Leaders worth following spend 30-60 minutes a day reading. Here's my list.
This is the reading list I share with every mentee. Not everything I've ever read. The 30-ish sources that still show up in my own weekly rotation and that I recommend when someone asks "what should I be reading?". Blogs first, then podcasts, then books. The books are the ones I re-read.
Engineering leadership blogs
- Jade Rubick — Advises startup founders and leaders.
- Will Larson — Irrational Exuberance — Platform and infrastructure engineering.
- The Pragmatic Engineer — Gergely Orosz — Best paid newsletter for senior EMs and Staff+.
- Lara Hogan — Coaching for tech managers and leaders.
- John Cutler — Product ops, systems thinking, cross-functional patterns.
- LeadDev — Team & Management — Engineering leadership articles, curated.
- FirstRound Review — Long-form startup and management essays.
- Rands in Repose — Michael Lopp — The originals: Managing Humans, tech-leader personality patterns.
- Corporate Rebels — Real experiments in changing how organisations work.
- Unfix — Jurgen Appelo — Org design patterns beyond Spotify Model.
- The Engineering Manager — Curated resources for EMs at every stage.
Product leadership blogs
- John Cutler — The Beautiful Mess — Product ops, prioritisation, systems.
- SVPG — Marty Cagan — Product management first-principles.
- Melissa Perri — Product Thinking — Escaping the Build Trap, product operating models.
- Rich Mironov — Product-org economics and coaching.
- Roman Pichler — Product strategy and roadmaps.
- Jeff Patton — Story maps, discovery, product life-cycle.
- One Knight in Product — Interviews with senior product leaders.
- Department of Product — Weekly product news and analysis.
Podcasts
- The Pragmatic Engineer podcast — Gergely Orosz interviewing senior engineering leaders.
- Modern CTO — Kipp Sorensen with practising CTOs.
- LeadDev podcast — Talks from LeadDev conferences.
- Level-up Engineering — CodingSans on EM practice.
- Software Engineering Daily — Daily conversations with practitioners.
Books I re-read
- Radical Candor — Kim Scott
Care personally, challenge directly. The framework I use with every new mentee for the first three sessions.
- Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss
Negotiation. Half of engineering leadership is negotiation dressed as something else.
- Strong Product People — Petra Wille
Growing product managers — the closest analog we have to growing EMs.
- Escaping the Build Trap — Melissa Perri
How product-led orgs actually work. Read this before you write your next OKR set.
- Managing Humans — Michael Lopp
Field notes from a career in tech management. Still the book I hand new EMs first.
- The Manager's Path — Camille Fournier
Ladder rungs from TL to CTO with concrete responsibilities per level.
- An Elegant Puzzle — Will Larson
Systems thinking applied to engineering orgs. Repeatable playbooks.
There's a longer, unfiltered list onGitHub. Missing something you think should be here? Tell me onLinkedIn.
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