Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook
$9.99
Minimum price
$19.99
Suggested price

Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook

Your guide to building a successful, high-performing tech department. For CTOs and Engineering Managers.

About the Book

At its core, "Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook" is your guide to building a successful, high-performing tech department. Whether you're a seasoned CTO, engineering manager or aspiring to a tech leadership position, these recipes will provide the tools and insights you need to lead with confidence and effectiveness.

You'll learn how to design and implement effective strategies for tech departments to meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security goals. Each recipe includes one or two problem statements, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for solving them, as well as examples using real-life scenarios, team dynamics, and organizational structures.

You'll also receive implementation guidelines, and a discussion of the pros, cons, and trade-offs that come with each solution.

  • Learn how to establish a purpose-driven tech department for success
  • Discover how to set Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for focus
  • Implement an Agile Roadmap for effective planning
  • Make meetings productive and ensure things get done
  • Understand how to structure teams within your department for optimal performance
  • Learn how to deal with single points of failure and ban acronyms
  • Master the art of announcing difficult decisions and delivering end-to-end
  • Understand how to optimize onboarding, deal with underperformance, and make remote teams work
  • Learn the importance of Product Owners, customer feedback, and informed decision-making through analytics and metrics
  • Discover how to measure the performance of your teams, integrate security into your development cycle, and deal with tech risk and tech debt
  • Learn how to ensure your cloud computing costs don't spiral out of control and how to ensure teams perform well in case of incidents
  • … and many more actionable recipes
  • Share this book

  • Categories

    • Leadership
    • Business and IT Alignment
    • Agile Enterprise
  • Feedback

    Email the Author(s)

About the Author

Raphael A. Bauer
Raphael A. Bauer

Raphael A. Bauer is a software engineer by profession and has held engineering leadership positions at technology companies such as Semrush, Zalando and Springer. These days, he's mostly working as an Interim CTO. "Spicy: The Tech Leadership Cookbook" is based on his experiences as Engineering Leader and Interim CTO.

Table of Contents

  • About this book
  • General Organization of the Tech Department
    • Purpose Is the Basis for Success
    • Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for Focus
    • An Agile Roadmap for Planning
    • Multi-Focus Is Deadly for Teams
    • How to Make Meetings Productive and Get Things Done
    • Essential Meetings for Your Department
    • How to Structure Teams in Your Department
    • Organizational Chart for Clarity
    • How to Organize the Documentation of Your Department
    • How to Deal with Single Points of Failure
    • Ban Acronyms
    • Announcing Difficult Decisions
    • Always Deliver End to End
    • Clear Ownership for Teams
  • Culture
    • How Your Department Benefits From Retrospectives
    • Tolerating Failure is the Prerequisite for Innovation
    • How Post-Mortems Help to Improve
    • Pre-Mortems for Project Success
    • Checklists - For Everything
    • Celebrate Success
    • Traits of High-Performance Teams
    • How to Deal with Toxic Team Members
  • People (HR)
    • Optimize Onboarding
    • What to Do When Employees Leave
    • Sourcing Employees is Your Responsibility
    • How to Establish Career Ladders
    • Hiring the Best People Consistently with a Structured Hiring Process
    • How to Get Feedback From Teams Before Problems Pile Up
    • Team Maturity Is a Crucial Concept for Successful Team Formation
    • How to Identify Underperformers
    • How to Deal with Underperformance
    • How to Make Remote Teams Work
    • How the Pomodoro Approach Can Help to Foster a Remote Team
  • Product Management
    • Product Owners - Not Project Managers
    • Get Feedback Quickly from Customers
    • A Roadmap is NOT a Wish List
    • Analytics and Metrics For Informed Decisions
    • Acceptance Criteria to Define When a Feature Is Finished
    • Use Internship Programs to Connect Engineers with Users
    • Follow-up on Customers Quitting Your Software
    • How to Run Your Product Development Teams
    • How to Visualize What’s Going on in Your Teams And Hold Everyone Accountable
  • Engineering
    • How to Measure the Performance of your Teams
    • A Tech Radar Guides Your Engineers
    • True Continuous Deployment Boosts Productivity
    • Maintain an Overview of Your Services and Systems
    • Ownership for Services and Systems is Essential
    • How to Integrate Security Into Your Development Cycle
    • How to Unblock Engineering Teams That Are Waiting for Other Teams
    • How to Deal with Tech Risk and Tech Debt
    • Outdated Systems and Libraries: A Ticking Time Bomb
    • How to do Pull Request Reviews
    • How to Make Sure Software Works and Can Be Developed Further
    • How to Make Sure Your Cloud Computing Costs Don’t Kill You
    • How Teams Perform Well In Case of Incidents

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $13 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

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) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and 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

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub