Leading software teams with context, not control
Leading software teams with context, not control
Effective practices for creating alignment and engagement within software teams
About the Book
As a software engineering leader, the scope of your role is extensive. You have many competing responsibilities and priorities that need to be balanced to ensure you and your team are as effective as possible. These can include providing architectural direction, driving peer to peer collaboration, ensuring cross-team alignment, motivating teams with purpose, supporting team members' career progression, or perhaps helping remove blockers and impediments. All of these efforts work to create a specific culture within a software team that aims to improve effectiveness, engagement, and retention.
This book is for software engineering leaders who are responsible for leading teams. It also dives into the unique complexity and challenges that comes with leading, aligning and supporting multiple software teams. This book aspires to provide you with helpful and reusable approaches that can be leveraged to bring about a greater level of efficiency into your role as a leader. There are many books written around leading teams or leading people, this book takes a lens of what specific practices and initiatives you should be investing your time into when leading software engineering teams.
What you will learn:
- How to baseline a software team
- How to develop a software engineering roadmap
- Defining effective software engineering metrics
- Prioritizing technical uplift work
- Running effective 1:on:1s
- Implementing a software team structure that works
- Defining a career pathway framework for software teams
- Running engaging team meetings
- Building a culture of learning
- Crafting an experimentation culture
- How to run software engineering working groups
- Also check out the ToC below for additional learning topics...
The book has been inspired by the many people I have worked with, learnings from practices I have implemented, as well as books and blogs I have read over the years. I see this is a book that leads itself to many iterations and should evolve as I discover new practices and techniques that help me improve the way I lead software teams. Regardless of the size of your software team, if you find yourself needing to better balance both the technical and people aspects of leading teams, or guidance on initiatives you could be running to improve team alignment, effectiveness and engagement then this book is written for you.
About the Author
Table of Contents
- Why this book was written
- About the Author
- Terminology within the book
-
Part 1: Creating alignment
- 1. Baselining a software team
- 2. Defining a software team target state
- 3. The software engineering roadmaps
- 4. Effective software team metrics
- 5. Importance of collaborating on team goals
- 6. Balancing reactive versus strategic work
- 7. Balancing technical uplift with product development
- 8. Introducing a new technology
- 9. Platform SLAs
-
Part 2: Leading teams
- 10. Effective 1:on:1s
- 11. Continuous performance feedback
- 12. Impactful position descriptions
- 13. Candidate centric interviews
- 14. Onboarding effectively
- 15. Software team structures
- 16. Career pathway framework for software teams
-
Part 3: Uplifting team culture
- 17. Context over control
- 18. Engaging team meetings
- 19. Team health checks
- 20. Building a culture of learning
- 21. Crafting an experimentation culture
- 22. Software engineering working groups
- 23. Running a software team hack day
- Final words
- Notes
Authors have earned$9,664,887writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
The Leanpub 45-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 45 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers), EPUB (for phones and tablets) and MOBI (for Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
- #1
El Manual del Manager
Keyvan Akbary, Félix López, and Álvaro Salazar¿Has deseado alguna vez el haber tenido una buena introducción al rol del Engineering Manager? En este libro aprenderás lo necesario para ejercer el rol de una manera efectiva: Expectativas y Responsabilidades del Rol, 1-1s, Ayudar a Crecer, Objetivos, Planes de Carrera, Cultura, Feedback, Contratación, Cultura de Producto y mucho más.
- #2
Functional Design and Architecture
Alexander GraninSoftware Design in Functional Programming, Design Patterns and Practices, Methodologies and Application Architectures. How to build real software in Haskell with less efforts and low risks. The first complete source of knowledge.
- #3
Ansible for Kubernetes
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a powerful infrastructure automation tool. Kubernetes is a powerful application deployment platform. Learn how to use these tools to automate massively-scalable, highly-available infrastructure.
- #4
CCIE Service Provider Version 4 Written and Lab Exam Comprehensive Guide
Nicholas RussoThe service provider landscape has changed rapidly over the past several years. Networking vendors are continuing to propose new standards, techniques, and procedures for overcoming new challenges while concurrently reducing costs and delivering new services. Cisco has recently updated the CCIE Service Provider track to reflect these changes; this book represents the author's personal journey in achieving that certification.
- #5
CCIE SP v4.1 - Workbook
Łukasz Bromirski, Piotr Jablonski, and Nicholas RussoAre you striving to prepare to and pass CCIE SP lab exam? Take the opportunity and get this workbook! With the attached initial cfg files you will prepare yourself for the CCIE SP exam as well as learn SP technologies applicable to all kinds of today modern networks! This workbook covers blueprint topics and provides challenging examples.
- #6
Practical FP in Scala: A hands-on approach
Gabriel VolpeA practical book aimed for those familiar with functional programming in Scala who are yet not confident about architecting an application from scratch.
Together, we will develop a purely functional application using the best libraries in the Cats ecosystem, while learning about design patterns and best practices.
- #7
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
- #8
C++ Best Practices
Jason TurnerLevel up your C++, get the tools working for you, eliminate common problems, and move on to more exciting things!
- #9
Tame your Work Flow
Steve Tendon and Daniel DoironDo you need a high performance enterprise governance approach improving management, execution and delivery while dealing with multiple projects/products, events, stakeholders and teams? Giving you better bottom line results, faster time to market, less work, better predictability, happier employees, and delighted clients? Then learn about TameFlow!
- #10
R Programming for Data Science
Roger D. PengThis book brings the fundamentals of R programming to you, using the same material developed as part of the industry-leading Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization. The skills taught in this book will lay the foundation for you to begin your journey learning data science. Printed copies of this book are available through Lulu.
Top Bundles
- #1
Quality Software
11 Books
The Quality Software Bundle is for managers, would-be managers, and any of us who find themselves being managed and confused. This comprehensive bundle covers the entire span of software development approaches, from hacking through waterfall, cascade, prototyping, Iterative enhancement, reusable code, off-the-shelf, to Agile teams. The bundle... - #2
The Node.js Bundle
3 Books
This bundle combines three bestselling Leanpub Node.js books into a package that gives you everything you need to get started with developing Node.js applications at an unbeatable price. - #3
The Tester's Library
8 Books
The Tester's Library consists of eight five-star books that every software tester should read and re-read. As bound books, this collection would cost over $200. Even as e-books, their price would exceed $80, but in this bundle, their cost is only $49.99. Here are the books, and why they should be in your library: Perfect Software and Other... - #4
agile
11 Books
In this bundle, you will find 10 different agile books. They are about different aspects of being agile. - finding a job - doing coding dojo's - Retrospectives - Personal kanban - a non-typical coaching book and even a book that gives you an insight in the lives of some agile people. - #5
WTFlop 6M + HU - Beta Bundle
6 Books
- #6
Growing Agile: Coach's Guide Series
4 Books
This bundle provides a collection of training and workshop plans for a variety of agile topics. The series is aimed at agile coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters who often find themselves needing to help teams understand agile concepts. Each book in the series provides the plans, slides, handouts and activity instructions to run a number of... - #7
Marionette.js A to Z
3 Books
Marionette.js has become a popular Backbone-based javascript library, because it helps you avoid boiler-plate code and focus on what makes your app special. But how do you get started?Whether you want to finally get started with dynamic client-side programming (like one reader did), or are an experienced front-end dev who has inherited a... - #8
Complete Scala Bundle
3 Books
Scala is a general-purpose programming language and it's getting extremely popular these days. Some say that learning Scala could be a challenging task. My experience, however, suggests that this is actually a myth that has very little to do with reality. With the right approach, learning Scala can be easy, fun and rewarding.The first book from... - #9
Build A Better Backbone App
3 Books
The best way to learn new development skills is through experience, but that takes time you don't have.Get the best of both worlds with this bundle: you'll learn how to produce modern web applications by learning from experienced developers like Derick Bailey and David Sulc. BackboneJS is one of the favorite tools on the web today, but it... - #10
People Skills—Soft but Difficult
7 Books
Perhaps you've been told that "lack of people skills" has been holding you back. No wonder: you may have had hundreds of hours of technical training, but little or no "people skills" guidance.You've heard it said that people skills are "soft," whereas technical skills are "hard." For you, though, technical skills are "easy," but people skills...
