Engineering Leadership: The Hard Parts (Category Management)
I like to read management books that don’t try to sell “leadership” as a set of beautiful poses or phrases. And O'Reilly's new book.Engineering Leadership: The Hard Parts", issued at the beginning 2026 It looks interesting because of that. The authors decided to talk about the part of the work where priorities move, resources are not enough, processes are creaking, and the work still needs to be done. It was written by Juan Pablo Buritica and James Turnbull. The first is CTO Convergint with experience in Stripe and Splice, and the second is a senior vice president of development at the same place, who previously managed to lead Kickstarter, Docker, Venmo and a number of other companies, and he also managed to write several other technical books before this book.
The table of contents shows that the book goes from uncertainty and the role of the leader to the topics of working with the team, assignment of direction, delivery of results, work with the budget, definition of technical principles, as well as joint decisions and metrics. That is, the conversation here is not only about personal meetings with employees and evaluation of work, but about the entire full-house at once: people, product, process, money and technology.
It's especially good that
1Authors begin by diagnosing chaos. Not from a dream about a perfect team, but from signs that the system is already on its way: no owners, weak communication, a culture of finding fault, a constant fire mode, no clear measurements. This is a good entry, because many management books start where the reader is already doing well. I also like to tell the menti that they mention the difficulties of the new job, that if all was well, you would not be called to lead this direction:) 2The role of the technical manager they spread through several supportsPeople, meaning of work, plan, process and result. The strong idea here is simple: the leader is not a “former best developer”, but a multi-armed Shiva or as the authors describe.generalist with range", which links the command, direction and way of working into one system. 3️ There's a strong block about working in chaos.. The authors do not give out a “universal template”, but rather a set of mental models: first understand the context, then choose the action; look at the result, not at the fuss; say compromises out loud; build not heroism, but a system in which people easier to move work. 4The book is not just about people.. There is prioritization, task queue, balance between new functions and technical debt, transparency of priorities. And then budgets, spending, contractors, do-or-buy disputes, followed by technical principles and strategy. This range of topics in one book is rare. 5Completed with engineering practices and metrics. And that may be one of the most valuable parts. Many organizations either do not know how to measure engineering work at all, or turn metrics into a baton. Here, on the table of contents, you can see a healthier approach: metrics should be designed in question and not fetishize the speed of development. (velocity)
If you put a book next to Will Larson's books, I have a comparison. An Elegant Puzzle is a strong system book about engineering management: team size, technical debt, succession planning, organizational decisions. (see. my post) Engineering Leadership: The Hard Parts is a more down-to-earth book about the day-to-day work of an executive within an already noisy system. In general, they can be perfectly combined.
#Engineering #Management #Leadership #Processes #Strategy #Metrics