Engineering Leadership

Lead an Engineering Team for the First Time

Leading your first engineering team is the hardest transition in an engineer's career. The skills that made you a strong IC actively work against you as a manager.

Scale an Engineering Team from 5 to 20+

Scaling a team from 5 to 20 requires building systems — hiring pipelines, onboarding programmes, and communication structures that don't depend on you.

Deliver a Major Project On Time and On Scope

Delivering a major cross-functional project proves you can align engineers, product managers, and stakeholders toward a shared outcome.

Become a Staff Engineer

Optional — the staff track is for those who want to drive technical direction without moving into people management.

Become VP Engineering (First Time)

Optional — the VP track is for those who want to own the full engineering organisation, including hiring, culture, and cross-company technical strategy.

Free stories of how engineers reached Staff+ roles. Read 10 stories before applying for a senior or staff role — the patterns of what matters become clear.

Elad Gil's book is free online. Read chapters 3–5 on scaling teams first — the advice on moving from 10 to 100 engineers is the most practically useful section.

Free articles and conference talks from engineering leaders at real companies. Subscribe to the newsletter — the quality is consistently high.

Will Larson's free blog posts have most of the value from his book. The systems thinking approach to engineering organisations is the clearest framework available for free.

Camille Fournier's engineering management bible. The free preview has the early chapters on mentoring and managing ICs. Buy the full book if you manage managers.