The Engineering Executive’s Primer

As an engineering manager, you almost always have someone in your company to turn to for advice: a peer on another team, your manager, or even the head of engineering. But who do you turn to if you’re the head of engineering? Engineering executives have a challenging learning curve, and many folks excitedly start their first executive role only to leave frustrated within the first 18 months.

In this book, author Will Larson shows you ways to obtain your first executive job and quickly ramp up to meet the challenges you may not have encountered in non-executive roles: measuring engineering for both engineers and the CEO, company-scoped headcount planning, communicating successfully across a growing organization, and figuring out what people actually mean when they keep asking for a “technology strategy.”

This book explains how to:

• Get an engineering executive job, negotiate the contract, and onboard at your new company
• Run an engineering planning process and communicate effectively with the organization
• Direct the core meetings necessary to operate an effective engineering organization
• Hire, onboard, and run performance management
• Manage yourself and remain effective through many challenges
• Leave the job when the time is right
• Will Larson was the chief technology officer at Calm and the author of An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer. He’s also a prolific writer on his blog, Irrational Exuberance.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Getting the Job

Chapter 2. Your First 90 Days

Chapter 3. Writing Your Engineering Strategy

Chapter 4. How to Plan

Chapter 5. Creating Useful Organizational Values

Chapter 6. Measuring Engineering Organizations

Chapter 7. Participating in Mergers and Acquisitions

Chapter 8. Developing Leadership Styles

Chapter 9. Managing Your Priorities and Energy

Chapter 10. Meetings for an Effective Engineering Organization

Chapter 11. Internal Communications

Chapter 12. Building Personal and Organizational Prestige

Chapter 13. Working with Your CEO, Peers, and Engineering

Chapter 14. Gelling Your Engineering Leadership Team

Chapter 15. Building Your Network

Chapter 16. Onboarding Peer Executives

Chapter 17. Inspected Trust

Chapter 18. Calibrating Your Standards

Chapter 19. How to Run Engineering Processes

Chapter 20. Hiring

Chapter 21. Engineering Onboarding

Chapter 22. Performance and Compensation

Chapter 23. Using Cultural SuNey Data

Chapter 24. Leaving the Job

Closing

Appendix A. Additional Resources

Appendix B. lnteNiewing Engineering Executives

Appendix C. Reading a Profit & Loss Statement

Appendix D. Starting Engineering Hubs

Appendix E. Magnitudes of Exploration

About the Author

Will Larson has been the CTO at Carta and Calm, and a software engineering leader at Calm, Stripe, and Uber. He is the author of An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer. Before moving to San Francisco, he grew up in North Carolina, and studied Computer Science at Centre College in Kentucky.