Why I spent a year turning this blog into a book
The tools changed. The job didn't.
For years, I’ve used this blog to write about what I’ve learned leading engineering teams. My main goal has consistently been to help engineering managers navigate their roles so they can be effective sooner than I was in my career.
The posts got great responses, but every time I pointed someone to them as something to actually learn from, I heard the same thing: the content is good, but it’s hard to follow as a single thread.
So I tried to organize my thoughts. That’s most of why I went quiet here over the past year. The result is a book, Leading Effective Software Teams: Systems Thinking for Engineering Managers.
It takes the ideas I’ve been circling in these posts and turns them into one argument: that an engineering manager’s real job is to proactively lead the team as a system, shaping how product, technology, and people fit together, rather than managing each part on its own.
This is how it will look on your table.
It’s not lost on me that I wrote a book at exactly the moment the industry is being reshaped, with AI redefining roles and ways of working. However, watching the industry shift gave me more confidence in the content than before.
You just need to look around and see how many of the new solutions emerging from the AI cycle are repackaged ideas from earlier eras: the renewed focus on specs, the worry about the code review bottleneck, and so on. It’s almost ironic how many conversations I’ve had recently about the new AI development lifecycle with people describing long-standing, basic principles of effective iterative software development.
That’s not surprising, because when you step back, the goal is still to make a group of people (and now machines!) effective at delivering customer value through software.
AI has changed and will continue to change how we work. However, my bet is that engineering leaders will still be a key part of this process, and this book is my perspective on how to do that well.
You can find a free first chapter and an early release version here. And please don’t hesitate to send me your feedback!
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