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An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management?
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+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.
Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle would be a perfect fit for you. Larson helped Stripe scale its engineering arm (now CTO of Calm) during its rapid growth phases. It's easily referencible:with each chapter and sub-section a vertical slice of value that stands on its own—and offers a stupid simple writing style/content, and a.
As a product person, it helped me go from being conversant on the underlying technologies of my product(s) to being more conversant with the engineers that built them. Sounds silly and obvious, but the very tactical guidance offered gave me a solid perspective on the kind of organization and products that engineers and developers want to be apart of. I gotta assume the same would apply to you (but in reverse?).
I love Cagan, but this was probably one of the most beneficial non-product management books I've ever read.
Building an engineering practice from scratch is not really something you can grasp via podcasts and blog posts. You're going to need to set aside a lot of time for deep, focused thinking on this problem. Because it's a fairly organization and business specific problem.
Step 0: Determine what you budget is. Have a dialogue with business leadership about how much you can spend on this team both upfront (for recruiters, hiring bonuses, etc) and year-to-year (salaries/benefits).
Congrats, you have a budget. Now determine what your engineering practice actually looks like, or at least how you want it to look. Don't just immediately jump to "hiring people". Determine the the flow of work on a very basic level at least. Do you have QA processes? Are there staging/pre-prod environments? What does the dev tooling look like? Are you going to be open to multiple tools/frameworks/ideologies, or are there one or two you'd like to pick from -- are you going to avoid sprawl or embrace it for some period of time? What does taking a set of work from "idea" to "deliverable" look like. Who will these engineers primary stakeholders be? Who sets priority?
Congrats, you now have a basic scaffold for how the engineering practice will function. Now determine what key players need to exist within that practice to meet the business needs. Hopefully your org has an HR flavored person to assist with writing things like hiring plans and needs assessments. Does your budget allow you to hire all of those key players? If not, ask for more budget or think about ways to restructure the team to work within the budget.
If this is a "we need to hire a buttload of people by end of 2022" situation, I'd highly recommend reading An Elegant Puzzle a few times cover-to-cover. Take notes. Highlight stuff.
An Elegant Puzzle is almost purpose-written for "OK so you've managed a team well, here's how you manage an entire engineering practice well".
Will Larson's other book, An Elegant Puzzle, is a fantastic read for someone at the CTO/director/VP level and is quite intimate regarding advancement. Though you should read the Staff Engineer book if you haven't.
As far as fundamental stuff goes, The Manager's Path is fantastic for all things related to transitioning into technical leadership.
The Making of a Manager provides some common scenarios by which people often find themselves presented with leadership opportunities, though a good chunk of the book is more how to navigate those particular flavors of transitions well.
Assuming these staff+ positions are at all product focused, pretty much anything by Marty Cagan (like Empowered) is a slam-dunk.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been in leadership for 15 years now and this book seems like the best description of my leadings so far; https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Management/dp/1732265186
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