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About the Book
Engineering Culture is a practical guide for CTOs and engineering managers who want to stop firefighting and start scaling. Instead of relying on fuzzy, feel-good values or crowd-sourced wish lists, this book offers a bold idea: culture should be built top-down—as a management tool. Drawing on 30 years of leadership experience and years of CTO coaching, Stephan Schmidt shows how to define, roll out, and enforce an engineering culture that actually works. One that reduces cognitive load, creates alignment, and builds “automatic management” systems—so you can focus on what really matters. This is not culture for culture’s sake. It’s the culture you deserve.
About the Author
Stephan Schmidt launched his tech career as a self-taught coder, mastering the art of programming as a kid in a department store back in 1981 with ambitions of creating video games. His passion for technology led him to university, where he delved into computer science, specializing in distributed systems and artificial intelligence, while also exploring the realms of philosophy. With the dawn of the internet era in Germany during the 1990s, Stephan became a pioneering coder and engineering manager for several startups.His journey in the tech world expanded as he founded a venture capital-funded startup and tackled architecture, processes, and growth challenges in various fast-growing VC-backed companies.
His roles have included engineering manager at ImmoScout24 and CTO of an eBay Inc. subsidiary. Following the successful sale of his wife’s startup, the couple relocated to the seaside, where Stephan embraced his role as a CTO coach, guiding technology leaders through the intricacies of their evolving roles.