Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley : Successful Engineering Entrepreneurs' Best Practices and Career Guidance for Tomorrow's Technical Leaders on Leadership, Management, Development, and Business

Containing the ideas, practices, and histories of a group of Silicon Valley VP's, directors and CTO's with more than 400 man-years of experience running engineering teams in Silicon Valley, this book contains everything you need to know to successfully run a hi-tech engineering organization. Honest and comprehensive, this book will save you time and pain in dealing with people, technical and business issues. This book covers the topics you need to know to get the job done right. It's what we would have wanted to know the day we took the job! You will learn how to develop your career as a senior technical leader, and how the job evolves from a startup to an established organization, including the challenges of very rapid growth. The book looks at all components of the complete product development lifecycle, from product planning to development to support, giving practical advice for the leader as to what to do in each phase. It looks at team leadership, dynamics and development, with topics ranging from developing team culture to meeting management to personnel development, as well as dealing with difficult situations. The difficult challenges of build-versus-buy decisions, offshore and outsourced development are also reviewed. Finally the connections of the engineering leader to the other executives and teams in the company are studied. Each chapter is illustrated with real life examples. The focus throughout is on realism - illustrating successes as well as problems and challenges, especially the kind of daily life situations that you only learn on the job. All in all, in this book, you will find an overview all the major topics anyone running an engineering organization is likely to face!

If you're looking to make the career jump from Engineer to Engineering manager, this book provides a toolkit that will let you learn from some of the top Engineering VPs and CTOs in Silicon Valley. There are lots of books about management and lots of books about software engineering, but this is the only book that teaches you how to become a great leader in an engineering organization. --Zack Urlocker, VP Database Products, Sun Microsystems

A must read for all engineers who wish to have a successful management career. or. The book offers deep and critical insights into why many engineers do not succeed as managers. A practical guide to a successful management career in engineering driven companies. -- Rajiv Lal, Harvard Business School