#33 | Sunday reads for EMs
My favourite reads of the week to make your Sunday a little more inspiring.
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How I Estimate Work as a Staff Software Engineer (Sean Goedecke)
tl;dr: Estimates don’t come from engineers, they come to engineers - your management chain already has a timeline in mind, and your job is to figure out what technical approaches fit within it. Instead of asking “how long will this take”, ask “what can we ship in the time we have?” Come back with a risk assessment and multiple options, not a single number.
Things I’ve Learned in My 10 Years as an Engineering Manager (Jampa Uchoa)
tl;dr: Dense with non-obvious tactics. You’re 10% player, 30% coach, 60% cheerleader - and that 10% should be off the critical path (CI/CD, flaky tests, tooling). You need to be a “transparent umbrella”: protect from stress but don’t hide reality. Never walk into exec meetings with “maybe A, maybe B” - you’ll leave with orders to do Z. Format for upward communication should be: context → problem → plan/alternatives → what support you need.
Curiosity is the First Step in Problem Solving (Will Larson)
tl;dr: Will Larson’s reframe on accountability: “make being wrong cheap” rather than trying to be wrong less often. Multiple examples on how leading with curiosity before accountability preserves relationships and often surfaces context you were missing.
How to Facilitate a Conflict on Your Team (Ed Batista)
tl;dr: If you reflexively arbitrate conflicts (just deciding who’s right), you’re concluding them, not resolving them. Arbitration focuses on content, facilitation focuses on process - you don’t need to be the subject matter expert, you need to be the traffic cop.
Autonomy and Clarity in Leadership Styles (Bjorn Roche)
tl;dr: A useful decision tree for picking your leadership style: Does the problem need central coordination? Can you gather full context? Is it a repeated decision? Maps to five modes: autonomy, involvement, policy, conviction, and consensus. Good framework for diagnosing why a decision-making approach isn’t working.
The Shape of Leadership (Mike Fisher)
tl;dr: V-formation (clear hierarchy, aligned direction) vs. murmuration (emergent, distributed decision-making). The diagnosis of stuck organizations is interesting: they want murmuration adaptability but keep V-formation incentives, punishing deviation while asking for innovation.
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What did you read recently that you would like to share?
This list is a great mix of practical tactics and mindset shifts, very actionable.
Solid collection. Larson's take on making being wrong cheap versus trying to be wrong less often completly reframes accountability. I've seen managers treat every mistake as a capital crime and it just pushes problems underground. The shift to curiosity before blame acutally helps you catch issues earlier because people stop hiding them. Creates way better feedback loops too.