February 2026
Intermediate to advanced
268 pages
7h 34m
English
Content preview from The Effective Software Engineer
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 4. Collaboration and Cross-Functional Influence
No matter how technically skilled you are, your effectiveness is limited if you can’t work well with others. Software is a team sport. As an IC, especially at senior levels, you often need to influence decisions without having formal authority. This chapter covers how to collaborate with key roles (PMs, designers, managers) and how to gain influence across teams.
Working Effectively with Product and Design
Great products emerge from close collaboration between engineering, product management, and design. Cross-functional collaboration with product managers (who own product strategy and roadmap) and designers (who own user experience and interface) is particularly critical for effective engineers. Yet sometimes engineers and PMs/designers can feel at odds—engineering wanting simplicity/tech purity, PMs/design wanting more features or a pixel-perfect UI. Effective engineers bridge that gap. To do so, and to foster a strong partnership, effective engineers adopt several key practices:
- Understand the “why” behind requirements.
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Don’t just take a task from your ticket tracker and execute blindly. Ask your product manager what user problem a feature is solving, or what metric it aims to move. This context lets you make smart trade-offs during development. For example, if you know a feature is an experiment to see if engagement increases, you might build it in a scrappy way to test quickly (knowing it’ll be thrown out if it ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.