Intro
Previously, before my exchange semester at TU Delft, I held a few leadership roles within organizations at UWaterloo. Notably, I used to run WARG (https://www.uwarg.com/), WEEF (https://uwaterloo.ca/engineering-endowment-foundation/) and was the control systems lead at the University of Waterloo Robotics Team (https://www.uwaterloorobotics.com/).
As organizations grew, an inevitable (but happy) task was scaling myself and turning the more senior folk around into leaders themselves. I put together a reading list of books and resources that I personally like, and when I refer to each for advice. I'll note that my reading list, experiences, and resources are biased toward technical leadership as a nature of the organizations I am heavily involved with.
A note that there are mild spoilers in my description of the books. I'll write this blog post as a letter to various student leaders asking for book suggestions.
The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim
I would recommend The Phoenix Project to existing leads struggling with process and feedback-oriented issues within their teams or organizations. The important lessons in this book came in the form of mastering the 3 ways (https://itrevolution.com/articles/the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/ - amplification of feedback loops and systems thinking is a big part of a win I took home with WEEF, such as cutting reimbursement times five-fold) and understanding the various archetypes of characters that might be present in an organization. In particular, I find that Brent (https://rajipillay.medium.com/the-brent-effect-df10c4c5d3bc) shows up in a lot more places than I first thought, and applying the lessons proposed in the book really does work in increasing the team's bandwidth, knowledge, and confidence.
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner
I would recommend Engineering Management for the Rest of Us to new leads without prior leadership experience. I found that Drasner emphasizes the human aspect of leading and prioritizes servant-based leadership, which took me a while to learn. The book provides a high-level overview of how to interface with people while also going over the basics of project management and priority setting.
Managing Humans by Michael Lopp
I would recommend managing humans to leads who have some experience in running a team and are interested in scaling themselves beyond a first-level manager. The organizations I was on the leadership team of employed 3 levels of management - I think this book covers a lot of the hidden lessons in a casual, storytelling style that becomes valuable as one climbs the technical management ladder, especially as directional authority and scope/influence increases.
Build by Tony Fadell
Build is a bit of an odd one - it isn't focused on leadership, rather, it's focused on providing advice to building the next cool thing. However, Fadell focuses on scaling nest and how many of his lessons from his time at Apple translated into scaling a startup, which I found had many parallels with scaling a technical team that isn't necessarily profit-oriented (such as a student design team). I would recommend this book to more experienced leads who are interested in scaling their organization or are in the process of seeing their team scale and want to address the growing pains associated with scaling the team.
Other Mentions
I found The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt to contain the same lessons as The Phoenix Project, just a different storyline. It was a decent read, but I would personally recommend Phoenix Project over The Goal.
The Software Developer's Handbook by Michael Lopp was an entertaining read for me as an individual. It does have some helpful management tips but is primarily focused on one's career progression. I recommend it as a read for those in software-oriented roles to understand how career progression might be defined to different people and use that knowledge in a leadership role to better scale those reporting to a lead.
Future Me's Reading List
A collection of books on my kindle waiting for me to get some time for them that are tangentially related.
Turn the Ship Around
Team Topologies
Engineer's Survival Guide
Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track
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