Tech Leading - General Overview

If you read one thing - read this

• Will Larson - StaffEng Takeaway: A whole site dedicated to what it is to be in a Staff Engineer+ role. Guides, resources, interviews - an absolute must read. You can also purchase the 💲 book from Amazon or Gumroad.

Articles

• David Haney - Developer Turned Manager Takeaway: You must earn your teams trust. Don't let your team of direct reports get too big. Make people a priority. Prioritise spending time in 121s with your people. Avoid rescheduling or being late wherever possible. Help people address their problems with each other directly - mediate if needs be. Your success is the success of others.

• HackerNews - How to be a Good Technical Lead

• David Morgantini - Anatomy of a Great Tech Lead Takeaway: Focus on leadership, communication and technical skills.

• Sam Newman - A Tech Lead Manifesto Takeaway: List of behaviours to perform and others to avoid to be a successful team lead.

• David Byttow - Effective Technical Leadership Takeaway: Work on knowledge, speed and awareness. Block and unblocking. List of activities many tech leads do.

• Silvia Botros - On Being A Principal Engineer

Training Courses and Videos

• Patrick Kua - Why Technical Leadership Matters [42:05] Takeaway: Keep people moving in the same direction. Understand impact vs influence. Give people the skills to implement your vision. The type of leadership people need depends on where they are.

• Laura Paterson and Patrick Kua - Technical Leadership [36:25]

• Patrick Kua - The Geek's Guide to Leading Teams [1:01:01]

• Eryn O'Neil - Congrats! You're the Tech Lead. Now What? [32:18] Takeaway: Facilitate others by helping others do their jobs. Advocate to get things done right. Motivate to get things done without having or using authority.

Book Recommendations

• Jurgen Appelo - Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders 💲

• Michael Lopp - Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager 💲

• Edmond Lau - The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact 💲 Takeaway: Focus your effort where the impact produced, divided by time invested, is the highest - high leverage activities. Measure what you want to improve. Validate your hypotheses early and often. Invest in your onboarding.

• Camille Fournier - The Manager's Path 💲

Blogs

• Rands in Repose
• Roy Osherove - 5 Whys
• Patrick Kua

Twitter Feeds to Follow

• Patrick Kua - @patkua
• Camille Fournier - @skamille
• Dan North - @tastapod

Newsletters

• Software Lead Weekly

Communities

• Lead Dev Takeaway: A community for engineering leaders. Lots of great webinars, articles and videos about engineering leadership topics here! Also runs conferences (San Francisco, London, New York and Berlin)