Find resources to solve your technical leadership challenges
A product brief is an effective tool for product development. Read more to learn how how to write a successful product brief.
A concise one-page template that helps product and engineering leaders capture the purpose, audience, success metrics, and timeline for a new product initiative.
A concise guide outlining a structured software engineering job ladder to clarify expectations, career progression, and promotion criteria.
A framework that helps engineering managers have meaningful conversations with their direct reports about role expectations and career progression across four ladders.
A good roadmapping process supports the company's strategy and helps focus the company's efforts. Here's how to make it easier to accomplish those goals.
The author describes how they wrote the Retrospectives Antipatterns book, sharing mistakes to avoid and lessons learned for anyone planning to write a similar guide.
An analysis of the Canva service outage that explores how system saturation leads to failures and how resilient practices can help technical leaders mitigate similar risks.
A blog post that uses the metaphor of untied shoelaces to illustrate how small leadership oversights can trip a team, and offers practical steps to keep things securely tied.
The perils of poorly designed metrics and incentives
The article discusses the growing importance of risk management for boards, emphasizing the need for a clear strategy and the centrality of defining what must be true.
The article explains how leaders should act as intentional bottlenecks to manage cross-team dirty work, termed "Dirty Webs", and offers examples and guidance for preventing organizational debt.
An exploration of ratchet effects in engineering leadership, showing how small, repeated improvements can compound into significant outcomes.
A reflective article on engineering career progression, mapping the journey from junior (Charmander) to senior leadership (Charizard) and offering practical guidance for technical leaders to grow their impact.
James Shore shares insights from his keynote at the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo, explaining why productivity cannot be measured and offering a framework for building effective product engineering organizations.
A critical reflection on toxic workplace culture and the misuse of forced positivity, arguing that superficial fun initiatives create misery rather than productivity.
The article examines why developers and managers resist Extreme Programming, highlighting common misconceptions and organizational incentives, and offers guidance on addressing these challenges.
Learning what transparency means and how to find the right level of transparency.
Giving feedback is an investment that scales your judgment across your organization. Here's how to give useful feedback in as little as 1-2 hours per week.
Certain tasks, and their complexity, change how impactful an interruption is. Research also discovers a disconnect between perception and physiological data.
This article discusses common assumptions and default practices that can hinder the performance of tech organizations and suggests alternative approaches for leaders to consider.
An article exploring the relationship between Agile and the Product Model and how Agile functions as one of its three dimensions.
This blog post explores how organizations can scale their platform engineering efforts while balancing team-specific needs with shared best practices.
If you, like me, are running out of patience with bad meetings, here are my picks for the best writings on facilitation: three evergreen books that have helped me improve meeting culture by becoming a better facilitator.
Leaders act as Maxwell Demons in organizations, reducing entropy through the injection of information and direction, fighting against the natural tendency of systems to move towards maximum disorder.
People with high EQ are often great team players, great collaborators and overall great people to work with. This is how you can develop EQ!
An overview of three lesser-known product development processes that modern product teams use as alternatives to Scrum and Kanban.
A blog post exploring how leaders often confuse facts with the stories they create, using a startup-as-mountain-climbing metaphor to illustrate constructing meaning.
Being too empathetic may hurt your ability to speak firmly and accurately when you share "bad" news, and apologizing for reasonable decisions can shift power dynamics.
Why do smart, driven founders fail, despite having great ideas and execution? This model offers an answer, and a path to increase the chance of success.
Most products don't fail because they're broken-they fail because no one stops them. This article explains how to recognize when a product is not worth continuing and how to make the tough decision to kill it.
Marty Cagan discusses the potential impact of generative AI on the roles on a product team and the team topologies of product organizations.
An article that explores how leaders can redesign organizational systems to enable individuals to perform at their highest potential, focusing on practical changes for technical teams.
An article discussing the challenges of programming while dealing with chronic pain and practical strategies that helped the author manage symptoms.
Once you've written your strategy's exploration, the next step is working on its diagnosis. Diagnosis is understanding the constraints and challenges your strategy needs to address.
Discover the critical difference between capable and capability, and learn how to develop individuals who can deliver real business results. Practical strategies, examples, and coaching tips for managers and leaders.
An inside look at the security practices Google uses to protect its own cloud infrastructure.
This post discusses the importance of ownership and urgency as defining traits of high-performing coworkers, drawing personal anecdotes to illustrate how taking responsibility drives better outcomes in teams.
The article examines the role of substitutes in strategy, presenting five distinct types of substitutes and the strategic imperatives each creates for organizations.
The article discusses how entrepreneurs differ from managers and strategists, focusing on a 2008 paper that argues entrepreneurs use effectual reasoning.
Ways to stay tech-savvy while adding value as an engineering manager
What to say and do as a leader, without losing your mind
A short essay examining why engineering, design, and product management all think they own the product and what that means for technical leaders.
The article discusses how organizations can achieve ten times the impact with only one-tenth of the people by leveraging rapid learning, agile practices, and focused teamwork.
A retrospective on a decade of engineering ladder evolution, reflecting on the original Rent the Runway engineering ladder post and lessons learned over ten years.
An article discussing the role and challenges of a medium-level engineer in technical leadership.
A short article about how the author reorganizes his day into three categories of work to stay productive and fulfilled while managing a growing, distributed team.
When You Don't Trust Your People, That's THE Problem You Must Fix
A concise overview of how leaders can cultivate a long-term sense to improve product strategy and decision making.
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.