Tactical playbooks, scripts and frameworks. No theory, no fluff, just what works on Monday morning.
New essays for engineering managers, delivered when they drop. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.
Thanks, you're in.
One is bought by a company for a group of managers. The other is bought by a manager, often on their own card. That difference decides most of it.
Reforge is broad and built for experienced operators across functions. EM Accelerator is narrow and built for the first years of managing engineers. Breadth is the whole difference.
Manager Tools built the best free management library there is, and it was never written for software teams specifically. Here is what to reach for when that gap starts to matter.
Management is not the rung above Staff engineer. It is a different ladder against a different wall. Here is how to choose the track that fits the work you actually want.
Every guide to these questions is written for people who have already managed a team. You have not. What the panel is really testing, and why the honest answer beats the polished one.
You have been made the manager of people who are better engineers than you. That gap is not closing, and every way you try to prove you deserve the job backfires.
You got promoted because you were the best engineer. That is the worst reason there is to make someone a manager, and the most common. Here are the four that follow.
I asked engineering leaders on LinkedIn for the management books worth reading. Here is the full list, grouped by the problem each one solves, with an honest take on which to read first.
You get promoted for doing the work. Then the work stops being the job. Most of what goes wrong in a new engineering manager's first 90 days comes back to that one shift, and sitting with it is harder than it sounds.
Turn a number into a target and people will hit the number without doing the thing the number was supposed to measure. James Charlesworth has watched it happen at company after company. Here is how to measure engineering teams without breaking them.
Your biggest strength as a manager and your worst blind spot are usually the same instinct seen from two angles. Here are the five types of engineering manager, and the shadow each one cannot see in itself.
John Weatherford spent years at Yelp building teams the right way. The manager README, treating people like adults, and the peer group that quietly produced more VPs than any other meeting at the company.
