Engineering Manager's Compass
Halfway there
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you already know the kinds of questions we keep coming back to:
How engineering managers make decisions under uncertainty
How organizations shape outcomes
How much of this job depends on things nobody explains explicitly
For the past year, Maxim Schepelin and I have been expanding on those ideas and turning them into a book.
Today, we are happy to share that the first half is now available.
How we got here
When we started, we thought we were writing a handbook for new engineering managers: a practical collection of lessons, patterns, and mistakes to avoid.
But the deeper we went, the clearer it became that we were not writing a handbook so much as an encyclopedia. And while there is no shortage of management books, what still feels underexplored is the tacit side of the role: the hidden judgment calls, the unspoken rules, and the context that often determines whether good advice actually works.
That is the part we decided to focus on.
Why we are sharing it now
Like many engineering teams, we initially stayed in our own bubble for too long. We wrote, refined, and kept going. Eventually, we realized that waiting until everything felt complete was not the best way to make the book better.
So instead of polishing in isolation, we decided to share it in smaller iterations and learn from real readers along the way.
That is why we put the first half of the book on Leanpub. It gives us a way to publish early, improve continuously, and incorporate feedback before the full manuscript is done.
In the same spirit, we have also open-sourced the tooling behind this work (and wrote about it). It felt more consistent to share not just the ideas, but some of the practical machinery that helps us develop and publish them.
What you can expect
This book is for aspiring, new, and current engineering managers who want practical guidance rather than abstract theory. It is shaped by the same themes we explore on this blog, but in a more structured and connected form.
If you care about topics like:
Understanding the environment your team operates in
Building alignment across teams and stakeholders
Making better plans in the face of uncertainty
Becoming more effective without becoming performative
then there is a good chance this book will resonate with you.
The launch
The first half of the book is now available here: Engineering Manager’s Compass: Insights for building effective engineering organizations
If you decide to read it, we would genuinely love your feedback. In particular, we would love to hear:
What resonated with you
What felt unclear or incomplete
What seemed most useful in your own context
What you would want us to go deeper on in the second half
Writing in public is our way of making sure this book becomes more useful than it would have been if we had finished it alone.
Thank you for reading the blog, and thank you in advance if you take the time to look at the book. We hope it gives you something practical to take back to your own work.