Top Engineering Leadership books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Engineering Leadership books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Engineering Leadership

Understanding the concepts of Engineering Leadership starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

From mentoring interns to working with senior staff, you’ll get actionable advice for approaching various obstacles in your path. This book is ideal whether you’re a new manager, a mentor, or a more experienced leader looking for fresh advice. Pick up this book and learn how to become a better manager and leader in your organization.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

Read hilarious stories with serious lessons that Michael Lopp extracts from his varied and sometimes bizarre experiences as a manager at Apple, Pinterest, Palantir, Netscape, Symantec, Slack, and Borland. Many of the stories first appeared in primitive form in Lopp’s perennially popular blog, Rands in Repose. The Third Edition of Managing Humans contains a whole new season of episodes from the…

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Small Acts of Leadership: 12 Intentional Behaviors That Lead to Big Impact

In business today, there is no offline and there is no downtime. Professionals are both exhausted and depleted. Being constantly tethered to our work through technology makes us overwhelmed and shortsighted, and deprives us of time for meaningful reflection or thoughtful connection to our professional communities, and often even to our own families. For us to thrive-not simply survive-in this …

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

High output management

The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses—the art of the entrepreneur—can be summed up in a single word: managing. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies (as CEO and employee number three at Intel), High Output Management is equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup foun…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

After her first two weeks observing the problems at DecisionTech, Kathryn Petersen, its new CEO, had more than a few moments when she wondered if she should have taken the job. But Kathryn knew there was little chance she would have turned it down. After all, retirement had made her antsy, and nothing excited her more than a challenge. What she could not have known when she accepted the job, h…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Job Shop Lean: An Industrial Engineering Approach to Implementing Lean in High-Mix Low-Volume Production Systems

In the 1950’s, the design and implementation of the Toyota Production System (TPS) within Toyota had begun. In the 1960’s, Group Technology (GT) and Cellular Manufacturing (CM) were used by Serck Audco Valves, a high-mix low-volume (HMLV) manufacturer in the United Kingdom, to guide enterprise-wide transformation. In 1996, the publication of the book Lean Thinking introduced the entire world t…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Additional Engineering Leadership Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Engineering Leadership, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams—and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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I designed and built most of HubSpot's observability platform, and have handled realtime (sub-15s latency) streams of millions of datapoints per minute, and terabytes per day. I've improved Amazon's open source balancing algorithm for Kinesis to support downtime-free rebalancing over thousands of concurrent shards. I wrote the first endorsed Java …

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