97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

by Camille Fournier

Tap into the wisdom of experts to learn what every engineering manager should know. With 97 short and extremely useful tips for engineering managers, you'll discover new approaches to old problems, pick up road-tested best practices, and hone your management skills through sound advice.

Managing people is hard, and the industry as a whole is bad at it. Many managers lack the experience, training, tools, texts, and frameworks to do it well. From mentoring interns to working in senior management, this book will take you through the stages of management and provide actionable advice on how to approach the obstacles you'll encounter as a technical manager.

A few of the 97 things you should know:


"Three Ways to Be the Manager Your Report Needs" by Duretti Hirpa
"The First Two Questions to Ask When Your Team Is Struggling" by Cate Huston
"Fire Them!" by Mike Fisher
"The 5 Whys of Organizational Design" by Kellan Elliott-McCrea
"Career Conversations" by Raquel V�lez
"Using 6-Page Documents to Close Decisions" by Ian Nowland
"Ground Rules in Meetings" by Lara Hogan

Genres: Management, Leadership, Nonfiction, Engineering, Business, Technology, Programming

296 pages, Paperback

Published December 17, 2019

About the author

For the 19thC gynaecologist, see Camille Fournier.

Camille Fournier is the former chief technology officer of Rent The Runway and former vice president of technology at Goldman Sachs.

Reviews

[Miguel David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is nothing more than a collection of articles from Engineering Managers about different parts of their work, as such there's variation in the interest of each piece. The good thing though is that most of them are interesting to very interesting and each of them is about 3 kindle pages long, so you can start and stop and restart whenever you want.
I learned a lot from this book and recommend it.

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Exactly what one could expect from that kind of book ("97 things that ...") - each chapter is written by someone else and covers a totally different topic/idea/concern. Some are interesting, but only very few have really caught my attention (my fav is on Chaleff's typology of followers). I've grabbed this one because of C. Fournier (who've collected & redacted the book), but it's really hard to recommend it wholeheartedly.

2-2.5 stars.

[Łukasz Słonina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short articles compiled together, without particular order. mainly for people starting as engineering managers. Few good "things", few obvious to me.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great fun easy to read book consisting of 5 minute chapters that you can read between things. Nothing life changing but good to hear different view points and graphs and diagrams to back it all up.

Even though I am giving this a 4/5 I still recommend reading it especially to new leads or managers.

[Rajeev Bharshetty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good starter guide for an engineering manager from experienced engineering managers. Very thorough.

[Avraam Mavridis · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a few good articles, and a lot of really boring ones. Its more like a collection of Medium posts rather than a book.

[Arman Hilmioglu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giving 4 stars, and recommending this book to all new and aspiring engineering managers. The key difference between this book and all other management relevant ones (ex: Manager's Path, Managing Humans etc...) is; this one has a lot more practical advice summarized in much shorter stories. While certain aspects of the management is going to be different from organization to organization / culture to culture / this book was much more comprehensive in things that went right and wrong for people. That's what you should want from a management book, practical examples, rather than abstract concepts.

[Arman Hilmioğlu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giving 4 stars, and recommending this book to all new and aspiring engineering managers. The key difference between this book and all other management relevant ones (ex: Manager's Path, Managing Humans etc...) is; this one has a lot more practical advice summarized in much shorter stories. While certain aspects of the management is going to be different from organization to organization / culture to culture / this book was much more comprehensive in things that went right and wrong for people. That's what you should want from a management book, practical examples, rather than abstract concepts.

[Gustavo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought the book because I had really enjoyed the previous one from the same author. Unfortunately this one was disappointing. It's a collection is very short pieces, all bundled together, that in my opinion misses depth. Every one of them leaves me thinking "ok, but how?". All have good intentions but are too shallow. Still, thank you for putting the book out, can be a good starting point for some people.

[Isaac Perez Moncho · Rating 2 out of 5]

The main point of this book is that it's a curated list of short chapters by many authors, unfortunately the curation is not great.
There are some good chapters, but the style is very different between the authors, there doesn't seem to be any type of organisation and it feels it jumps from one topic to the next and back.
It would have benefited with consistency in quality of the chapters and some organisation of topics.

[Mahdi Taghizadeh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book actually is not written by one author and is composed of 97 things written by various people who are CTOs, EMs, senior software engineers, VPEs, etc.

Don’t expect much technical stuff as this is more about the Management part of Engineering Manager’s hat; but those things are absolutely worth reading and you will learn a lot to manage teams of engineers.

[Simon MacDonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays by a number of engineering managers. Like any book with that may authors the quality varies and you will probably find some to be absolute gold while others you will forget immediately.

I recommend that you read one or two essays a day using them like zen koans to provoke deeper thought on whether or not you can incorporate them into your routine.

[Sergey Shishkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

97 Things is an interesting genre. Essays might seem disjoint at first. What I liked is the diversity of perspectives and ideas. I'm sure everyone will find a thing or two that will resonate more than other more comprehensive books for managers.

[Jose Reales · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://chemaclass.es/readings/97-thi...

[Alex French · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few good tidbits here and there, but overall just a disjointed mishmash of mediocre essays.

[Jevgenij · Rating 3 out of 5]

About 80% of the book is pretty shitty: trivial, generic, boring. But in the remaining 20% it was possible to find some really interesting ideas.

[Daniel Gomez Rico · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a book full of lessons and that's cool, it's a book to read overtime otherwise it's hard to save all of that in your brain.

[Laurian Filip · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the jumble of information, you can find quite a few interesting and useful tips.