The Engineering Executive's Primer

Preface

This is the book that I wish I’d read before starting my first Engineering executive role, and that I would have reread before starting my second executive role—to reflect on how my beliefs had evolved after doing this expansive, complex work. I hope reading this book serves you well and, more importantly, that it helps you form your own opinions rather than convinces you to take on mine.

My favorite chapter in this book is the third, which discusses creating an Engineering strategy. I also wrote a chapter about Engineering strategy in my last book, Staff Engineer. It’s interesting how different those two chapters are, despite the fact that I wrote both of them, and only three years apart. At first, I wanted to believe this difference reflected some kind of deep insight I’d acquired between writing the two books, but the real difference is more fundamental: being an Engineering executive is a meaningfully different job, and it’s forced me to adopt a different perspective than my previous roles as an engineer and engineering manager.

As an Engineering executive, you will deal with many familiar problems but will have new tools to solve them. For example, the hardest part of developing an Engineering strategy in my previous roles was usually building consensus around the solution. As an executive, the hardest part is building conviction that your strategy is right for your company. There are also new problems that you’ve probably not spent time with before, if you’re new ...