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Books

Book: Living by the Code

I’m in this book Living By the Code, talking about engineering management. Ray helpfully pulled out some of his highlights from my interview: 1) Keeping a team productiveI loved the section where you talked about orienting the entire team toward continuously delivering use value. It sounds so simple when you say it, but it’s so […]

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Books

Book: Managing Transitions

I’ve been thinking a lot about change management, lately – what makes it work, what makes it not. As a result, I was looking for reading that would help me formalize some of the concepts, to allow me to go one level deeper than recognizing what won’t work to more thoughtfully critique why certain things […]

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Books

Book: So You Want to Talk About Race

I read So You Want to Talk About Race (Amazon) after seeing my friend Jill tweet about it. As a white European, whilst I care about intersectionality and try to educate myself, I know there’s a lot I don’t know, and going deeper on this topic seemed like a good next step after reading Whipping […]

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Books

Book: Whipping Girl

I read Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Amazon) pretty quickly – over the course of 8 days (most of which I was traveling). I sought out the recommendation because I was looking to better understand the experiences of trans women and their evolving (or not) medical support and […]

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Books

Book: The Brand Gap

I read The Brand Gap (Amazon) on the recommendation of my colleague Michelle. I  wanted to better understand what branding is, how it works, how it fits in with marketing etc. At the end of it, I bought her a small gift which demonstrated that I had understood the book. The gift was a Yoko Ono […]

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Books

Book: Org Design for Design Orgs

I read Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams (Amazon) on the recommendation of my team mate, Matt Miklic. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 18 months working with Matt on how engineering teams can work better with designers, and I wish I’d read this book earlier! It was […]

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Book: Finite and Infinite Games

Finite and Infinite Games (Amazon) was my final piece of assigned reading for the AltMBA I took last summer. I don’t know why it was on the list, and having read it I still don’t know what it’s about. It reads like someone got incredibly high and saw the meaning of life, which they then […]

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Books

Book: Playing Big

Playing Big (Amazon) was a gift from Jean Hsu, and I loved it. It articulated things that I had noticed, and opened my eyes to things I had not. Super helpful. A few highlights: I’m over the inner critic (perhaps a topic for another post), but I loved the idea of the inner mentor. The […]

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Books women in computer science

Book: Brotopia

I ordered Brotopia (Amazon) after reading an extract I’d been quoted in. It was pretty interesting, and I appreciated the way that it tied together the things that I knew – and the things that I didn’t. It was pretty fascinating to read about the early Google culture, after experiencing first hand how far away things had […]

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Books

Book: The Art of Possibility

The Art of Possibility (Amazon) was the second book from the AltMBA with a woman co-author (the other was Thanks for the Feedback), and definitely in the top three that I got the most out of (along with Thanks for the Feedback and A Beautiful Constraint). It’s written by an orchestra conductor and his therapist, […]