There’s a particular type of content paralysis that hits engineering managers who start taking their growth seriously.
You open a resource list. 200 items. Newsletters, books, YouTube channels, podcasts. You subscribe to six things at once. Your inbox fills up. You skim everything and read nothing. Three weeks later, you quietly unsubscribe from all of it.
This post is meant to help you avoid that.
My suggestion before you go further: pick one person from this list. Follow them for two weeks. Decide if their thinking is useful to you. If yes, keep going. If not, try someone else. The worst thing you can do is subscribe to everyone and end up reading no one.
Everything here has either shaped how I think about engineering leadership or is something I actively use. I’ve left out plenty of good stuff - intentionally. This isn’t a “comprehensive database.” It’s what I’d actually recommend to someone I was mentoring.
📚 Books That Changed How I Manage
There are hundreds of books on leadership, management, and software engineering. Most of them overlap enough that you could read three and cover the ideas in fifty. I’ve read a lot of them.
These six made a real dent.
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk - Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish
I know what you’re thinking.
I read this book before I had children. A colleague mentioned it in passing and I picked it up skeptically. What I found was one of the clearest books on human communication I’ve ever read - and I mean human communication with adults, colleagues, and direct reports.
The title is not intuitive for engineering managers, and that’s exactly why most miss it. If you strip away the parenting context, what you’re left with is a precise breakdown of why people don’t feel heard, why feedback backfires, and how to get someone to actually change their behavior versus just agree with you in the moment. Parents who’ve read it will recognize it immediately. Everyone else should just start from page one.
The Goal and The Goal II (It’s Not Luck) - Eliyahu M. Goldratt
This is my personal bible for project management.
Goldratt writes in novel form, which sounds like a strange choice for a management book - until you realize you’ve read 300 pages without noticing. The Goal introduces the Theory of Constraints: the idea that every system has one bottleneck, and optimizing anything other than that bottleneck is wasted effort. It’s Not Luck goes deeper into the thinking tools.
The Critical Chain methodology I use for managing scope, risk, and delivery timelines comes directly from this work. If you manage complex projects with uncertain scope and real deadlines - which is most software development - there’s no more important book in your leadership life.
Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink
One of the most readable leadership books out there. Willink is a former Navy SEAL, and the stories are gripping - but the core idea is simple and uncomfortable: you are responsible for everything that happens under your leadership. Not some of it. All of it. No excuses, no blame, no “the product team didn’t deliver the requirements.”
If you’re the kind of leader who looks for what went wrong externally before looking internally, this book will challenge you. The lessons apply whether you’re leading a special operations mission or a team of backend engineers missing a deadline.
Radical Candor - Kim Scott
It’s all about the feedback. The central idea here is a 2x2 matrix: one axis is how much you care about the person, the other is how directly you challenge them. Most managers cluster in one of three bad quadrants - being nice but vague (ruinous empathy), being harsh without caring (obnoxious aggression), or just avoiding the conversation entirely (manipulative insincerity). Radical candor sits at the intersection of caring personally and challenging directly.
The book is useful because it gives language to something most managers feel but can’t articulate: why giving genuine feedback is hard, and what gets in the way. It’s also honest about the fact that being radically candid is uncomfortable. Scott doesn’t promise it gets easier - she explains why it’s worth it anyway.
Atomic Habits - James Clear
My bible for how I actually operate day-to-day.
Every framework and workflow I use - how I structure my week, how I build consistent habits around learning and reflection, how I think about incremental improvement on my team - has roots in this book. Clear’s core argument is that outcomes are a lagging measure of habits, and that tiny consistent behaviors compound into significant results over time.
Engineering managers who struggle with consistency, with following through on the changes they want to make, or with building sustainable routines will find this more practically useful than most leadership books.
Accelerate - Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim
This one is backed by research, which already makes it unusual in a field full of anecdote-dressed-as-wisdom.
Accelerate is the result of years of State of DevOps research - studying what actually differentiates high-performing engineering teams from average ones. The DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, time to restore service) come from this work. If you’ve ever been in a room where someone asks “how do we measure engineering performance” and everyone looks at each other awkwardly, this book gives you defensible answers.
Worth reading once carefully and then keeping as a reference.
🗺️ Learning Paths
Below I’ve organized content by theme - my own articles and external resources I’ve found genuinely useful. The goal isn’t to read everything in a category at once. Pick the topic that’s most relevant to your current problem and go from there.
Delivery
How to Finish Engineering Projects Early Without Added Stress
Why Your Most Expensive Engineers Should Work On Your “Simple” Problems
Why 1% of your work creates 50% of the results (and how to find it)
People Growth
AI
Why complexity is your superpower (and 6 AI rituals to prove it)
AI for Engineering Leaders: A Practical Playbook From Leading 20+ Engineers
📬 Newsletters Worth Following
A word of warning before this section: subscribe to one, maybe two. Read them consistently for a month before adding another. Most of the value comes from building the habit of reading and thinking, not from volume.
These are the newsletters that I personally follow and that have shaped how I think. I don’t curate lists of things I haven’t read - there’s too much of that already on the internet.
💬 A Note on Credit
This post was directly inspired by Gregor Ojstersek’s 200+ Resources to Become a Great Engineering Leader in 2026. If you haven’t seen it, go look at it - there are many excellent resources there that I didn’t include here because they’re already covered well by Gregor. My list is meant to be complementary, not a replacement.
Gregor’s newsletter, Engineering Leadership, is also worth subscribing to.
How to Actually Learn From This
The pattern that works, in my experience, is simple and boring:
One resource at a time. Apply what you learn before moving to the next one.
Read Atomic Habits, implement one thing from it, see what happens. Follow one newsletter for a month, notice whether your thinking changes. Apply the idea from Extreme Ownership to a real situation this week, not in theory.
The trap is treating learning as consumption. You’ve “read” 50 leadership books, which means you’ve moved text through your eyes. That’s different from having changed how you lead.
Pick one thing from this list. Do something with it. Then come back.
The parenting book was a new one for me! I was just looking for the next thing to read :) Thank you.
And I appreciate highlighting some of my work on your list!
Amazing list of resources these! Thanks Karol! The list of newsletters is long! May I suggest - how about highlighting one newsletter recommendation with each of your posts that is closely tied to the content you are writing in the post? That way, the reader can also get a glimpse into what to expect in the promoted newsletter?