Be Better Engineering Leader With Practical Engineering Management
A few weeks ago, I announced that I was working on a 30-day course for software engineering leaders—Better Engineering Leader. Starting very soon, on Monday, October 21st, everyone who signed up will receive the first day's lesson directly in their inbox. Over the next 30 consecutive workdays (Monday to Friday), I’ll send an email focused on one of the three essential pillars of software engineering leadership: People, Technology, and Product.
You won’t be automatically enrolled in this course even if you’re already subscribed to Practical Engineering Management. I respect your inbox and won’t send daily messages unless you intentionally opt-in. Here are all the details on how you can join (the course will be distributed on two platforms: Substack and LinkedIn): Be a Better Engineering Leader Ahead of 2025.
Here, I want to provide more context on why I’m launching this initiative.
Practical Engineering Management
I launched Practical Engineering Management to help first-level engineering leaders be more impactful in their work. When I was a Tech Lead and later an Engineering Manager, I didn’t have trouble finding inspirational materials on empowering people, building strategies, setting goals, and being a good leader overall.
However, when I returned to my day-to-day job after reading something inspiring, it wasn’t always obvious HOW to implement those ideas. For example, how to build an empowered engineering team with a product mindset, implement Toyota’s TPS system in software development, or develop an engineering strategy in Richard Rumelt’s style.
This is why I started Practical Engineering Management: to share practical examples and my experiences applying these ideas in a typical engineering manager’s work. I want to show that these practices aren’t exclusive to Fortune 500 tech companies—any engineering leader can apply them in startups, scale-ups, or larger organizations.
PEM's Content
Over the past two years, I’ve written nearly 200 articles, 90 of which are available to subscribers. I maintain a strict content moderation routine, regularly refining my articles or removing those that no longer meet my quality standards.
Yet, even with 90 articles, each taking about 10–20 minutes to read, that could easily translate into several days of nonstop reading. It’s enough content to fill a book (which maybe I’ll write one day if that's something you’d like - please let me know 😊!).
I know that as an engineering leader, you don’t have time to read all of that. You must act fast, be hands-on, manage people, collaborate with product teams, write, and review code. The last thing you need to do is dig through multiple pages of archives from one of the engineering leadership newsletters.
That’s why, one day, I sat down, wrote all of my content in Post-its, and tried to organize it.
It was satisfying to see themes emerge, such as Engineering Strategy, Leading Change, Leadership Styles, and DevOps culture. This also helped me identify gaps, like missing insights on career progression, expectations management, or remote work environments - just a few of my recent posts.
But while this clarified the roadmap for future content, it still didn’t solve the problem of how to make it all more accessible.
Intro to Engineering Leadership
One attempt to simplify things was to distill content for those recently promoted to engineering leadership roles.
I understand that when you're just starting out, you don’t need to dive into every nuance at once—expectations management, strategic planning, transforming into a DevOps culture, building high-performing teams, or making them data-driven.
For early-stage leaders, I’ve been running the Practical Engineering Management Blog, where the content is not as detailed as my newsletter but serves as a perfect introduction to leadership topics.
If you think this would be a good place for you to start, I recommend checking out one of the most popular articles: New to Engineering Leadership? Let Me Help.
Be a Better Engineering Leader
While the Engineering Leadership 101 content was useful, I found it too general for people who have been engineering leaders for some time. That led me back to my original whiteboard with articles and categories.
This time, my goal was clear: I wanted to guide my readers through the content in a structured, simplified way. I also realized that engineering leaders should possess three core categories of competencies: People, Technology, and Product.
In our work, we must improve in each of these areas simultaneously. This led to the final structure—a chronological course that touches on each of these pillars in turn.
This is what "Better Engineering Leader" is about.
I want to show you, step by step, how complex, engaging, and rewarding your work can be, especially when you connect the worlds of people management, software engineering, and building products that customers love.
I truly believe that people like you can make the world a better place. As engineering leaders, we are fortunate to be part of the creative process, and the results of our work can literally touch millions of lives.
With this course, I want to help you maximize your impact. If even one of these lessons helps you achieve that, I’ll be thrilled. We live in a dynamic system, and, according to chaos theory, the butterfly effect is real. If so, I want to help great ideas happen through empowered engineering leadership. 🚀
I want to help you become a Better Engineering Leader right before the year 2025.
See you on Monday, October 21st.
Mirek
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Signed up for this! Looking forward to the email course👍