Praise for The Engineering Leader

“The penguin example alone is worth the price of this book. I’m not even kidding.”

— Tanya Reilly, author of The Staff Engineer’s Path

“Cate is an expert on managing and leading whose work I recommend again and again. Her new book is a wealth of great advice, helpful insights, and useful tools, and will improve leaders, their teams, their cultures and their companies.”

— Ellen Pao, author of Reset

“This book is a valuable guide to navigating career growth and making an impact in any role, whether you lead teams, write code, or are figuring out which path you want to take.”

— Camille Fournier, author of The Manager’s Path

“I’ve heard advice from many brilliant people over my career, but few of them have had the impact that Cate has had. Her advice helped me form my team, my company, and my own leadership style. This book has everything she taught me and I cannot recommend it highly enough.”

— Dan Shapiro, CEO of Glowforge

“Where was this book when I was figuring out how to be an Engineering Manager building an engineering group at Google? It’s a manual for leaders looking to expand their leadership range, and it’s a call to arms for individual contributors to take responsibility for their careers beyond the current job/company.”

— Duncan Skelton

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Q&A

What makes this book different from other engineering leadership books?

Many engineering leadership books give readers a set of tools to deploy, but engineering leadership is not just a set of tools, anymore than developing software is about specific programming language features. You need to know them, but understanding when to apply them and what they are supposed to accomplish is more important. For instance questions for a 1:1 can be a useful starting point, but achieving the goal of a 1:1 — building a relationship where you understand how someone is doing and how you can help them be effective — is not guaranteed by asking the “correct” questions.

The book talks about scaling yourself, not just your team. What’s the difference, and why does it matter?

As your responsibility grows, your leadership style needs to evolve with it. You can’t run a team of teams the way you run a single team — you just can’t be in the details to the same extent. This means you can’t scale your team without scaling yourself. As a leader, often you’re in a situation where no-one is looking out for you — so you’d better figure out how to look after yourself before you hit the wall.

You advocate for a “coach-like style of leadership.” What does that mean?

A core premise of coaching is that people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole. Coming to work with people that way changes your mindset to one where you help people be effective rather than trying to control people. It means asking questions rather than coming with the answers, and being genuinely curious.

What’s the most uncomfortable truth about engineering leadership that you wish more people talked about?

There’s a joke that if managers call engineers “resources”, managers should be called “overhead”. This is true. An effective leader needs to be a multiplier in the organisation; your job is not your position on the org chart, but what you can get done. Your value is not in what meetings you attend, but what you add to them. Your work is not what you know, but what you can help get done. Your impact is not measured by how many people report into you, but what they accomplish.

If someone reads this book and decides NOT to pursue leadership, would you consider that a success?

Yes. Leadership and management are not for everyone, and I believe in supporting people to make the right decisions for them.