97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

by Camille Fournier

Tap into the wisdom of experts to learn what every engineering manager should know. With 97 short and extremely useful tips for engineering managers, you'll discover new approaches to old problems, pick up road-tested best practices, and hone your management skills through sound advice.

Managing people is hard, and the industry as a whole is bad at it. Many managers lack the experience, training, tools, texts, and frameworks to do it well. From mentoring interns to working in senior management, this book will take you through the stages of management and provide actionable advice on how to approach the obstacles you’ll encounter as a technical manager.

A few of the 97 things you should

"Three Ways to Be the Manager Your Report Needs" by Duretti Hirpa"The First Two Questions to Ask When Your Team Is Struggling" by Cate Huston"Fire Them!" by Mike Fisher"The 5 Whys of Organizational Design" by Kellan Elliott-McCrea"Career Conversations" by Raquel Vélez"Using 6-Page Documents to Close Decisions" by Ian Nowland"Ground Rules in Meetings" by Lara Hogan

Genres: Management, Leadership, Technology, Nonfiction, Engineering, Business, Programming

441 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 21, 2019

About the author

For the 19thC gynaecologist, see Camille Fournier.

Camille Fournier is the former chief technology officer of Rent The Runway and former vice president of technology at Goldman Sachs.

Reviews

[Miguel David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is nothing more than a collection of articles from Engineering Managers about different parts of their work, as such there's variation in the interest of each piece. The good thing though is that most of them are interesting to very interesting and each of them is about 3 kindle pages long, so you can start and stop and restart whenever you want.
I learned a lot from this book and recommend it.

[Yaroslav Brahinets · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a blog post but not a full-fledged book either. It's more like a compilation of top picks from forum conversations or a conference after-party. I really enjoyed reading this book because of its bite-sized chapters that you can easily squeeze into a spare minute during work or while commuting, a great alternative to social doomscrolling.

Although this book didn't have the same level of depth as other professional tech books I've read, I still found a solid collection of advice from different people. Here they are:

- your primary goal as a professional is not necessarily to be liked, but to deliver results for the business, being likeable is not a primary goal
- sometimes, there will be challenging moments where you only have to "disagree and commit," as they say
- as managers, our peers will be our number one priority, not our direct reports. F2F is like an oil change, a great way to be on track smoothly
- managing people is like using an API without documentation – you have to try, fail, and adapt. The same API may work differently tomorrow

The strategies shared in the book were quite useful. For example, open door policy does not work so fine on leadership positions, and good leader doesn't wait for people to come to them; instead, proactively share information. Follow the principle of overcommunication, "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them, duplicate info in several mediums." Also, it's important to avoid focusing too much on individual happiness at the expense of the team's overall strength. This is a common pitfall for new managers.

In terms of personal development, a great point resonated with me: Instead of just continuously learning, it's essential to focus on continuous improvement. And do not forget that change is a constant in life – it will never stop.

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

Essay collections like this always tend to suffer from hit-or-miss quality, but having so many (and such short essays) really exacerbates the effect. Compelling essays are few and far between, plus don’t have the length to fully develop their ideas. Many of the rest fall into the realm of extremely generic/common management advice, and don’t bring a lot of fresh perspectives or mental models.

If you’re early enough in your learning journey to get much benefit from the lessons in this book, you’re probably better off with one that provides more structure and curation (Camille Fournier’s other book, The Manager’s Path, being one of my favorites).

A few essays I did find stood out:
- The Five Why’s of Organizational Design by Kellan Elliot McCrea
- Followership by Jason Wong
- How do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? by Camille Fournier
- Risk Budgets: Five Choices Between Your Team and Failure by Cris Concepcion
- Why Your Programmer Just Wants to Code by Marcus Blankenship

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Exactly what one could expect from that kind of book ("97 things that ...") - each chapter is written by someone else and covers a totally different topic/idea/concern. Some are interesting, but only very few have really caught my attention (my fav is on Chaleff's typology of followers). I've grabbed this one because of C. Fournier (who've collected & redacted the book), but it's really hard to recommend it wholeheartedly.

2-2.5 stars.

[Łukasz Słonina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short articles compiled together, without particular order. mainly for people starting as engineering managers. Few good "things", few obvious to me.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great fun easy to read book consisting of 5 minute chapters that you can read between things. Nothing life changing but good to hear different view points and graphs and diagrams to back it all up.

Even though I am giving this a 4/5 I still recommend reading it especially to new leads or managers.

[Rajeev Bharshetty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good starter guide for an engineering manager from experienced engineering managers. Very thorough.

[Avraam Mavridis · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a few good articles, and a lot of really boring ones. Its more like a collection of Medium posts rather than a book.

[Pat Swanson · Rating 1 out of 5]

A better title for this book would be: 97 things engineering managers have written about.

I'm going to lump my gripes about this book into two groups: problems with the book overall, and problems with the individual articles.

Overall, the book has no organization - it's 97 articles on subjects that might matter to someone in engineering management. Because of this, it would be fairly hard to use the book as a reference - there's no index or structured table of contents. This also means that the articles leap from intended audience to intended audience - sometimes it's a brand new manager, sometimes an article appears to better suited for a manager of managers.

As for the articles themselves, after reading this book, I am uncertain if the writers are experts in their field (as the subtitle claims). I am, however, convinced that they are (mostly) not experts in the fields of writing or communication. Many of the articles struggle to make their point. Some fail entirely. A number wander for a while, using a relatively small fraction of the few pages allotted to them in a worthwhile fashion. Sometimes the intended audience for the article was unclear. Occasionally, I left the article feeling that there could be _no_ target audience for the issue being discussed.

I did actually enjoy having read the book, but only because I read it in a book club - the conversations we had fleshed out the subjects of the articles in a way that the authors did not. I really can't recommend this book to anyone outside of that context.

[Arman Hilmioğlu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giving 4 stars, and recommending this book to all new and aspiring engineering managers. The key difference between this book and all other management relevant ones (ex: Manager's Path, Managing Humans etc...) is; this one has a lot more practical advice summarized in much shorter stories. While certain aspects of the management is going to be different from organization to organization / culture to culture / this book was much more comprehensive in things that went right and wrong for people. That's what you should want from a management book, practical examples, rather than abstract concepts.

[Gustavo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought the book because I had really enjoyed the previous one from the same author. Unfortunately this one was disappointing. It's a collection is very short pieces, all bundled together, that in my opinion misses depth. Every one of them leaves me thinking "ok, but how?". All have good intentions but are too shallow. Still, thank you for putting the book out, can be a good starting point for some people.

[Isaac Perez Moncho · Rating 2 out of 5]

The main point of this book is that it's a curated list of short chapters by many authors, unfortunately the curation is not great.
There are some good chapters, but the style is very different between the authors, there doesn't seem to be any type of organisation and it feels it jumps from one topic to the next and back.
It would have benefited with consistency in quality of the chapters and some organisation of topics.

[Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a good book for both engineers and engineering managers. There are no particular insights, but, for me, as an engineer, it helped to confirm that, as for the current project, there are things indeed that I am not imagining.
One thing that could be useful, to keep a list of chapters which caught your immediate attention, and reread in a week. I got 15. Let's see in a week, the goal is to try to provide valuable feedback that will be helpful for the team and project.

[Mahdi Taghizadeh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book actually is not written by one author and is composed of 97 things written by various people who are CTOs, EMs, senior software engineers, VPEs, etc.

Don’t expect much technical stuff as this is more about the Management part of Engineering Manager’s hat; but those things are absolutely worth reading and you will learn a lot to manage teams of engineers.

[Simon MacDonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays by a number of engineering managers. Like any book with that may authors the quality varies and you will probably find some to be absolute gold while others you will forget immediately.

I recommend that you read one or two essays a day using them like zen koans to provoke deeper thought on whether or not you can incorporate them into your routine.

[Felipe Albuquerque · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a really nice place to get introduced to some good practices for understanding how to manage a very diverse set of situations. One of those books that you may want to revisit from time to time. Of course: or lacks depth on those topics, so you may want to read complementary materials if you really want to deep dive into something.

[Sergey Shishkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

97 Things is an interesting genre. Essays might seem disjoint at first. What I liked is the diversity of perspectives and ideas. I'm sure everyone will find a thing or two that will resonate more than other more comprehensive books for managers.

[Dimitrios Zakas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been trying to read this book for months. Some of the "things" were very helpful and that's why my rating is 2/5 but the remaining were the most boring blog posts on management I have read for quite some time.

[Daniel Friman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has an unusual format that offers short and insightful essays, making it a valuable resource to pick up for tips when faced with particular situations. Although it may not be read from cover to cover, it's worth browsing through every now and then to gain thought-provoking ideas.

[Jose Reales · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://chemaclass.es/readings/97-thi...

[Alex French · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few good tidbits here and there, but overall just a disjointed mishmash of mediocre essays.

[Jevgenij · Rating 3 out of 5]

About 80% of the book is pretty shitty: trivial, generic, boring. But in the remaining 20% it was possible to find some really interesting ideas.

[Daniel Gomez Rico · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a book full of lessons and that's cool, it's a book to read overtime otherwise it's hard to save all of that in your brain.

[Laurian Filip · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the jumble of information, you can find quite a few interesting and useful tips.

[Soner · Rating 3 out of 5]

An elementary and a quick guide for new engineering managers to start to find out their way.