Whether you're an IC, manager, or director everyone plays a role in running a successful data team. But it can feel overwhelming learning all the skills required to keep a data team on track.
You can try to learn everything on the fly and by yourself but the more you can learn from others whether it be mentors, videos, books, articles, etc.
But there is still likely one problem.
One of the problems we face in the world today isn't a lack of information but too much information. So below I put together a list of books, articles, and videos that you should read or watch.
Now, there are still a lot of articles and pieces of content here. But I view this as more of the page of resources that you can return to when you have specific problems. Thus, I have broken this resource list down by problems vs by type of resources.
Below the content is a mix of books, articles and videos and I wanted to give a legend to notify the reader which was which. The emojis listed below are said legend.
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📚 Book
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📝 Article
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🎥 Video
- New Manager - Making The Switch From IC
- How To Help Your Team Grow In Their Career
- Project Management
- Culture
- Team Organization
- Talent Acquisition And Retention
- Onboarding
- Communication
- Influence
- Templates
- Data Infrastructure
- Other
When you're making the switch from IC to manager there are so many new challenges you'll need to take on. That's why this section contains mostly books because I believe there is a lot to cover and most of it can't just be covered in a 1500 word article.
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📚 The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You (paid) by Julie Zhuo
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📚 Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track (paid)
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📚 Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smart (paid)
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📚 An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (paid)
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📚 Data Teams: A Unified Management Model for Successful Data-Focused Teams
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📝 Don’t Lead a Data Team Before Reading This - Aligning The Data Team with Business Objectives (paid)
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🎥 The Engineer to Manager Transition, by Former Twitter Director of Engineering David Loftesness
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🎥 How To Become An Engineering Manager With A Google Engineering Manager
One of the goals as a manager is to help the ICs you manage grow. Luckily, there is a ton of great content you can share with them. Below is a great list of mostly articles focused on helping individuals grow.
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📝 How To Fast Track Your Career As An Engineer by Ryan Peterman
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📝 Becoming A Better Data Engineer - Tips On Translating Business Requirements
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📝 How to grow from a mid-level to senior Data Engineer (paid) by Gregor Ojstersek
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📚 The Unspoken Truths for Career Success: Navigating Pay, Promotions, and Power at Work (paid)
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🎥 Three Things Preventing Your Promotion to Senior Engineer from a Principal at Amazon
Now whether you're the one managing the project or you just need a sense of how to help your team keep projects flowing, here are a few great pieces of content you can look through to improve your project management and estimations.
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📝 Demystifying Project Estimation (paid) by Nicola Ballotta and Jordan Cutler
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📝How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum (paid) by Gergely Orosz
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📚 Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Tim (paid)
I ended splitting culture and team organization and management (the section below) because they did feel different in terms of how they can impact your team. One is how the team is generally organized and the other is how the team feels and is driven.
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📝 Inside Stripe's Engineering Culture - Part 1 (paid) by Gergely Orosz
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📝 Elevating Your Data Team: From Service Providers to Strategic Partners
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📚 The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups (paid)
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📚 Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (paid)
How teams are organized impact the way we communicate and operate. Below are several pieces of content that review the ways you can organize your teams.
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📝 How to Structure Teams for Building Better Software Products
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🎥 How To Manage Data Teams Successfully - Asking A Director Of Data Architecture And Governance
Hiring and retaining talent is an important aspect of being a manager. You need to be able to assess candidates with varying skills and backgrounds as well as create an environment that makes employees want to stay.
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📝 Retaining Software Engineers and Engineering Managers (paid) by Gergely Orosz
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📝 Hiring ONLY seniors is the worst policy in the software industry by Anton Zaides
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📝 Good Attrition, Bad Attrition for Software Engineers (paid) by Gergely Orosz
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🎥 Confessions from a Big Tech Hiring Manager: Tips for Software Engineering Interviews
When you do hire someone or when you start a new role its great to have a smooth onboarding process as well as a plan for your first 90 days. That's why I picked the articles below that both review onboarding as well provide content for the employee who is just starting.
It goes without saying that communication is a very valuable skill in any role. Even if you're the most technical person, if you can't communicate the goal of your work or help get other people on board your project will likely move slower or perhaps never even get started.
There are several great writers on Substack that focus heavily on influence. The reason is whether you're an IC or a manager the ability to get buy-in from other teams or work with them to ensure that your project goes the right way is crucial. It can be the difference between your project and team moving forward or continuing to be stuck for the next 6 months.
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📝 Why Influence Without Authority Is a Vital Skill for Anyone by Irina Stanescu
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📝 Lesson #26: How to lead without being in management by Lessons in Engineering Leadership
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📚 Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It (paid)
I'd actually love some more templates, so if you have any feel free to send them over!
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📝 Which cloud provider should be used when building a big data solution? by Alex Xu
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📝 Optimizing Your Data Infrastructure Costs: How To Approach It And Common Issues
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📚 Fundamentals of Data Engineering: Plan and Build Robust Data Systems by Joe Reis and Matt Housley
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📚 Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications by Chip Huyen
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🎥 Walking Through Data Infrastructure Migrations - With Real-Life Examples
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🎥 What is Data Pipeline | How to design Data Pipeline ? - ETL vs Data pipeline
I often noticed that as a data leader you need to look into alternatives to various solutions. So here are some articles
- 📝Alternatives to dbt
- 📝Alternatives & Competitors To Hevo
- 📝Alternatives to SSIS(SQL Server Integration Services) – How To Migrate Away From SSIS
- 📝4 Alternatives to Fivetran: The Evolving Dynamics of the ETL & ELT Tool Market
This last section is a mix of articles that range from focusing on how to calculate productivity or perhaps how not to, as well as some other pieces of content I didn't feel like had a specific category.
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📝 Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey (paid) by Gergely Orosz
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📝 The Trap of Tying Your Identity to Your Job Title. (paid) by Elena Verna
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Planning Your Data Roadmap For 2024 – Elevating Your Data Strategy
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🎥 How To Drive Value With Data Science - Managing Data Science Teams In Healthcare
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🎥 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 with Matt Turck
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🎥 Structuring Data Teams And Self Serve Analytics With Ethan Aaron