Startup Engineering Management

by Piaw Na

If you’re currently an engineer and has been offered a management job at a startup, this book is for you! If you’re an engineer wondering what your manager is supposed to do for you, this book is for you as well!
Drawing from the author’s experience as an engineer and manager, this book explains:
· Why should an engineer consider doing management work?

· How should a manager put together his team?

· What are the important things to consider when interacting with engineers?

· How to hire top engineers for your startup.

· How to pick engineering leaders?

· How would you define processes and when don’t you need them.

· How to report to your managers.

· How compensation systems and promotion systems work, and when they fail.

Genres: Management, Software, Leadership, Business

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2011

Reviews

[Govind Chandrasekhar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very practical and very applicable, if you're in the business of startups and engineering.
I must have recommended this book to 20-30 people over the years, and to pretty much every manager in my org.

[Dmitry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an effective book: it respects your time, and wastes no words. In a terse, opinionated, no-nonsense way (all good traits in my opinion) it presents sound, practical advice on essentially all aspects of being an engineering manager, particularly in a fast-moving, resource-constrained company - i.e. a startup.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who either is, wants to be, or wants to effectively work with an engineering manager. New managers - particularly those who were previously high-energy tech leads! - might want to pair it with some other book that explores deeper the concept of "servant leadership", to create a well-rounded management style. (I recommend Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration)

Disclosure: when I purchased the book from their website, the author has kindly allowed me access to the beta version of the new edition - and my review is based on and biased by that version. In particular, the beta version contains the advice I consider particularly valuable: that is, how to build a high-performing team that collaborates well remotely - an essential topic in the post-Covid world.

[Mikhail Filatov · Rating 2 out of 5]

It seems that the only serious company in author career was Google. So this book is a mix of Google practices, like a story if manager, who organized co-sitting of his team with another team yo encourage collaboration in subtle way with the recommendation from the author to track bad performing employee for 2 weeks and fire if no improvement.
The author does not know a lot about Agile (mentioned Scrum along as XP for pair programming). So -overall seriously oudated book.

[Carl Rannaberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a short but practical guide for engineering team manager how to run an effective team through different obstacles and problema that may arise in the real world when developing products in fast changing environment.