From Code to Team (Second Edition): An Honest Playbook for Engineering Leaders: 1 - Brossura

Nel, Marius

Brossura

ISBN 13: 9798174051638

Casa editrice: Independently published, 2026

Riassunto

Nobody rewrites your job description on the day of the promotion.

HR sends a form. The team congratulates you. Then Monday arrives, and the muscle memory of 10 or 15 years of being paid to close tickets, close designs and close incidents closes right down on you again — and it lies to you about what a good day now looks like.

From Code to Team is a field guide for the first year of engineering leadership: the identity shift, the weekly rhythm, the people, the 90-day horizon — and, in this second edition, the half of the job that happens outside your own team. It is written for the recently promoted engineer, the tech lead about to take direct reports, and the senior IC still deciding whether leadership is for them.

It is also, deliberately, a book of mistakes. The review delivered months too late. The delegation that was really offloading. The dashboard that taught a team to inflate its own numbers inside a quarter. Every pattern here is one the author walked into first, most of them more than once.

New in the second edition

About 6 months in, you get reasonably good at running your team — and discover that nothing stopping you is inside it any more. Your manager has pressures you have never asked about. The person you build the product with answers to somebody else entirely. You are still accountable for the result, and you cannot tell either of them what to do. That is not a broken organization. It is the next part of the job, and this edition adds 2 chapters on it:

• Working with your manager — what they are actually judged on, the 48-hour rule for bad news, the 1:1 you run on your own boss, and how to ask for what your team needs in a form that can be granted
• Working with your product partner — who decides what, said out loud; the 4 tiers before you escalate; the 2 things engineering must refuse to carry; and a method for the technical decisions nobody noticed were decisions until they were load-bearing

What you will learn

• The two scoreboards — and how to know, on a Friday, which one you actually ran on
• Sprints as an operating system, not ceremony as identity
• The manager's basic contract — 6 promises, running in both directions
• Reading your people — a private A/B/C/D diagnosis, and the conversation each one asks for
• The hard duties — underperformance caught early and handled without ambush; reviews with nothing new in them
• The 12-week cycle — and the capacity arithmetic almost nobody runs
• Sustaining yourself — the energy audit, the confidence gap, and the flat Friday that arrives in year 5

Built to be used, not admired

Every chapter closes with a single Monday-morning action: one small, specific thing to try in the week ahead. 13 chapters, 13 Mondays, running alongside your first quarter rather than waiting on a shelf.

The appendices carry the rest: 5 coaching relationships followed from the first honest read to the final conversation; every cycle in the book mapped onto a single page, with the way each one fails when nobody is watching; a manager's Read Me you can hand to your own team in week one; and 12 one-page sheets — the sprint ceremonies, the 1:1, feedback, the review year, the 90-day cycle, running and reporting a project, sustaining yourself — each with the mechanics, the failure modes, and the tell that gives it away.

Written from 3 decades in technology and more than 20 leading engineering teams — in Johannesburg, Melbourne, Seattle and Bengaluru, at sizes from 4 engineers in one room to 53 across 3 time zones.

This is not a book that will make you a great leader. It is a book that will help you become one honest cycle at a time.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Independently published
• Data di pubblicazione: 2026
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 13: 9798174051638
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 617
• Contatto del produttore: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.it/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Lussemburgo