The Personal MBA

I have a confession. I’m a business leader without a business degree. As an engineer I never thought much about the ins and outs of business strategies, and I didn’t have to. Now that I’m in a role that requires me to make decisions that impact business outcomes I’ve found this book essential to my success.

This book gave me the confidence to assess development options through a business lens and make more educated decisions.

The Making of a Manager

Julie’s recommendations from her early years of building teams at Facebook are priceless. She makes it clear that leading people is hard (and scary) sometimes, but it is a completely learnable skill that we can get better at. I learned so much about being a manager from this book. If you want to level up your management skills and lead a more productive (and happier) team, this book is for you.

The DevOps Handbook

Want to know how to ship software faster? This book is a guide to tracking your work, moving quickly, and shipping often.

After reading this book I immediately set out to automate my team’s deployment process and mundane tasks so we can spend more time on what matters and deliver value faster.

Leading from Anywhere

I didn’t think I would need a book like this, but it turns out managing a remote team is really challenging. This book covers everything from hosting better video meetings to facilitating team bonding and cohesion virtually.

One of my favorite takeaways from this book is how to maintain team engagement. This is probably my biggest struggle as a remote leader, but David provides thoughtful guidance on how to encourage team collaboration.

Making Work Visible

Anyone who knows me knows how much I hate time theft. It’s the bane of my existence. At home, time thieves are relatively obvious (I’m looking at you Netflix). At work, they can be easier to miss.

Sometimes work tasks are actually the culprit, which seems counterintuitive, but identifying these thieves and creating a process to track them helps prioritize activities based on their impact to the company’s goals.