#31 | Sunday reads for EMs

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

Jan 18, 2026

👋 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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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. The tactical framework here is solid: lead with the decision you need, anticipate their questions (cost, ROI, alternatives, risks, measurement), and drop the jargon entirely.

Software Development Waste (Dr Milan Milanović)

tl;dr: A comprehensive taxonomy of where engineering effort disappears, expanding Poppendieck’s classic seven wastes to nine categories including cognitive load, psychological distress, and building the wrong thing entirely. If you can name the waste type, you can address it systematically. Key additions to watch for: backlog thrash (constant re-prioritization), over-engineering (architecture more complex than the problem), and AI-generated code waste (accepting LLM output without review).

Prioritize Relatively (Andrew Bosworth)

tl;dr: Stop debating whether ideas are “good” and start asking “is this better than what we’re doing right now?” The reframe forces trade-offs into the open and prevents the false conclusion that rejected ideas were bad - they just weren’t the best use of time.

Tenacity Beats Talent (Dr Nia D Thomas)

tl;dr: General advice on persistence through big projects - the people who finish aren’t the smartest, they’re the ones who stay with uncertainty and discomfort longest. Useful framing if you’re coaching someone through a difficult initiative or reflecting on your own multi-year efforts.