#31 | Sunday reads for EMs

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

👋 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

Paid subscribers get 50 Notion Templates, The EM’s Field Guide, and access to the complete archive. Subscribe now.

One bottleneck at a time (James Stanier)

tl;dr: Your system has exactly one bottleneck limiting throughput at any time, and improving anything else just creates inventory pile-ups. The suggestion is putting your best engineers on the ugliest problems (slow deploys, flaky tests) instead of sexy features, and having the courage to defend that decision when leadership asks why velocity looks down.

The Engineer to Executive Translation Layer (Anna Shipman)

tl;dr: If your proposals keep dying in leadership review, this explains why and how to fix it. Executives think horizontally across the entire business and have dramatically less time per area than you do.…