The best Engineering Project Management books: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897

Haven't read it myself yet, but heard it recommended a lot.

> Easy job for her.

Just finished https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973

Holy shit, NOT an easy job for the first decade+!

Strongly recommend that book by the way. It reads almost like a techno thriller.

Love these guys. Downloaded.

PS Eric Berger also wrote a book about the early days of SpaceX called Liftoff. I'm in the middle of it and very interesting.

+1 for this. "I'm not a programmer, but I work well with them and can translate for them to non-technical people." is exactly what a PM is. You might find this book valuable.

+1 for Will Larson's stuff. An Elegant Puzzle is a fantastic read if you're interested in director/VP/CTO level engineering practice management.

> How about you? What are you planning for your career path?

Management. Much less sexy than the technical work, but I'm enjoying the people/process flavored challenges. Top-end of the comp band for engineering management at my current company is well above the "I can live comfortably" line for me.

Hi SpaceTaco - happy to be here!

There are a lot of resources out there but I think fundamentally you should understand what a product manager is and what a product manager isn't. I have interviewed quite a bit for junior product manager roles and whether it is a role for someone straight out of university or someone with a year or two of product management experience, I like to see intellectually curious individuals who can work well together in a team environment (i.e., communicate effectively), are empathetic to the end customer, and can start to think about how to invest time and resources.

Tactically for interviews, two resources I found pretty helpful when I was doing PM interviews was Cracking the PM Interview and Inspired but there are plenty of other online resources out there that can help! If more is needed i am happy to link to some online resources I found useful.

Cracking the PM Interview here: https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-PM-Interview-Product-Technology/dp/0984782818/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535773043&sr=8-1&keywords=cracking+the+pm+interview would be a good place to start :)

Like /u/the-incredible-ape mentioned, Cracking the PM Interview is great!

The most important thing, which is similar to eng interviews, is that you need to practice the "technical" questions as much as you can. That's the main thing that's used to evaluate you during an interview.

I don't think there are any company that exclusively hires MBAs for PMs. Some, like Amazon, prefer it, but it doesn't really matter. Source: have interviewed at Amazon.

Also check out Daily Product Prep for daily product management interview prep questions. Full disclosure I help run it!

To add on to the project+ part, as I just took it.

Going through the Udemy course https://wgu.udemy.com/course/comptiaproject-pk0-004/

and the abridged study guide (250 pages, vs the 450+ for the provided ebook) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1119280524/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Set me up well to pass it, I didn't do the best but I got like 768.

Watching the videos first on 2x seemed to provided a good basis, I also screen capped some of the graphs and charts when they were covered and took notes, though I didn't read those notes and they were a waste.

Then I worked through the book taking notes as I went along and reviewed them for a few days before the test.

I recommend taking simple hierarchical notes, using bullet points and nesting what things are under what part/topics and what they entail. It was dry, I hated it and spent way too long on it from procrastinating, but when I really went at it at the end it was pretty quick to pick up. The actual test isn't that hard imo. I was getting ~80% on the comptia questions, then only 65-70% on the pluralsight ones that I've read some post saying were more accurate to the test, which had me worried towards the end as studying my notes didn't improve that score. But in the end the comptia questions lined up with the topics covered more.

Read Lift Off by Eric Berger and hear the answer coming from SpaceX employees themselves. That book helped me a lot to understand what makes SpaceX an outlier. Spoilers: it's hard to exclude the upper management..

https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973

Read Liftoff by Eric Berger. It's the story of the first few years of SpaceX from the point of view of the early SpaceX employees.

https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973/

Spoiler: Elon Musk was the main project manager (akin to Von Braun's role) and Tom Mueller the propulsion engineer who designed the engine. If you follow Tom Mueller on Twitter, you'll find him often refuting people saying "Musk was not the mind behind it " like you do.

A bachelor in Physics is enough to say he can read engineering textbooks and figure out what they mean without having to go back to study calculus or whatever.

I believe him that he left the PhD because he thought the opportunity to make money on the early internet was too good to miss. And he did make make building and selling zip2.

The people interviewed for Eric Berger's Liftoff (https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973) were pretty candid.

Tom Mueller, former head of propulsion at SpaceX, father of record setting Merlin and Raptor engines and possibly the best rocket engineering currently working in the world, thinks that people who say that Elon is not technical are hilariously wrong.

https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929

If von Braun wasn't a major in the SS, lots of things would have been named after him. He is the person who contributed the most to rocketry. Elon Must has created a miracle of a company in SpaceX. It shattered the myth of "it will costs billions of dollars and you will fail anyway because only people who have worked with the people who worked with von Braun can build a rocket that works, if you try without receiving the wisdom of those who worked on Apollo you will fail". Turns out an organization with good leadership and only $100M can build a working small orbital launcher. Since Falcon 1 it has been done a bunch of times, so it wasn't a fluke. Now space has been democratized. But I think nothing will be named after Must, because he's a shit. I used to think he's just immature, but he's a real shit, and it's a pity. Eric Berger's "Liftoff" interviews a dozen people who were there in the early days and Musk really was deeply involved in all the technical details. He didn't lie when he said he's the chief engineer. But he's also an asshole.

This book really helped me make the jump from IC to manager: The Manager’s Path. There’s also a lot of great content on YouTube, my favorite is from the Lead Developer conference. Some of the talks by Pat Kya, Lara Hogan and Poornima Vijayshanker speak directly to your journey.

I do not consider myself an Elon fanboy by any stretch but to say he "didn't make the rockets" is actually completely false. Elon is the Chief Engineer at SpaceX and has a TON to do with the actual design and development of their technology. I read the book Liftoff which details his involvement from the beginnings and to say he just leans on his employees is flat out wrong in this case.

For anyone willing to dive deep into the origin story of SpaceX, I highly recommend the book Lift Off by u/erberger. It contains not only the account from Musk himself, but also by several early SpaceX engineers.

Fun fact. The writer, Eric Berger. Has recently been acused of war crimes by Rogozin.

Have you been through the hiring process at Google?

My comments about Google were from direct experience interviewing as a product manager in 2018.

cracking the PM interview was written by one of the early hires at Google and details the interview process across the FAANG/top tier software companies (she also has a book for software engineering) and it covers the complete process, including the fermi estimates portion.

Having been through the process myself at several high tech companies, I feel confident determining if it’s still in use.

But from that same interview, he goes on to say

> One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Which contradicts the idea that fermi estimate questions are useless, since the point of those questions are to figure out ways to solve problems with no obvious answers.

In the end, it’s one part of a 5 or 6 round interview process. When I did the interview day it was 6 different sessions ranging from assessing the broad technical landscape, the estimates and then leading into product strategy, then leadership of teams, engineering design, and finishing with product strategy.

So the interview process itself is quite detailed and this is not the be all and end all of picking candidates. (And that’s not including the phone based stuff as well).

This book: Cracking the PM Interview
This playbook: Comprehensive Interview Playbook

Salut, pentru mine a fost destul de interesant the Manager's Path.

E un fel de handbook on how to manage IT people (big tech și toate alea) pe care nu trebuie sa îl parcurgi din scoarța în scoarță sa te învețe ceva.

Practic e suficient sa citești capitolele care se aplică la rolul tău curent, deoarece cartea începe de la rolul de individual contributor într-o companie de tech, trece prin team lead, tech lead etc, pana la nivelul de CEO. Pentru fiecare pas din cariera încearcă sa îți dea diverse sfaturi utile și ce așteptări au oamenii de la tine pentru rolul respectiv.

Nu e foarte lungă lectura, as zice ca e un punct bun de început. Ofc trebuie totul citit cu o doza de scepticism și probabil unele lucruri nu se aplica chiar asa dacă lucrezi într-un shop de tip consulting în România. Spor!

I think The Manager's Path does a really good job of describing the differences between the levels. It's actually a pretty big leap to Director/VP as you give up your last hope of staying hands on (you stay "technical", but not hands on). I've made the transition in and out of manager of manager roles twice, and can say that manager of managers is most definitely not for everyone. Obviously people management is not for everyone, period, but as a front line manager of a team you are still close enough to the code and the act of building through code that it doesn't matter too much that you're not the one at the keyboard writing it. When you are a manager of managers, it all changes.

Good luck!

To add to what others said, also come prepared with anecdotes of how you influenced other people. If you don't know already, use the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) format in your anecdotes.

Here are also some resources that will help you get started on the people managing track:

• Engineering Manager Slack
• The Manager's Path

Saving you a whole lot of pain here: https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-PM-Interview-Product-Technology/dp/0984782818

That book covers like 85% of questions you're likely to get through the whole of the PM interview process and is a fast read.

Sweet Jesus it must be fun being that crazy.

If you want to bother with the history I'm talking about I'd suggest starting here:https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973

I read it on a long layover. The section I'm referring to is from September to December 2008.

Good luck, homie. I should know better than engage.

> I am not the best engineer on my team

And you'll never have to be, because the best people for engineering management are not the best engineers. They're the best people persons.

In most companies, it's just talking with your manager to let them know you're interested in hopping over to the M track. Usually it'll be informal early on with + on interviews, or mentoring, and eventually you'll get reports. Make sure it's a clearly defined yearly goal with your manager, though. It usually is a switch around mid/senior level where instead of going to Senior SWE, you become a Manager, Engineering. HOWEVER, caveat, focus on engineering as much as possible until you get that official switch. Reason being is your performance as an SWE will be aimed at ENGINEERING goals until you become a manager.

You don't just magically get pulled into management anymore at most companies (I hope...) because a lot of companies have found out that great engineers don't necessarily make great managers.

What do you need to learn? Probably this book would help Manager's Path.

I used this book: CompTIA Project+ Study Guide: Exam PK0-004 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119280524/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glc_fabc_4EZ9Z9ART960V7N91N09

And then I used Certmaster and the CompTIA practice tests. I read the book with one chapter a night and took the notes on paper before typing them up. After the book I did the practice tests. At the end of the tests they give you what you passed vs failed so I focused on reviewing what I failed in Certmaster.

So he is the lead product designer, absolutely, and that's nothing to mock. Starship is going to change human space exploration forever and it's entirely his vision. Being the CEO behind bringing that to fruition is not a trivial matter. He sleeps, breathes and lives rocketry.

But he actually works on the system as well, a shit load. Musk lives in a 600 sqft trailer at Starbase and has for almost a year now. He primarily focuses on production issues and translating design to physical parts. If you really care, the early days are pretty well covered in Liftoff and his recent work is probably best viewed as a starting point through his interview with Tim Dodd, which is worh watching even if you don't like Musk just because what they are building is about to change everything. Part 1/3

> but he’s not personally doing any of the hard work.

I don't know how you can jump from "that's not to be downplayed" to "his job doesn't involve any of 'the hard work'".

The people that each individually contribute some fraction of the hard work don't actually get to make that contribution (or it does not translate into a 'real' product, that changes anything about the world, a la Blue Origin or Waymo) absent Musk.

From all accounts, at least as far as SpaceX and Tesla are concerned, Musk is personally quite involved in the day-to-day nuts and bolts of the hiring, engineering and production-line decision-making required to make those companies function successfully. He's obviously also absolutely crucial to their financial success, as he both personally committed all of PayPal money to keeping them afloat in the early days, and his presence is what draws investors to continue plowing money into companies that require massive amounts of capital (and early losses) to ever achieve profitability. SpaceX is basically going to lose money for another decade, everyone knows that, and every investor in the world wants to be on the cap table.

I mean, there's obviously a gradient to Musk's personal usefulness to any one of his enterprises from more (SpaceX, Tesla) to less (Neuralink, OpenAI), but the people that claim he doesn't do anything are willfully ignorant of all the numerous accounts of all the stuff he actually does.

I am graduating in Spring 2022 with a degree in History and actually just landed an APM role for after grad with practically no formal technical experience (I only had retail banking experience on my resume as I really struggled to land an internship anywhere!). I interviewed with 3 firms in total and they were all essentially the same process - a PM at one of those firms recommended I read this book cover to cover and it really helped me prepare for the interviews but also figure out how to go about landing a career in tech in general :) book: https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-PM-Interview-Product-Technology/dp/0984782818

Personally, I think one of the things that all three firms really valued was diversity of thought so I don't think you will necessarily be tied down to your technical skills learned in class - they seemed to like that I didn't have a technical background. Instead, I would focus more on projects that offer you the opportunity to experience new things: I personally worked on digital research projects at my university that involved learning basic python. I don't necessarily think you need to extend your time in school to land a role as a PM. However, I haven't actually started working yet so this is all to be taken lightly and was just my personal experience.

I definitely think you can land a role after graduation without having to compromise more time but I also see your rationale!

I would be happy to chat more if you'd like! :) good luck! You got this.

PM in a similar setting here. not sure if you came across this one, but I found this book super helpful: link

Remember that there are many, many powerful and wealthy people in the world that have a vested interest in staining Musk's reputation, personal history and qualifications. You'll find countless instances of media slander, and the vast majority of it is exaggerated or untrue. He did not single handedly build his companies (as no company is build single handedly), but he led those he worked with to success and chose very talented people to collaborate with.

If you'd like a deep dive insight into the beginning of SpaceX and what Elon was like at the beginning of that particular adventure, this book is a great read: https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973