Technical Leadership Growth Resources

Posted on February 14, 2025

This list was developed when I worked at Bellese Technologies to help with professional growth of our engineers. If you have suggestions for it, feel free to reach out!

In your growth as an engineer, particularly in Senior+ and Tech Lead roles, you may need resources to continue your growth whether on the independent contributor or management track.

This is intended to be a living document where folks can find various resources on engineering leadership, and contribute resources that they find useful. This is not required reading, only an offered set of resources that should fit many different learning styles.

Legend

  • IC indicates the resource is targeted towards Independent Contributors (Staff+, Tech Lead, etc)
  • EM indicates the resource is targeted towards Engineering Management
  • IC/EM indicates the resource has content for both tracks

Books

  • IC The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly - This in-depth book shows you how to understand your role, manage your time, master strategic thinking, and set the standard for technical work. You’ll read about how to be a leader without direct authority, how to plan ahead to make the right technical decisions, and how to make everyone around you better, while still growing as an expert in your domain.

  • IC Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson - I wrote this book to become a more effective partner for the Staff engineers I work with, and with the hope that it can help others who are charting their path to technical leadership within an organization that’s still figuring out how to support them. The vast majority of the writing included in this book is available for free on staffeng.com, and will continue to be available for free indefinitely.

  • IC/EM Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.

  • IC The Software Engineer’s Guidebook by Gergely Orosz - This book follows the structure of a “typical” career path for a software engineer, from starting out as a fresh-faced software developer, through being a role model senior/lead, all the way to the staff/principle/distinguished level. It summarizes what I’ve learned as a developer and how I’ve approached coaching engineers at different stages of their careers.

  • EM The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier - Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal—especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager.

  • EM Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner - I wrote this book because there’s so much no one told me about management that I wished I would have known. There’s a lot to be purposeful about that many of us learn on the job, and worse: learn on people. This book provides some organization for collaborating with networks of people, working together towards a common purpose.

  • EM Resilient Management by Lara Hogan - Lara Hogan shares her recipe for supporting and leading a tech team—from developing your mentoring and coaching skills, to getting comfortable with having difficult conversations, to boosting trust among teammates—while staying grounded along the way.

Websites

  • IC/EM LeadDev - We are a community of software engineering leaders that come together to learn and get inspired on all things team, tech, process, and personal development.

  • IC staffeng.com - The StaffEng project aims to collect the stories of folks who are operating in Staff, Principal or Distinguished Engineer roles. How did you get there? What were your lucky breaks? How did you learn to be effective? As more of these stories are collected, I hope to build a dataset that helps folks draw their own map to Staff Engineer.

  • EM Resources for New Managers - This site has a lot of useful templates, articles, webcasts and videos to help folks new to management. Provided by Lara Hogan and Wherewithall.

Newsletters

  • IC/EM Level Up by Pat Kua - Level Up delivers a curated newsletter for leaders in tech. Ideal for busy people such as Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and more.

  • IC/EM Leadership in Tech - A carefully curated weekly newsletter for CTOs, engineering managers and senior engineers to become better leaders.

  • IC/EM LeadDev - Newsletters and updates from the LeadDev website including articles, videos, and webinars focused on your interests.

Slack Communities

  • IC/EM Rands Leadership Slack - With over 30,000 participants on over 750 public channels, RLS has a focus on growth in engineering roles, both IC and Management. There are several channels relevant to growth into Staff+ roles. #staff-principal-engineering #engineering-leadership are a couple examples.

Training

  • EM Demystifying Management - Hi! I’m Lara Hogan. Former VPE at Kickstarter, Engineering Director at Etsy. I’ve transformed my renowned in-person workshop for managers into this self-paced virtual program. It’s accessible, actionable, and will level you up each step of the way.

Conferences

  • IC/EM LeadDev / StaffPlus / LeadingEng - LeadDev is a leadership conference for tech leads and engineering leaders. There is typically supplemental coinciding StaffPlus (for existing Staff+ engineers) and LeadingEng (for existing engineering heads/Directors and above) events. It’s held in various cities with New York being an annual mainstay, and additional events in San Francisco, London, and other locales.