#27 | Sunday reads for EMs

My favourite reads of the week to make your Sunday a little more inspiring.

Dec 21, 2025

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. This is a new series in which every Sunday I share with you my favourite reads of the week. To accelerate your growth see: 50 Notion Templates | The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching

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The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better (Kent Beck)

tl;dr: AI doesn’t just make juniors more productive, it shortens the time-to-breakeven so dramatically (24 months → 9 months) that your failure rate from attrition drops from 36% to 15%. You have to manage juniors for learning, not production and teach them augmented coding (using AI to accelerate understanding), not vibe coding (blindly accepting AI output).

The Compensation Commandments (Stay SaaSy)

tl;dr: Your goal isn’t happiness, fairness, or market-matching - it’s “the most talented, enthusiastic team your budget allows”. You can’t buy happiness, but you can absolutely create unhappiness through perceived unfairness. The test to hold yourself to: can you explain any compensation decision to the whole company without embarrassment? Also includes a useful threshold for equity motivation - if someone’s equity could buy a 3-bedroom house in their nearest metro, they’ll treat the company like their child, not their rental car.

Use It or Lose It (James Stanier)

tl;dr: “use it or lose it” applies to managers’ cognitive and technical skills just as much as muscles, and that uncritical offloading of thinking to AI risks eroding judgment, context, and first-principles reasoning. Using inversion, it shows how managers can make themselves obsolete by disengaging from details, coding, AI experimentation, and active participation. The antidote is intentional AI use: maintain a minimum dose of hands-on work, stay close to the tools and details, think first before prompting, and use AI as an assistant, not a replacement, to sharpen rather than dull your skills.

How Do Daily Stand-ups Boost Team Performance? (Lizzie Matusov)

tl;dr: Research reveals stand-ups don’t directly improve satisfaction or performance but they create psychological safety, which then drives both. If your stand-ups feel performative, you’re getting zero value. The fix is to model vulnerability by sharing your own blockers first, focus on genuine obstacles rather than status updates, and track whether people actually feel safe speaking up.

A Little Bit Uncomfortable (Werner Vogels)

tl;dr: Fear is a signal you’re pushing into growth territory, and as you move into leadership, your job shifts from managing your own discomfort to spotting and supporting others’ brave moments.