#28 | Sunday reads for EMs

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

Dec 28, 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 4 Questions Execs Use to Judge Your Product Roadmap (Paweł Huryn & Elena Luneva)

tl;dr: Execs evaluate every initiative on four dimensions - what is it, why does it matter (to the business), when do we see results, and what’s the true cost (including opportunity cost and maintenance burden). “Why does it matter?” isn’t philosophical, it’s resource allocation really.

Advice For Individual Contributors (Stay SaaSy)

tl;dr: Playbook for senior ICs who want to increase their impact without moving into management. The most actionable advice I found: send bi-weekly written updates to your manager (cc their manager) covering what you’re doing and where you need help - this forces self-reflection, builds visibility, and frees up 1:1s for higher-value discussions.

The AI Divide (Justin Reock)

tl;dr: MIT’s Project NANDA found that 95% of organizations are seeing zero measurable return from AI investments, with only 5% reaching sustained impact. Mid-market companies scaled AI faster than large enterprises, buying beat building (externally-sourced tools deployed at 2x the rate of internal builds), and individual productivity gains don’t translate to org-level transformation unless you redesign workflows around them.

The Counterintuitive Way to Master Any Leadership Skill (Gilad Naor)

tl;dr: A practical framework (SCRIPT: Skim, Commit, Record, Instantiate, Practice, Tailor) for turning passive reading into actual behaviour change using AI coaches. Reading 50 books a year is counterproductive, you need weeks of deliberate practice per skill, not more information intake.

I Created a System to Automate Performance Reviews (Fran Soto)

tl;dr: A structured approach to brag docs that separates information capture from refinement. Treat your work log as an “information funnel” - daily capture without judgment, then periodic translation into business-friendly language with metrics. The author explicitly says to log canceled projects and difficult debugging work because “the business outcome might be zero, but the engineering output remains valid”. The system also feeds 1:1 prep and CV updates, not just performance reviews.