Book Recommendations for Engineering Leaders
Titles That Inspired the Best Articles on Practical Engineering Management
As I write this article, we’re slowly approaching the end of the year. For many, it’s a hectic season—chasing quarterly or yearly goals, managing peak service usage, or preparing for upcoming code freezes ahead of the holiday period.
Whether you’re pushing yourself and your team to the limits or winding down before the holidays, December is a great time for a small gesture of appreciation to strengthen your relationship with your team.
To that end, I’m sharing my top 10 book recommendations for you and your team. This list isn’t the usual selection of books for software engineers. While I’ve enjoyed titles like Building Micro-Frontends by Luca Mezzalira, Effective Java by Joshua Bloch, Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans, or Clean Code by Robert C. Martin, I recommend those for specific cases, depending on an engineer’s seniority or focus area.
Here, I’ve curated books that, rather than deepening technical craft, will broaden perspectives on software engineering and leadership.
The Power of Book Gifting
Organizations have varied spending policies. Some provide dedicated L&D budgets for employees to use as they wish, others recommend specific materials or training programs, and some are so tight with budgets that extra spending isn’t an option.
Regardless of the situation, my personal approach is this: I don’t mind spending a few bucks out of pocket for a meaningful gesture. When I led smaller teams, buying a $10–$50 book for each person was a no-brainer. For larger teams, I believe leaders have the credibility and influence to secure this budget within the organization.
When Do I Gift Books?
At work, I often gift books in the following scenarios:
A gesture of appreciation, especially during the holiday season: This is my way of telling teammates I value our collaboration. While most companies send holiday boxes from HR, I prefer a more personal touch. A gift from me to them—not just employer to employee.
Welcome gift: When creating new structures or welcoming a new teammate, I often give a book that reflects the culture, processes, and mindset I want to promote. Depending on the situation and team/company maturity, there were different titles. But the ones that I shared the most often were "Accelerate" (Gene Kim), to show what we are aiming for as engineering team(s), or "Inspired" (Marty Cagan) to present what the role of engineering teams and why we do what we do.
"You have to read this!" or "Here’s how we’ll align.": When leading a transformational project or process, I provide books to align everyone on the foundational ideas. It's especially useful when the company misses some core competencies and/or my background is insufficient. In my experience, I shared books, like: "Good Strategy / Bad Strategy" (Richard Rumelt) to build long-term planning practices, "Building Micro-Frontends" (Luca Mezzalira) or "Domain-Driven Design" (Eric Evans) to build a better understanding between business and technology, and how to reflect it in complex projects.
Is this approach naive? Perhaps.
I know some people might never read the books or interpret them differently than I do. But my belief is this: My success as a leader depends on the knowledge and success of my team. Spending a fraction of my yearly salary to invest in them or align us is well worth it.
And even if they don’t read it, I hope they remember the gesture. As Kim Scott wrote in Radical Candor: Care personally, challenge directly. Any idea that strengthens personal relationships is worth exploring.
Book Recommendations for Engineering Leaders
Here are my top 10 recommendations, which I highly recommend all engineering leaders read. In most cases, I support the idea of giving these titles to your most senior teammates to develop their "T-Shape" skillset.
Each of these books was highly influential on the content I published on Practical Engineering Management. The concepts and stories described there also drive my day-to-day work as an engineering leader, sometimes even for over a decade.
DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim
When I began my career over a decade ago, “DevOps” and “DevOps Culture” were buzzwords, much like “Machine Learning” or “Artificial Intelligence” are today.
While many organizations now have dedicated DevOps engineers and embrace cross-functional teams, the deeper understanding of DevOps Culture—streamlining workflows, delivering value rapidly, and gathering feedback early—is often missing.
If your team still operates with “code freezes,” big-bang monthly deployments, or a centrally managed QA testing team, this book can be an eye-opener. It offers a clear picture of what engineering teams should aim for and provides practical strategies for evolving.
For more, I recommend reading my articles inspired by the book:
DevOps Culture Checklist: Includes a template to assess your team’s DevOps maturity.
The Three Ways: Flow, Feedback, and Continuous Learning: Core principles of DevOps culture.
Ten Types of Software Engineering Waste: A guide to streamlining software delivery processes.
Wiring the Winning Organization by Gene Kim
While DevOps Handbook focuses on transforming the tech stack and engineering teams, Wiring the Winning Organization tackles company-wide transformation.
This is the best book I’ve read in 2024.
Here's the thing. Most of us work in a company that is far from perfect. "We" deliver once a month, "others" deliver daily. "We" have a monolithic tech stack and siloed teams, and "others" have distributed architecture and cross-functional teams. "We" are blind to some events and incidents, and "others" have fully-fledged telemetry, SLAs, and alerting.
In Wiring the Winning Organization, Gene Kim provides tools and techniques to transform a regular company into a winning organization through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification. It’s not just for CTOs or senior leadership—it’s packed with actionable insights for engineering leaders at all levels.
If you’re interested in practical applications of these ideas, check out my series:
Inspired and Empowered by Marty Cagan
If I can pick a single author who inspired me to write this newsletter, this would be Marty Cagan with his two books: "Inspired" and "Empowered".
The role of technology is to solve customers' problems is probably the most often used sentence in my writings.
Software engineering teams are critical for the existence of tech organizations. But if developers are only "factory workers" who produce code or even particular features, as requested by Product Managers, the company only uses a fraction of the available potential.
What "Inspired" and "Empowered" teach us is that the engineering team doesn't work for the product. It is a product team, along with product managers and UI/UX designers. This fundamental idea can be a critical factor for to company’s success.
Here's one of my pieces inspired by Cagan's books: Build a team of missionaries, not mercenaries
Transformed by Marty Cagan
Marty Cagan’s newest book, Transformed (2024), builds on Inspired and Empowered. While the previous books were mostly about what is the role of engineering in the product organization, "Transformed" says how to transform our organization into high-performing team. The book centers on three key transformations:
Changing how products are built,
Changing how problems are solved, and
Changing how decisions are made about which problems to solve.
This aligns beautifully with Gene Kim’s Wiring the Winning Organization and can complement any large-scale transformation plan.
For a detailed breakdown, explore my series:
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Feedback from your team(s) is probably one of the most important sources of information in your work. Your teammates are not only your direct reports. They can also be your personal advisors.
Yet, creating an environment where people are not afraid to share their personal opinions with you does not come naturally.
I wrote multiple hints about how to build such a feedback culture in the article Mastering the Feedback. Kim Scott's Radical Candor can be a great extension to that.
Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
When you lead talented engineers, you quickly realize they often know more than you about certain aspects of the work. This means that telling them precisely what they should do is probably the least effective way of working with such talented people.
There are a few other approaches:
Leading through expectations (expectations management)
Leading through giving them problems to solve, not orders to execute
Leading through purpose ("the role of engineering is to solve customers' problems")
Leading through principles (read here: Principles - Guidelines for Your Team).
Ray Dalio's Principles is one such book that can inspire you to manage talented individuals through a set of high-level rules and principles that set some boundaries but are open to interpretation.
Are Your Lights On? by Don Gause and Gerald Weinberg
This book emphasizes the importance of carefully defining the problem before rushing into solutions. It challenges readers to think critically, question assumptions, and consider multiple perspectives.
After reading many positive reviews, I tried codifying the content into a framework that I could use in my daily work, and boom, it was a perfect hit.
"Are Your Lights On" led me to create a Problem-Solving Framework that can be applied to most of the technical challenges ahead of us. But not only that - I also try to use it when solving people-related problems, for example: How to Work with Teammates Resistant to Change
Working Backwards by Bill Carr and Colin Bryar
While M. Cagan's "Transformed" and G. Kim's "Wiring the Winning Organization" is about what are the principles of the successful transformation of an organization, "Working Backwards" shows how such change can be led in practice (Gene Kim's book uses some of Amazon's cases in his book as well).
Many years ago, Amazon faced challenges similar to ours: monolithic systems, siloed teams, instability, overcomplicated management structures, and problems with delivering even the simplest changes to production.
"Working Backwards" walks us through their critical changes to team structures (Two Pizza Teams and Single-Threaded Leadership), distributed software architecture, approach to hiring (Bar Raiser), or how to define the product to build (Working Backwards).
Here's one of my articles inspired by the book Working Backwards: Creating Effective PR/FAQ Documents.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Even though our job title often has "engineering" or "technology" in its name, as leaders, we work with people in the first place. It has some implications, like - not all problems can be reduced to logical or mathematical problems.
In our work, we often deal with assumptions, cognitive biases, and emotions. Many of these cannot be switched off—they are rooted in our brains.
But what we can do is become more aware of these internal mechanisms and biases that make us who we are. And for that, there is nothing better than the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate who passed away this year.
While the lecture is not the easiest to read, it's worth every minute of your time and will surely make you a better people leader.
If you want to sample some of the content, see Cognitive Biases for Engineering Leaders.
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
Richard Rumelt's "Good Strategy / Bad Strategy" is one of my favorite books. While it's focused on building strategies for entire organizations and doesn't discuss software engineering, it can be fully applied to our work.
Bad leaders execute, Good leaders improve, and Great leaders compound. There is no better book to inspire you about compounding your team's efforts.
In my writings, I tried to translate Rumelt's wisdom into software engineering leadership in a few of the articles:
But if you want to understand the entire background that led me to create this content, you should definitely read "Good Strategy / Bad Strategy." For a long time, this was the number-one book I gave to the most senior people in my teams.
Extra: Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet
While I have read all of the books I recommended above, "Turn the Ship Around" is still on my to-read shelf. I don't know what to expect from it, but Practical Engineering Management subscribers highly recommend it.
I hope that in the near future, I will share some article(s) inspired by it, but in the meantime, I invite you to check it on your own. So many engineering leaders have already recommended it, and it cannot be wrong! 😊
You can check our chat for other recommendations from PEM’s readers:
Final Words
Books are not just gifts—they’re investments in your team’s growth, alignment, and success.
Whether they’re read immediately or serve as a reminder of your care and leadership, the gesture matters.
I hope this list inspires you to pick a title or two for yourself or your team and create a lasting impact.
Great list Mirek, thank you :)
I only read Cagan's latest book, do you think it's worth going backward for the other 2?
I also highly recommend "Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager" by James Stanier :)