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."
Lencioni writes in fables, which I find easier to absorb than straight business books. This one hit close to home — I've watched good people go through the motions not because the work was bad but because nobody told them it mattered. The three signs are a useful diagnostic for any manager who wonders why their team seems checked out.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
Two Navy SEALs walk into a boardroom and say: everything is the leader's fault, no exceptions. They're not wrong — but it helps to remember they learned this in situations where the alternative was body bags. My full Kindle notes are linked below. The concept I return to most: "there are no bad teams, only bad leaders." Uncomfortable, clarifying, and hard to argue with once you've seen both kinds of teams up close.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
My sad experience is that most business negotiations resolve somewhere within 10% of the midpoint of the two opening positions — regardless of who's actually right. This book is a manual for breaking that gravity. Voss's insight is that the emotional layer of a conversation is the real negotiation; the words are just the surface. My full Kindle notes are linked below. "Tactical empathy" sounds manipulative until you realize it just means actually listening to win on the merits.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
Reed Hastings built a culture that most companies claim to want and almost none are willing to actually build. The "keeper test" — would you fight to keep this person? — is the most clarifying management tool I've used. My full Kindle notes are linked below. The catch nobody talks about: the whole system depends on talent density being real, not aspirational. Talent density is hard, and it's a leader's single most important job — if you haven't done the work of exiting mediocre performers, the freedoms backfire.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
Written in 1967 and still the most useful book on being an executive. Drucker's central observation — that effectiveness is a discipline, not a talent, and can therefore be learned — cuts against every "natural born leader" narrative I've ever heard. My full Kindle notes are linked below. The chapter on time management alone is worth the read: most executives don't actually know where their time goes, and the gap between where they think it goes and reality is embarrassing. I actually hate this book because whenever I read it I feel like I am so very far from being an effective leader. Apparently it's a journey, not a destination.
When I read these books on Kindle, I create a set of notes — to see them, click here.
The title is right but the diagnosis is counterintuitive: meetings aren't bad because they're long, they're bad because they're boring. Lencioni's solution — inject more conflict — gets the problem right but misses the human dynamic. You're not going to get people lower in the power structure to embrace conflict no matter how hard you preach it; the incentives are just wrong. What you actually need is a system that actively encourages and protects productive, respectful discussion of controversial issues — which is harder to design and harder to sustain. Lencioni gets the diagnosis; I disagree with the prescription.
The least-read of the Lencioni books and possibly the most useful for a first-time executive. The core insight — that organizational health is a competitive advantage, not a soft concern — took me longer to fully believe than I'd like to admit. "Over-communicate clarity" sounds obvious; doing it consistently at scale is one of the hardest things a leadership team actually faces.
Lencioni's first book and still one of the sharpest. The temptation I see most often in myself and others is choosing certainty over clarity — waiting to communicate until you're sure, when what your team actually needs is directional clarity now, even if the details are still forming. A short read; worth doing before taking any new leadership role.
The core insight is genuinely liberating: your brain is terrible at storing open loops, and the anxiety of half-remembered tasks is a tax on everything else you're trying to think about. Even a partial implementation — write everything down, identify the actual next action — reduces cognitive overhead more than you'd expect. I've used GTD for decades and find it more powerful the more I use it.
Strategy & Innovation
The book that named the thing every tech leader fears. Christensen's core insight — that being good at what customers ask for today is exactly what makes you blind to what will kill you tomorrow — is one of those ideas that reframes everything once you've internalized it. Required reading before anyone in a market-leadership position gets too comfortable.
Collins's research-backed answer to "what separates good companies from truly great ones" — the Hedgehog Concept, Level 5 Leadership, the Flywheel — is a useful lens for any strategy conversation. The irony is that most of the companies he held up as models have since returned to the mean. Worth reading for the frameworks, but take the "greatness is repeatable" thesis with a grain of salt: it turns out sustained greatness is a lot harder to sustain than a book about it suggests.
Grove coined "strategic inflection point" from Intel's own near-death experience — the company nearly destroyed itself clinging to memory chips before pivoting to microprocessors. The core lesson: the signals of a fundamental shift are visible long before leadership is ready to act on them, and paranoia is a feature, not a bug. The irony is that Intel's recent trajectory — caught flat-footed by ARM's dominance in mobile, now leaning on a government bailout to survive — suggests Grove's successors forgot everything he wrote. Maybe he wasn't paranoid enough.
Taleb's core insight — that the most consequential events are the ones our models told us couldn't happen — is one you can't un-see. What's shifted since publication: black swans don't feel so rare anymore. The world keeps getting more complex, and the "once-in-a-generation" events keep arriving faster than a generation at a time. Maybe the real lesson isn't how to predict them — it's how to build organizations and lives that can absorb them.
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.
