#37 | Sunday reads for EMs

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

Mar 01, 2026

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Building An Elite AI Engineering Culture In 2026 (Chris Roth)

tl;dr: AI is a multiplier, not an equalizer: Taste × Discipline × Leverage. Senior engineers get 5x the productivity gains from AI tools vs juniors, and PR review times jumped 91% even as output increased. Specific practices from Linear, Stripe, Cursor, and Vercel: spec-driven development before prompting, stacked PRs to solve the AI-generated review crisis, AGENTS.md as a curated (not auto-generated) team artifact, vertical slice architecture for AI-friendliness, cycle time replacing story points, and the Design Engineer role dissolving traditional handoffs.

The Shift to Managing Managers (Kevin Goldsmith)

tl;dr: Moving to managing managers isn’t autonomy vs control - it’s leverage vs comfort. Staying close to execution feels responsible but trains your org to route everything through you, which caps both their growth and yours. I loved the four-tier decision boundary framework: define with each manager what they decide alone, what they decide and inform you about, what requires consultation, and what you decide together - then systematically move decisions toward greater autonomy over time.

Hiring Tech Leaders: Think in Spectrums, Not Checkboxes (Marc Gauthier)

tl;dr: Instead of evaluating senior leadership candidates on right/wrong answers (they all know the textbook responses), map them onto sliders: consensus-driven ↔ decisive, process-heavy ↔ bias-to-action, technical depth ↔ strategic abstraction, risk-averse ↔ risk-tolerant. You need to assess both their default position and how far they can sustainably operate from it - a hands-on CTO can lead 300 people for a while, but they’ll eventually either burn out or start pushing code to production and making everyone mad.

The Secret to Getting Promoted (Bjorn Roche)

tl;dr: First you need to win emotionally, and then supply the proof. For promotions the emotion you must win on is trust. You might hear “stay out of office politics” while someone else might tell you “make sure your work is visible”. These pieces of advice are a bit contradictory, so which do you follow? You follow the one that leads to more trust.

Leading with Inquiry: How to Have a Better Dialogue (Ed Batista)

tl;dr: We default to pushing our point in conversations because we fill knowledge gaps with worst-case assumptions. The fix is leading with How/What questions instead of Why or yes/no questions.