Shipping Greatness: Lessons in Leadership from Amazon and Google

Need a shortcut to a degree in shipping great software? Successful team leaders must have an extremely broad skill set to find the right product, work through a complex and ever-changing development process, and do it all incredibly quickly. In this guide, Chris Vander Mey provides a simplified, no-BS approach to the entire software lifecycle, distilled from lessons he learned as a manager at Amazon and Google.

In the first part of the book, you’ll learn a step-by-step shipping process used by many of the best teams at Google and Amazon. Part II shows you the techniques, best practices, and skills you need to face an array of challenges in product, program, project, and engineering management.

• Clearly define your product and develop your mission and strategy
• Assemble your team and understand enough about systems to communicate with them
• Create a beautiful, intuitive, and simple user experience
• Track your team’s deliverables and closely manage the testing process
• Communicate clearly to gracefully handle requests, senior-management interactions, and feedback from various sources
• Build metrics to track progress, spot problems, and celebrate success
• Stick to your launch checklist and plan for marketing and PR

Chris Vander Mey is a former Google product manager and Amazon engineering manager, and has held multiple roles in small startups. He has a Master of Engineering Management from Dartmouth College and a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Virginia. He started writing code two decades ago and has shipped software to hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses.