Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
Teams often hurt more than help; productivity drops when groups grow beyond five, roles blur, and social dynamics dominate, so keep teams tiny, focus on A-players, and inject a healthy contrarian to avoid groupthink.
Directness can sabotage relationships when harsh language is used; the article shows how to stay honest while choosing compassionate wording, asking curious questions, and backing claims with evidence.
AI-driven DevOps can speed pipelines, but without human oversight you risk error propagation, security blind spots, and loss of accountability; leaders must embed humans at key stages to keep systems safe.
Formalizing who matters and their needs turns Agile's Twelve Principles into concrete, measurable actions, eliminating endless debate and aligning delivery with real stakeholder value.
A senior developer shares six practical steps-stop work, set boundaries, exercise, refill motivation, win small wins, and consider a job change-to recover from burnout and protect career health.
Give multiple teams a single shared OKR to force cross-team transparency, avoid hyper-local optimization, and let agile principles emerge at scale.
Audits force engineers to turn undocumented practices into traceable, risk-aware processes, showing how to build a compliant QMS for ISO 13485 and why that matters for product safety.
Agile works without enforcing deadlines when managers build cross-functional, autonomous teams and replace schedule variance with frequent demos, turning disengagement into steady value flow.
When a manager seems to dislike you, the fix isn't persuasion-it's listening to specific complaints, addressing the behavior they cite, and changing your actions rather than arguing.
AI-generated code floods enterprises with security flaws and exploding technical debt; disciplined governance, training, and proper processes are essential for production-ready AI development.
When AI lets candidates ship code fast but lack fundamentals, the article argues hiring seasoned engineers who understand trade-offs outweighs AI-driven speed, warning against over-reliance on unproven tools.
Treat AI as a teammate by engineering shared context instead of relying on single prompts; use a docs folder and base prompts to make AI output reliable and reusable.
A small engineering team built a transparent level ladder through collaborative drafting, 1:1 reviews, and growth plans, preserving morale and keeping productivity high.
Use a brief 1:1 live accountability moment - Now, Together - to unblock tiny stalled tasks, giving engineers compassionate support, immediate accountability, and insight into hidden blockers.
MIT's NANDA report finds 95% of generative AI enterprise pilots stall, with success tied to focused use cases, buying proven tools, and aligning budgets toward back-office automation rather than hype-driven marketing pilots.
Directors who split teams by promoting two new managers can make themselves redundant; instead, keep one team under their own management to stay productive and avoid boredom.
AWS has quietly overhauled core services - EC2, S3, networking, Lambda and more - so old best practices are often wrong today.
Long-term plans misalign incentives and rest on impossible assumptions, leading to delays and wasted effort; adopting short-term planning cuts risk and drives profitable product outcomes.
Tech leaders must balance hype-driven adoption with disciplined innovation, using time, people, and project balance to prevent wasted effort and sustain real value.
Effective hiring means finding people moving in the same direction, not perfect matches, and shaping realistic job profiles that attract diverse talent who can grow with the organization.
Discover how engineers can pinpoint and flex their own leadership style, turning vague leadership advice into concrete actions that boost impact at any career level.
A recently laid-off recruiter shares five concrete steps-mindset shift, profile building, problem-focused positioning, self-care, and networking-that helped him secure his next role and can guide others through redundancy.
Mental models give product teams concrete lenses-like Parkinson's Law, RACI, Jobs to be Done, and the Pareto Principle-to spot patterns, cut waste, and make sharper decisions.
Coaching notes show that merging CTO and VPE responsibilities, setting crystal-clear goals, and treating hiring as a continuous experience are the keys to building high-impact engineering orgs.
Attribute substitution makes us replace hard questions with easy ones, causing systematic mis-judgment; the piece shows two uncomfortable but free practices-admitting uncertainty and making conscious judgments-to curb this bias.
A concise list of 30 mental models that reveal how status games, self-deception, and social bullshit shape decisions and culture, helping leaders cut through noise and improve communication.
Team health checks only work when they're tailored, deep, and followed through, turning routine surveys into actionable insights that boost trust, communication, and performance.
A framework that moves people from being dependent fixers to independent problem solvers, giving managers a simple way to push teams up the problem-solving ladder.
Earn trust fast in a new role by listening first, admitting what you don't know, and scheduling intro calls that surface each teammate's strengths and challenges.
Leaders waste time chasing external metrics like headcount and titles; focusing on impact and self-growth builds genuine success and avoids burnout.
Technical leaders must push back on fixed-date expectations by framing estimates as uncertainty, using Scrum tools and storytelling to help managers understand why exact dates are impossible.
Effective onboarding turns new hires into high-performing contributors fast, closing the gap where 9 out of 10 teams fall short.
LLMs make writing code cheap, but code reviews, testing, and shared understanding remain the real bottleneck for engineering teams.
Leaders win by accepting people's flaws as inevitable and using that mindset to keep teams moving, rather than discarding imperfect contributors.
Software development is a holistic craft, not a prescriptive process, so leaders should act as support staff enabling teams to own the end-to-end work.
A concise review of Jamie Dobson's "Visionaries, Rebels and Machines", highlighting its shift from celebratory tech history to a cautionary look at AI's societal impact, plus brief takes on four diverse fiction titles.
EMs are Sergeant Majors, not Generals—in the trenches translating strategy to delivery while being the bumper rails that let engineers focus on bowling strikes without fear of gutter balls.
Jon Topper explains how early DevOps work shaped his leadership, the shift from immediate engineering feedback to long-term impact, and concrete practices-empathy, flexible remote work, stress management-that help scale teams.
Processes outlive their purpose; without documenting why they exist, teams keep useless rituals, wasting effort. Record the rationale to prune or tune processes and restore predictability.
Boom Supersonic shows how a software-first approach lets them iterate hardware faster while keeping safety intact, using digital twins, automated testing, and cross-functional pipelines.
AI-assisted coding forces the industry to confront that most code and many developers are mediocre, rapidly devaluing low-quality output and raising the demand for truly skilled engineers.
Succession planning gives leaders a proactive roadmap to fill key roles before vacancies hit, ensuring continuity and offering clear career paths for team members.
Choosing how to organize architects requires matching governance style to team maturity; the article maps four models-from benevolent dictator to architecture-less teams-and shows when each works.
Transitioning from senior engineer to engineering manager demands a mindset shift to people focus; this guide shares concrete first-year tactics-90-day plans, one-on-ones, priority setting, and mentorship-to help new managers succeed.
Team habits often hide an addiction to stability; recognizing the implicit organizing principle and the rules that protect it lets leaders shift culture without fighting resistance.
Working agreements let leaders surface partner expectations, align on success metrics, and create a shared framework for cultural change when scaling without existing value or culture alignment.
Scrum Masters often limit themselves to the team and product owner, missing the organizational level, which hampers agile adoption and cross-departmental impact.
Remote work can leave you socially isolated; the article shows why you must stop relying on work for social fulfillment and gives concrete steps to build relationships outside the office.
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.