Being an engineering manager is tough. Usually, you are promoted to manager after years of preforming well at what can seem like a completely unrelated job. A great quote I once heard was “You’ve done a great job building bridges, now go build an airplane” (or something like that). Managing people requires a completely different skill set than being an individual contributor, and success is dependent on learning quickly. I have found that one of the best ways to make the transition is to absorb the experience of others through reading. Here are 11 books (I tried to it to 10 but I love them all) I recommend it for any engineering manager, in no particular order.
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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
Even though I just said this list isn’t in order, this is one of my favorite books on management in general. What makes this book so unique is it puts the content in the form of a story, which not only makes the lessons more memorable but puts a lot of context in the scenario. Whenever I start on a new team, I look out for the 5 dysfunctions I learned about in this book.
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us
I know it sounds crazy, but much of engineering management comes down to how you manage people, including yourself. This book provides incredibly practical advice on how to deal with the very real challenges you’ll meet as an engineer manager: how to manage your team, team culture, dealing with your own personal care, the struggles of setting boundaries, and more. It goes into great detail on everyday things like the importance of 1:1s with your team members, and how to right size code reviews on your team. I especially recommend this book for new engineering managers, or as a gift to an engineering manager you know that acts as if they are still an individual contributor.
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
This book gets major points for uniqueness of content. There are a lot of books that talk about the technical side to engineering, and there are a lot of books that cover the management side, but very few (in fact this is the only one I’ve seen) that talk about organization management. This book answers questions like “What is the ideal manager to engineer ratio”, and “How do you define teams and groups”. As you get further along in your management career and start to think of transitioning from a leader of a team to a leader of leaders, these bigger scale questions and ideas start to appear (how do you think about culture when you aren’t directly in charge of a team?). Having a heads up as to what challenges are coming and insight into how your leaders are thinking can be a hugely valuable asset.
Farsighted
Before you become a manager you are often only responsible for your own work or small area of the product. As you gain more influence, one of the things that determines success is your ability to look down the road and strategize. Long term thinking is not only about the needs of the product, but also predicting the needs of your team, the demands of your management, and the changes in your organization. One of the most memorable techniques from this book was the concept of a pre-mortem, thinking about if the project failed what would be most likely to have caused it. It’s a very powerful technique that can help you expect (and hopefully mitigate) possible issues before they happen. Insights like this are incredibly valuable and help distinguish teams that are constantly firefighting from those who seem to always be ahead of the game.
First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
I admit when I first read this book, I had thought that a lot of the content was common sense. It turns out I’ve just been “breaking the rules” for quite some time. I think the most interesting part of this book is that it puts data and research behind a lot of the good practices of engineering management. For example, knowing the difference between skills, knowledge, and talent when hiring, and letting people lean more into who they are instead of trying to fill gaps in their abilities. A lot of the knowledge here is counterintuitive to some, but even if you are someone who already follows a lot of the advice in the book it’s still good to understand the research so you can confidently spread good practices around your organization.
Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)
I know some of you are thinking, “Robert, why are you including a book on meditation” but hear me out. Most of the struggles in our career (and in life) boil down to impulse control, or as this book says, making space between stimulus and reaction. Meditation helps train our brain to recognize and increase that reaction time. When done correctly mindfulness can also help build empathy and awareness. What’s great about this book is that it’s backed by science. The author shows how researchers have evidence of the impacts that mindfulness has on the brain (using fMRI). Even if you’ve never considered meditation, give this book a spin, you’ll be surprised by what you learn.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
You’ve probably heard of this book, and maybe even read it – it’s a classic for a reason. But if you haven’t, this is on my list as a practical guide to just plain being better at what you do. The habits in this book are particularly valuable to managers. For example, “Seek first to understand, then be understood” is a habit that really will transform how you interact with your colleagues and team. “Build with the end in mind” is critical to creating strategy to get your team ahead of the ball. Most memorable though is the Time Management Matrix used to distinguish between levels of Urgent and Important work.
Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Study after study has shown that being direct and candid produces very effective teams, but it can be a difficult line to walk. This book divides the space of giving feedback to others into two dimensions of caring personally and challenging directly. It talks about how radical candor is the balance between the two (for example if you challenge directly but don’t care personally it’s likely you are just being a jerk). This is a book I feel every manager needs to read so they understand the value of direct feedback backed by truly caring about getting the best outcome for people.
The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company
In a lot (probably all) organizations, the career ladder up to the top is very opaque and hard to get insight into. The fundamental concept of this book is that you need to have a constant pipeline of leaders at each level that you train and evolve through each level of your organization. One of the reasons I really enjoyed this book is that it gives insight to each of the rungs of the career ladder and spoke about where people get stuck in each transition (like my favorite, the engineering manager who tries to keep being an engineer by micromanaging their direct reports’ work). This book gives valuable insight into what each level of an organization looks like so you can decide where you want to land, but also serves as a valuable look at to what you (and your team) need to do to prevent you from getting stuck.
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships
Okay so I have to admit this title caught me off guard. Like okay, sure just don’t hit people when you talk and your good right? But due to its high rating, I dove in anyways and I loved what I read. It breaks down communication into four easy to apply steps: Making Observations, Understanding Feelings, Understanding Needs, and Understanding Requests. So much of our job as a manager is based on communication that it is imperative to have a reliable and repeatable practice for communicating with others that you can reflexively reach for, and this book provides it.
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment Hardcover
Setting aside the fact that behavioral economics is one of my favorite subjects, this book explores how things that shouldn’t be a factor affect the decisions we make. Noise is different than bias. Bias shifts your mind consistently in a direction. Noise causes shifts in ways that are harder to detect (such as data showing judges giving harsher sentences before lunch presumably because they are hungry). I find that books like these are what elevate managers from good to excellent because they challenge you to think about the way you think. Metacognition like this allows you to make better decisions and be self-critical in ways that lead you to better outcomes.
I have so many books that I have read and love, but this is a great list to start with. Give them a read and see what you can apply to your own management style.
