Recommendations

Welcome — here are some of the books, tools, and articles I recommend. This is a living list; I’ll update it regularly.

Books

Below is a curated list of books I recommend, grouped by theme and annotated from the perspective of an engineering executive — notes focus on strategy, team design, delivery, and measurable outcomes.

Leadership & strategy

  • Start with Why — Simon Sinek — Clarifies organizational purpose so engineering strategy aligns with customer value and prioritization.
  • Think Like Amazon — John Rossman — Practical lessons on customer obsession, working backwards, and data-driven tradeoffs that engineering leaders must operationalize.
  • The Everything Store — Brad Stone — Case study of scaling product, logistics, and tech decisions under an uncompromising vision.
  • Good to Great — Jim Collins — Frameworks for disciplined leadership and focus that reduce engineering churn and technical debt.
  • The Advantage — Patrick Lencioni — Organizational health practices that remove friction and accelerate engineering execution.
  • Work Rules! — Laszlo Bock — Signals how people systems and hiring practices scale high-performing engineering teams.
  • No Rules Rules — Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer — A look at freedom-with-responsibility cultures and the governance required to make them work.
  • Leaders Eat Last — Simon Sinek — Explains psychological safety as a prerequisite for innovation and sustained engineering performance.
  • Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America — Jeff Ryan — A cultural case study on product longevity and brand-driven product strategy (useful for thinking about product defensibility and engagement).

Teams & delivery

  • The Phoenix Project — Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford — A narrative that frames flow, bottlenecks, and the operational practices engineering leaders must correct to achieve reliability and speed.
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — Patrick Lencioni — A diagnostic playbook for trust, accountability, and clarity in engineering leadership.
  • Radical Candor — Kim Scott — Practical coaching techniques to upskill managers and accelerate team performance.
  • Team Topologies — Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais — Prescribes team types and interaction modes that minimize cognitive load and speed delivery.
  • Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time — Jeff Sutherland — Core cadence and feedback loops engineering orgs can adopt to improve predictability.
  • The Scrum Fieldbook — J.J. Sutherland — Tactical patterns for applying Scrum across teams and programs.
  • Radical Focus — Christina Wodtke — Concise guidance on using OKRs to translate strategy into prioritized engineering work.
  • Measure What Matters — John Doerr — Case studies and templates for setting measurable outcomes that engineering teams can influence.
  • Accelerate — Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim — Empirical evidence on technical and managerial practices that correlate with high delivery performance.
  • Extreme Ownership — Jocko Willink & Leif Babin — Leadership mindset and accountability principles for engineering decision-making.

Product & startups

  • The Power of Moments — Chip Heath & Dan Heath — How to design onboarding, milestones, and rituals that reinforce culture and retention.
  • Inspired — Marty Cagan — How to structure product discovery so engineering builds the right things with minimal waste.
  • The Lean Startup — Eric Ries — Experimentation and validated learning to de-risk new features and product lines.
  • Customer Data Platforms — Martin Kihn & Christopher O’Hara — Tactical overview of CDPs and how to organize data to enable product and growth experiments.
  • SEO for Growth — John Jantsch & Phil Singleton — Bridges product, engineering, and marketing with measurable acquisition levers engineering can instrument and drive.

Personal productivity & craft

  • Deep Work — Cal Newport — Practical routines to protect engineering leaders’ and senior engineers’ focus time for high-leverage work.
  • Search Inside Yourself — Chade-Meng Tan — Mindfulness techniques to improve leadership presence, empathy, and decision quality.
  • Emotional Intelligence 2.0 — Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves — Actionable EQ skills for resolving conflict and influencing cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Drive — Daniel H. Pink — Motivation principles to design team autonomy and mastery into teams.

Negotiation & influence

  • Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss — Negotiation tactics useful for vendor, stakeholder, and hiring negotiations.
  • Irresistible — Adam Alter — Insights into habit-forming product design that inform prioritization of engagement features.

Articles & Papers

If you have suggestions, ping me via the Contact page or open a PR with your additions.