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Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

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Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#1

Post by latentdeepspace »

I just became a technical lead (spiced with a little product manager) for a team who is working with machine-learning/deep-learning technologies (I have ~6 years of background in this field). I feel like I am performing well, but there is a lot of room for improvement on: how to plan for the future, how to communicate success, how to assign engineers and researchers to tasks, how to define tasks, etc.

Do you have any recommendation on what should I do, read to become better and better every day? I want my team to be successful, and to show the improvements we make to the company.

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#4

Post by wins32767 »

I've found that Switch[1] is really helpful for technical leaders. A large part of the job of a leader is successfully implementing change and too many leaders with a technical background lean too much on logic and reasoning to try to make changes happen. Switch offers a playbook for successfully implementing change and when I've followed it closely I've been much more successful than when I wing it.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/038...

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#8

Post by TimSchumann »

jeffbee wrote: post #2

What "tech lead" means varies hugely from organization to organization and from team to team and person to person. For general success of teams, this is my favorite book: https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Teams-Productivity-through-...

> What "tech lead" means

That roughly translates in my head to ‘terrible youtuber’

Re: Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?

#9

Post by colebowl »

The best book on leadership I read was Jocko Willink's Extreme Ownership[1]. He was a career US Navy SEAL and bring a lot of great leadership approaches from the SEALS and correlates them to the business world. His principles lead back to the idea of taking extreme ownership of everything related to your team and the "mission". I really liked his no nonsense approach.

The best lesson I learnt on leadership is to listen to and believe in your team. They are the experts, not you anymore. Your job now is to clear the path to their success. Different people need different things to succeed, it's your job to figure that out and try your best to provide it.

What I recommend: Figure out what kind of leader you want to be. Read as much as you can and talk to other leaders inside and outside of your company to see what works and doesn't work for them.

Finally, make sure your team has a crystal clear definition of what success is and the milestones to get there. Ensuring this understanding will help your team move in the same direction.

Good luck!

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23848190-extreme-ownersh...

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