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10 Essential Lessons from 10 Software Engineering Leaders

Success in engineering leadership is not easy to define.

The journey of an engineering leader is a rocky one, where you have to navigate the ups and downs of building a company and growing a team while delivering impact to your end-users.

A few months ago, Eiso Kant and Jason Warner started a podcast for Engineering Leaders called Developing Leadership. Almost 20 episodes in, and the lessons shared by our guests have been invaluable to our listeners.

Building high-performance teams, creating a company culture that scales, and why your software delivery pipeline shouldnโ€™t stop with engineering, here are 10 lessons from the Engineering Leaders weโ€™ve had the pleasure of speaking to.

For more context on these 10 lessons, you can read the full post on our blog.

1. Engineering, Product and Design need to work together.

๐Ÿš€ Jonathan Nolen, VP of Engineering at LaunchDarkly

2. Engineering Leadership is all about people. Technology is secondary.

๐Ÿš€ Anton Drukh, Tech Executive Mentor, and former VP of Engineering at Snyk

3. If you want to build a high-performance team, organization, and culture, you need to start with yourself.

๐Ÿš€ Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale

4. Your Software Delivery Pipeline shouldnโ€™t stop with engineering.

๐Ÿš€ Wade Arnold, Co-Founder & CEO of Moov Financial

5. Focus on removing the biggest blockers to your success.

๐Ÿš€ Emil Eifrem, Co-Founder & CEO of Neo4j

6. People donโ€™t want to receive corrective feedback, but if you donโ€™t give it they will get frustrated with you.

๐Ÿš€ Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering of Ambassador Labs

7. Want to be a better leader? Write more.

๐Ÿš€ Michael Lopp, aka Rands in Repose

8. You should probably be spending more time recruiting.

๐Ÿš€ Erik Bernhardsson, Founder of Modal Labs and former CTO of better.com

9. Culture is the most important thing to get right early on.

๐Ÿš€ Sam Alba, Co-Founder of Dagger and former VP of Engineering at Docker

10. Make sure your people are comfortable, delivering and that thereโ€™s a strong purpose to what they do, or they will leave.

๐Ÿš€ Nuno Antunes, Senior Director of Engineering at Datadog

Make sure you check out the full blog post to get the full context for these advice tidbits, and listen to the podcast for the full interviews!

Top comments (1)

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Jared Niervas

Great insights!