QFM067: Engineering Leadership Reading List - May 2025

Source: Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash

This month's Engineering Leadership Reading List examines management fundamentals and strategic decision-making. 4 styles of decision-making: A leader's guide outlines four distinct approaches—directive, analytic, conceptual, and behavioral—that leaders can employ to adapt decision-making processes to varying business contexts, emphasising flexibility and situational awareness. This connects to 10 Management Principles to Copy from Top 10% Teams, which shares ten essential principles designed to improve team morale, establish trust and efficiency, and streamline goals whilst boosting confidence among team members.

Engineering strategy and organisational alignment receive detailed attention. Designing an Engineering Strategy focuses on understanding and addressing high-stake business problems through structured approaches, defining strategy as a coherent set of analyses and actions that align engineering efforts with business challenges through diagnostic processes, guiding policies, and coherent actions.

Team wellbeing and burnout prevention emerge as critical leadership considerations. 9 Management Habits Quietly Burning Out Your Best Engineers identifies key habits that erode motivation within engineering teams, including equating busyness with productivity, micromanagement, and failing to set boundaries, whilst providing actionable guidance to foster healthier work environments and prevent engineer burnout.

Documentation practices and startup leadership round out core themes. Docs Like Code in Very Basic Terms introduces 'docs as code' concepts for beginners without developer backgrounds, explaining benefits such as improved collaboration with development teams and cost efficiencies whilst acknowledging the learning curve and technical skill requirements. Leadership Tips for Startup Founders provides comprehensive guidance tailored to startup founders' unique challenges, emphasising essential skills for building strong teams, fostering innovation, and developing resilience necessary for navigating startup leadership complexities.

Industry analysis and resource compilation provide broader context. In 2025, venture capital can't pretend everything is fine any more examines significant challenges facing the venture capital industry, including the burden of naive investments, inflated startup valuations, and reliance on AI prospects like OpenAI as potential salvation amidst systemic issues. The Book Of Secret Knowledge compiles curated collections of daily-use technical resources including cheatsheets, tools, one-liners, and manuals primarily for sysadmins, DevOps engineers, pentesters, and security researchers.

As always, the Quantum Fax Machine Propellor Hat Key will guide your browsing. Enjoy!

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Originally published on quantumfaxmachine.com and cross-posted on Medium.

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