The Engineering Executive's Primer

Will Larson

Feb 2024 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this eBook

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.

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.