Books for Management

After being a manager for a few years, I’ve done well enough to have a few of the engineers I’ve managed become managers themselves. While I am moving back to an individual contributor role, I have spent a lot of time geeking out about management and it seems I have accumulated a good bit of knowledge.

This post is meant to document some of the books I found useful learning to manage.

Tech Management

Books on managing in the tech world.

The Managers Path

This book is a great overview of being a manager in the tech industry. It has chapters that go through all the different levels of management, from mentoring all the way to CTO. It has a lot of great insights and since it is specific to tech management, it covers a lot of areas that more general management books miss.

An Elegant Puzzle

I don’t think I would recommend this book as someone’s first book on management. But once you have ramped up on the basics on management, this book provides a lot of important concepts (e.g. how to organize teams, how to come up with policy, how to create a culture, etc). It also has a lot of good references for learning more.

Staff Engineer

This book I’m listing for selfish reasons. As I move into a Staff Engineer role, I want managers to understand what that role looks like and understand what to expect from me.

Leading Tech Teams

Essential Scrum

Lots of technical teams nowadays are using Scrum to manage their work. And lots of technical teams are using scrum poorly. In my experience, there is a lot of using scrum words and going through some of the motions, but not really doing scrum. This book does a good job of describing the actual scrum process and discussing the different parts of it and their value.

The Lean Startup

This book is all about using an iterative development model and using feedback to make adjustments to what you are building in order to actually build something useful. It is targeted at startups, but has useful info that is valuable to all technical organizations.

The Phoenix Project

This book is basically a narrative introduction to DevOps. While I don’t really like the narrative style for management books, it does a good job of communicating the key ideas of DevOps, which I think are really valuable for Software Development in General.

The DevOps Handbook

This book is similar to “The Phoenix Project”, but it is not written as a narrative. So, I like it more, but it does take a bit longer to get through (and has more detailed information).

Accelerate

This book talks through some of the recent finding in DevOps. What I really like about this book is that they talk about how they did they research and came to their conclusion.

General Management

More general management books.

Drive

This book is about motivation. In particular the motivational differences between average performers and high-performers. It lists autonomy, master, and purpose as the three big factors behind high-performance motivation.

Good Strategy / Bad Strategy

This was a recommendation from “An Elegant Puzzle” and it is a great book on strategy. It does a really good job of describing what strategy is and how to develop good strategies. It also provides a good list of common mistakes of poor strategies.

Deep Work

As a manager, I felt like I spent a good bit of effort trying to protect my team from interruptions and unnecessary meetings. This book describes why. It talks about the need for long periods of uninterrupted focused work in order to solve more complex challenges.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

This book was given to all the managers at the first company I managed at. It provides 5 key components that teams need in order to be successful. This is another narrative style books, which I tend not to like, but there is some good information here.

Conclusion

This is far from a complete list and I’ll likely add more books to it in the future. But each of these books has provided some value to me in learning to manage and lead technical teams.