Become a Great Engineering Leader

Build Effective Skills to Lead and Grow

by James Stanier

As you step into senior engineering leadership roles, you need to make an impact, and you need to make it fast. This book will uncover the secrets of what it means to be a successful director of engineering, VP of engineering, or CTO. With a hands-on, practical approach, it will help you understand and develop the skills that you need, ranging from how to manage other managers, to how to define and execute strategy, how to manage yourself and your limited time, and how to navigate your own career journey to your desired destination.

You can become a great engineering leader, the kind that runs a healthy, ambitious, and efficient organization that builds quality products, and this practical guide will provide you with the skills to get there. With this book you’ll uncover the tools, techniques, and secrets to being a successful and effective engineering executive.

Starting with the roles and responsibilities of directors, VPs, and CTOs, explore their positions in the org chart and understand how they engage on tactical, operational, and strategic levels to deliver great products at scale. Dive into the tools and techniques that you need to be successful. Understand how to frame and allocate your time, how to play finite and infinite games, how to position and manage senior individual contributors, and how to get the best from your peers, your manager, and your counterparts that you collaborate with in other disciplines. Understand how to communicate at scale and then raise the bar through effective performance management.

Get strategic: define, create, and execute your vision for your organization that stands the test of time. Understand the typical monthly, quarterly, and yearly cycles that companies go through and how to use them to your advantage. Tackle planning and budgets and understand how to make both work for you. Navigate wartime and peacetime successfully by adapting your priorities and leadership style. Plan out your career journey by understanding that it’s never, ever a straight line to get to where you want to go.

It’s time for us to lift the lid on effective senior leadership.

• Errata, typos, suggestions

Releases:

• P1.0 2024/09/06
• B6.0 2024/08/23
• B5.0 2024/06/07
• B4.0 2024/05/08

• Introduction
• The Role Defined
  • VP, Director, What?
    • Laying Out the Career Tracks
    • Scope and Impact
    • Competencies
    • Getting the Gig
    • To the Org Chart!
  • Your Place in the Org Chart
    • The Division of Labor
    • The Shape of My Chart: Structures and Patterns
    • Structural Antipatterns and How to Avoid Them
    • Flows of Communication and Collaboration
    • Time Flies…
• Tools, Techniques and Time
  • Time: Observed, Spent, and Allocated
    • A Lens of Longtermism
    • Your Capacity: Your Most Important Resource
    • Time Management: Models, Tools, and Techniques
    • Your Calendar: Wielding a Double-Edged Sword
    • Now, You’ve Got People to Manage
  • The Games We Play and How to Win Them
    • Management 101: The Fundamentals
    • It’s All Just Leadership After All
    • From the Swamp to Infinity: Achieving Together
    • Leading Without Authority
  • The Sharpest Tool in Your Toolbelt
    • Individual Contributors: The Higher Rungs
    • The Four Archetypes: Pieces of Your Puzzle
    • Deploying Senior Individual Contributors
    • The Technical Shadow Organization
    • Looking Sideways
  • The Tragedy of the Common Leader
    • But We Didn’t Want This to Become a Dumpster Fire
    • Magnetism and Polarity: Pulling Peers Together
    • Actually, It’s All on You: Do It Yourself
  • Of Clownfish and Anemones
    • Teenage Rebellion: Raging Against the Machine
    • Prescriptions Don’t Work: Tools Do
    • Symbiosis: Defined, Observed, and Applied
    • Skip to the End: Defining the Relationship
    • When the Stuff Hits the Fan
    • Three Is a Magic Number
  • Trifectas, Multifectas, and Allies
    • Omne Trium Perfectum
    • Trifectas: Your Own Perfect Triplet
    • Extending to Multifectas
    • Snow Melts at the Periphery
    • And Now for Something Completely Different
  • Communication at Scale
    • Standing on the Shoulders of Scribbles
    • Patterns of Communication
    • Leadership Is Writing
    • The Grand Commit Log of History
    • And Now for Our Favorite Parts of the Job
  • Performance Management: Raising the Bar
    • The Rising Tide: Why We’re Doing This
    • Performance Management of Senior Staff
    • Calibrations: Converging on Fairness
    • Debugging Common Performance Management Issues
    • Let’s Get Strategic
• Strategy, Planning, and Execution
  • Strategy 101
    • What on Earth Is a Strategy, Anyway?
    • Engineering Strategy: Your Piece of the Puzzle
    • Let’s Build an Engineering Strategy Together
    • Cycling Through the Year
  • Company Cycles
    • The Calendar Is Dead, Long Live the Calendar
    • Sales: Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Live Without Them
    • Marketing: Big Bangs Without the Bang
    • Two Worlds Collide: Troubleshooting and Solutions
    • Dollars, Pound, Euros, and Yen
  • Money Makes the World Go Round
    • Finance 101: The Basics of Company Finance
    • Managing a Large Budget: Levers and Dials
    • Common Dilemmas: Patterns to Follow
    • Good Times and Bad Times Ahead
  • Boom and Bust
    • Spend! Invest! Grow! Crash! Burn! Rebuild!
    • Peacetime and Wartime: A Spectrum
    • Concentric Circles of Trust
    • Leading Through Peacetime: Invest, Spend, Grow
    • Leading Through Wartime: Cut, Save, Rebuild
    • So, Where Are You Going?
  • Tarzan Swings from Vine to Vine
    • The Fallacy of the Straight Line
    • The Tarzan Method
    • The Trajectory of Your Swing
    • Earn, Learn, or Quit
    • Putting It All Together
    • Once Again, It’s Been a Pleasure