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The Complete Engineering Manager

To build, lead and sustain the best team ever, you need to be the best manager ever!

 

This book equips you to become the complete and pragmatic engineering leader your team needs—one who inspires, drives outcomes, and creates a high-performing culture.

What’s Inside

As Eric Ries writes in his book The Lean Startup, “Entrepreneurship is Management”—a statement that's more relevant than ever. In today’s fast-paced world of shifting priorities, team transformations, and evolving technologies, traditional management methods simply don’t keep up.

 

This book equips you with modern practices for leading engineering teams, managing change, and building high-performing teams, all while navigating the complexities of today’s demanding environment.

 

Throughout the book, I used the term “Leader” and “Manager” interchangeably—because in high-functioning organizations, leadership and management are one and the same.

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Getting Yourself Oriented

Settle into your new role as an Engineering Manager by identifying your core values, leadership style, and key traits for success—all wrapped into the Engineering Manager's Starter Kit, which also includes your "Manual of Me" and a 6-month plan.

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Managing People Better

Start by managing yourself using the SELF (Situation, Emotion, Learning, and Focus/Energy) framework, then focus on building trust, conducting mindful one-on-ones, and managing performance to develop world-class engineers. Additionally, work with your manager to build a win-win relationship by understanding their priorities, aligning goals, and fostering strong collaboration.​

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Building a High Performing Team

Rome wasn’t built in a day. A high performing team neither. Discover how to transform your engineering team into a cohesive, high-performing unit, performing like an Orchestra.

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Mastering Prioritization

Understand your Organization’s big bets, vision, and mission, along with the Strategy Trio: Business, Product, and Engineering Strategy. Learn how to put OKRs into action while acting as a bridge between top-down and bottom-up approaches. Actively prioritize and deprioritize product and technical initiatives to build a compelling roadmap in partnership with your Product Manager.

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Delivering Impactful Projects

Adopt iterative delivery practices using MVPs, Minimum Viable Architecture, and modular design, while embracing continuous delivery. Measure delivery effectiveness with North Star and DORA metrics, and build strong stakeholder partnerships by reporting progress to the senior leadership and managing blockers efficiently.

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Evolving Processes

You will learn how to identify what’s working and not working for your engineering team and to evolve your team’s development, delivery and technical processes to improve their efficiency and throughput.​

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Become an Organizational Leader

Transition from an engineering manager to an organizational leader by expanding your influence through strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration.

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Who This Book is For

 

If you are a software engineer transitioning into management, this book will help you become the engineering manager every team needs, step by step, one chapter at a time. Even if you haven’t considered becoming a manager yet, this book will give you a better understanding of what it means to be one and equip you to become a better leader.

 

If you’re already an engineering manager, you’ll find modern, pragmatic approaches to the challenges you face in your teams daily, along with strategies to build a high-performing engineering team.

And if you love reading about management, personal development, organizational leadership, and engineering team dynamics to gain a fresh perspective, this book is for you!

About the Author

Ananth Ramachandran is a seasoned engineering leader who has got experience in building happy, productive and high performing engineering teams. He has worked as a developer, lead engineer and a manager in varied domains ranging from healthcare to traditional and modern banking systems to shipping business. He started his career in a fortune 500 company and later found his passion in startups and building engineering teams from the ground up. He’s passionate about scaling up people, product and technology strategy ultimately contributing to organization’s success.

A team architect, who orchestrated multiple team re-organizations and transformations to achieve organization goals and objectives. Ananth runs a newsletter for Engineering Managers, techmanagerguide.substack.com, where he writes about day-to-day experience, challenges, and modern engineering management practices and techniques. He also speaks on podcasts and at meetups, mentors and trains software professionals and aspiring leaders.

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Have a question or want to learn more? Reach out to us! Whether you have a query or feedback, we’d love to hear from you and help you on your journey to becoming a successful engineering leader.

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© Copyright Ananth Ramachandran. All Rights Reserved.

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