standups, weekly changelogs, and real-time PR notifications that boost visibility and trust.
Spice outlines a four-quadrant framework for engineering managers and shows how to build or buy EM talent, create reversible career moves, and measure success, giving leaders a practical roadmap for scaling management roles.
AI tools are turning programmers into operators, eroding deep craft, inflating cognitive debt, and threatening morale and code quality.
AI coding speeds up repeat tasks for low-skill developers but masks deeper issues like hallucinations, reinvention of the wheel, and a lack of production-ready expertise, leaving teams solving the wrong problem.
Leaders who try to cut developers out with outsourcing, no-code, or AI end up deepening dependency; the article shows why shared understanding, platform teams, and context ownership are the real solution.
A lightweight 4-step process that guides product leaders from data gathering to hard strategic choices, using narratives and use to turn insights into actionable product strategy.
Metrics that linger become decorative; setting an expiry date forces you to reassess usefulness, keep dashboards actionable, and avoid false confidence.
Promotion won't happen by chance; you must uncover your company's rubric, timeline, and politics, then own the paperwork and conversations to make it happen.
Ido Green spent a decade at Google, Facebook, and Netflix learning that scaling engineering teams is like raising teenagers. Hero culture and tribal knowledge are fine at 10 people, total disaster at 100.
Teams chase local metrics like fuel cost or ad revenue, creating short-term wins that hurt overall business performance and customer experience.
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Staff engineers create technical clarity by giving non-technical leaders a practical, simplified view of system risks and possibilities, turning vague mental models into actionable decisions.
70% of developers can't stay in flow state for more than 30 minutes. Interruptions every 3-10 minutes mean 23-minute recovery times to regain focus.
When serverless costs and latency outweigh its flexibility, this piece shows how to recognize the tipping point and plan a disciplined migration to traditional compute.
Most progress in software is just motion. New tools, same problems. Yusuf Aytas watched a colleague set up Spark for a tiny analytics job "because it scales." That's when it clicked: we confuse capability with necessity.
Effective leaders replace top-down answers with powerful questions, building systems that let teams make autonomous decisions and accelerate innovation.
Asking "How can I help?" puts mental load on your manager. Instead observe what's needed, assert what you'll do, validate you're headed right direction.
New team members bring enthusiasm and ideas. Kill it with "not now" or silence and they learn speaking up doesn't matter. Track proposals visibly.
Level 5 leaders have personal humility and fierce resolve. Their ambitions are for companies not themselves. Sometimes you need to put on your ego hat.
1:1s aren't forecast calls. Create predictable space where team feels heard, supported, stretched. Separate business stream from growth stream.
Most innovative companies aren't waiting for disasters - they're causing them. Chaos engineering means deliberately breaking your system in controlled ways so failures in production feel like well-rehearsed responses instead of panic.
Best engineers are often completely invisible. No social media, empty GitHub, LinkedIn with just company names. They do what nobody thought to measure - fixing deploy pipeline while mentoring juniors. You only know their talent if you've worked with them.
Gamma hit 50M users with 30 people. Gumloop aims for 10-person unicorn. Bolt.new hit $20M ARR in 60 days with 15 people. Top teams run 95th percentile salaries, almost no meetings, radical transparency, and focus on 10% of tasks that yield majority of results.
Longest bugs are one-liners. After 4 hours debugging, fix is almost guaranteed to be single line. Insidious bugs come from inaccurate assumptions - we're looking in code when problem is in our understanding. Variable named 'block' meant both physical and logical block numbers.
Building trust takes time but is achievable with specific exercises. Kathryn, the CEO in Lencioni's book, spoke confidently under pressure, held back opinions to develop her team, understood that time together saves time.
Gallup research shows managers account for 70% of variance in employee engagement. Séverin Bruhat was frustrated working crazy hours without purpose until Freedom Inc and Drive showed him what management could be.
A spider repeatedly rebuilding its web on a car mirror shows how toxic work environments trap us in futile resilience; the article offers concrete mental tricks and actionable steps to spot the pattern and move toward healthier ground.
Jack Coates uses a quadrant of leadership styles: easy versus difficult to work with, right versus wrong plans. The magic of social interaction: easygoing trumps right or wrong. Wrong but easygoing gets a pass.
Experience sampling: page developers randomly, capture what they're banging their head against in-the-moment. Nobody uses it for productivity research.
Shopify hired 25 interns, aims for 1000 more. While everyone fights over seniors, smart companies hire juniors. Great juniors aren't restricted by what they know, learn fast, have higher ceiling. Software isn't rocket science - can't tell difference between 10 vs 15 years experience.
Jon Bentley's 1985 Programming Pearls examined 40 years later. Most depressingly relevant: 'The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take,' 'If you can't write it down in English, you can't code it,' 'Make UI as consistent and predictable as possible.'
We cannot help but communicate. Saying nothing is often more damaging than saying the wrong thing. In absence of true communication, people find signal in noise. People can deal with imperfect information but cannot stand information insecurity. Communicate early and often.
Senior engineers must master communication, strategic thinking, and visible writing to expand impact beyond code and become stewards of product and organization.
Leadership failures often mask personal conflict; the author shows how toxic power dynamics, miscommunication, and the pressure to be an "asshole" harm teams, and why self-reflection beats blaming others.
Risk advice only works when framed as guidance, not a hard stop; product teams should dig into concerns and look for paths to yes instead of defaulting to veto.
Strategic leadership requires balancing time, context, direction, and expertise to define proximate objectives, and recognizing that strategy is contextual and must adapt to resource constraints.
It helps engineers decide if management is right for them and provides concrete tactics-self-questioning, choosing technical involvement, building support, and running effective 1-on-1s-to transition into a psychologically safe engineering manager role.
Leaders can cut chronic meeting overload by fixing the three root causes-lack of direction, unclear leadership, and decision-making bottlenecks-and then applying five concrete tactics that make meetings purposeful and move much of the work to async channels.
Staff engineers boost impact by mastering networking, communication, and outspoken advocacy - soft skills that turn technical expertise into team influence.
A Principal Engineer shares a day-to-day snapshot showing how hands-on code, cross-team meetings, versioning work and mentoring combine to drive platform stability and engineering impact.
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.