Books and resources that have shaped how I think about technology, leadership, and building products. Books marked with an S-Team Book Club badge were part of Amazon’s senior leadership book club when I was there.
Leadership & Management
A foundational book that will get you to a plateau. It won't make you remarkable, but it will stop many of the things we've learned earlier in our careers or lives that make us ineffective every day.
In my interactions with people like Steve that I've been privileged to have, I came to the conclusion that whether or not they needed to be a jerk to get to where they were, they could easily have been more effective by stopping being a jerk once they got there. The blindness which prevents them from seeing this, while they are so insightful on so many other things, still puzzles me.
This is a book you read once — maybe you skim it. The main thing to take away: in the vast majority of executive jobs, what they're really trying to figure out in the first 90 days is whether they made a hiring mistake. If you figure out what the criteria for that are — relationships, small wins, some change in some metric — you will be successful. The unsuccessful 90 days are characterized by you doing what you think is important, and them, on the 91st day, being pretty sure they made a hiring mistake.
I am not sure this book has aged that well. That being said, maybe we're entering a new renaissance where the people part of engineering leadership is going to be even more important.
A classic! Amazing how lessons from the IBM 360 are still relevant, and how the same mistakes are made over and over. It's very sad how this book continues to have the word "man" in its title — I wish they would restructure the book as "The Mythical Person-Month." Enough said. I do believe we're going to encounter a brand-new phase of the mythical person-month as people add AI agents. Maybe the next version of the book would be called "The Mythical Agent-Week."
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
Strategy & Innovation
Product
The foundational book on modern product management
How to build empowered product teams
Product marketing from the SVPG perspective
How companies transform to product-led organizations
Written for business, but can be applied to PM
Communication & Influence
Will change the way you look at and think about display of data
Data & Decision-Making
Operations & Lean
Software Engineering
More extreme than Kent Beck! A very readable book. Some of his insights are really profound, others are just plain wacky. This book has the most pretentious bibliography I've ever seen.
This book presents extreme points of view — so naturally I strongly disagree with some ideas and strongly agree with others. A good book because it makes people think!
This is a rigorous great book, filled with useful stuff. The best practices section at the back is the best part.
Nothing profound, just a good straightforward description of how good programmers use tools to create solid systems — the kind of thing you often don't learn at school.
A bit old now but still stands as the Scrum bible
A bit newer and has a wider scope
Programming Classics
Great stuff, but perhaps suffers from over expectations from the community. If you've written lots of systems you've used all these patterns before — now you have names for the patterns.
The ultimate reference for the language itself, though I wouldn't take the design stuff in this book too seriously. Not for the beginner.
Good practical style for using C++ well. Read them!
Challenging C++ stuff. A great read for the experienced C++ programmer — you are guaranteed to learn things you didn't think of before.
