Tap into the wisdom of experts to learn what every engineering manager should know. With 97 short and extremely useful tips for engineering managers, you'll discover new approaches to old problems, pick up road-tested best practices, and hone your management skills through sound advice.

Managing people is hard, and the industry as a whole is bad at it. Many managers lack the experience, training, tools, texts, and frameworks to do it well. From mentoring interns to working in senior management, this book will take you through the stages of management and provide actionable advice on how to approach the obstacles you’ll encounter as a technical manager.

A few of the 97 things you should know:

• "Three Ways to Be the Manager Your Report Needs" by Duretti Hirpa
• "The First Two Questions to Ask When Your Team Is Struggling" by Cate Huston
• "Fire Them!" by Mike Fisher
• "The 5 Whys of Organizational Design" by Kellan Elliott-McCrea
• "Career Conversations" by Raquel Vélez
• "Using 6-Page Documents to Close Decisions" by Ian Nowland
• "Ground Rules in Meetings" by Lara Hogan

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Advanced PeopleOps- One-on-One Retrospectives

Chapter 2. Answer These 10 Questions to Understand Whether You're a Good Manager

Chapter 3. Avoiding Traps in Manager READMEs

Chapter 4. Building Effective Road maps

Chapter 5. Busy Isn't Better

Chapter 6. Career Conversations as an Engineering Manager

Chapter 7. Career Development for Startup Engineers

Chapter 8. Communicating with Executives

Chapter 9. Communication as Craft

Chapter 10. Connect "The What" to "The Why"

Chapter 11. Continuous Kindness

Chapter 12. Culture Is What You Do When the Unexpected Happens

Chapter 13. Dealing with Uncertainty

Chapter 14. Define Your Culture Before It Defines Itself

Chapter 15. Delivering Feedback

Chapter 16. Developing Communication Patterns

Chapter 17. Distributed Teams Are Founded on Explicit Communication Channels

Chapter 18. Do Less, Lead More

Chapter 19. Don't Be the S--- Umbrella

Chapter 20. Don't Elevate the Means Beyond the End

Chapter 21. Don't Look for A Players

Chapter 22. Don't Just Evaluate Candidates on Skills

Chapter 23. Engineering Productivity

Chapter 24. Like This? Really?

Chapter 25. Everyone Can Lead with Leverage

Chapter 26. Fire Them1

Chapter 27. The First Two Questions to Ask When Your Team Is Struggling

Chapter 28. The Five Whys of Organizational Design

Chapter 29. Focus on Growth to Improve Employee Engagement

Chapter 30. Followership

Chapter 31. Forecasting with Less Effort and More Accuracy

Chapter 32. The Four Layers of Communication in a Functional Team

Chapter 33. The Four-Letter Word That Makes My Blood Boil

Chapter 34. Friday Wins and a Case Study in Ritual Design

Chapter 35. Get Deployment Right on Day One

Chapter 36. Good Process Is Evolved, Not Designed

Chapter 37. A Good Standup

Chapter 38. Ground Rules in Meetings

Chapter 39. Help Yourself to Better One-on-Ones

Chapter 40. How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck?

Chapter 41. How to Be Discerning Without Being Invalidating

Chapter 42. How to Conduct an Autonomy-Support Meeting

Chapter 43. How to Help Your New Grad Engineer Navigate Work

Chapter 44. How to Share Decisions for Strong Execution

Chapter 45. Improve Your Decision Making with Mental Models

Chapter 46. Interviewing Engineers: Going Beyond Technical Skills

Chapter 47. Introduce an Engineering Ladder

Chapter 48. Leadership Is About Responsibility, Not Authority

Chapter 49. Leading Through Rapid Change Is Normal

Chapter 50. Making Your New Team Feel Like a Team

Chapter 51. Manage Complexity with Diversity

Chapter 52. Management Is a Different Set of APls

Chapter 53. Manager Handoffs

Chapter 54. Managers and Culture

Chapter 55. Monuments and Hamburgers

Chapter 56. Navigating the Bumpy Road from Engineer to Manager

Chapter 57. The New Way to Manage by Walking Around

Chapter 58. Not Everyone Wants to Be a People Manager

Chapter 59. On Accountability

Chapter 60. On the Elusiveness of Time in Tracking Progress

Chapter 61. Onboard People, Not Technology

Chapter 62. Onboarding Beyond Codelabs

Chapter 63. Own the Narrative

Chapter 64. The Path to Change: Facts and Feelings

Chapter 65. People Leave Bad Managers, Not Bad Jobs- Right?

Chapter 66. Performance Is an Ongoing Conversation

Chapter 67. Physician, Heal Thyself1

Chapter 68. Political Capital and the Favor Economy

Chapter 69. Prioritize Building Relationships with Your Peers

Chapter 70. Priority Exceptions

Chapter 71. The Product Manager's Concerns

Chapter 72. Projects for Which Agile Is Inappropriate

Chapter 73. Reconciliation Loops

Chapter 74. "Remote"

Chapter 75. Risk Budgets: Five Choices Between Your Team and Failure

Chapter 76. Safety First!

Chapter 77. Scale Communication Through Writing

Chapter 78. Scaling Management by Giving Up Control

Chapter 79. Six Tips for a New Manager

Chapter 80. Stop Your Team from Bikeshedding, and Saying "Bikeshedding"

Chapter 81. Taking On Inclusion

Chapter 82. Team Stability Matters

Chapter 83. Three Questions to Avoid, and Three Questions to Ask During an Interview

Chapter 84. Three Ways to Be the Manager Your Report Needs

Chapter 85. To Code or Not to Code

Chapter 86. Transparency Takes More Than an Open Door

Chapter 87. The Triangle of Self-Organization

Chapter 88. Trust Is a Powerful Leadership Tool

Chapter 89. Using Six-Page Documents to Close Decisions

Chapter 90. WELCOME, {HUMAN}!- Writing Onboarding READMEs

Chapter 91. What I Wished I Knew Before I Started Managing a Remote Team

Chapter 92. Why a Good Boss Likes It When People Complain

Chapter 93. Why You Can't Manage Humans Like They're Software

Chapter 94. Why Your Programmer Just Wants to Code

Chapter 95. Willpower of Leadership

Chapter 96. Yes, Code Wins Arguments. But Why? And How to Be Polite About It

Chapter 97. Your Job Is Not to Be Liked

About the Author

Camille Fournier is an experienced leader with the unique combination of deep technical expertise, executive leadership, and engineering management. Camille is the former head of engineering at Rent the Runway. She was previously a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Camille is an Apache ZooKeeper committer and PMC member and a Dropwizard framework PMC member.