Software Leadership

Game development isn't just about ideas and creativity. It's about survival. It's about turning your vision into a product that retains, monetizes, and scales—without burning out your team or going broke. The Game Product Management Handbook gives you the real-world systems, mental models, and growth frameworks used inside studios that ship and scale. No fluff. No theory. Just tactics forged through 16 years of painful pivots, missed payrolls, and unexpected wins.

At most technology companies, you'll reach Senior software engineer, the career level for software engineers, in five to eight years. At the career level, your company's career ladder won't require that you work towards the next promotion; being promoted further is an exception rather than expected. This is also when many engineers are first given an opportunity to move into engineering management.

Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully.

Engineering isn’t broken because people stopped caring. It’s broken because product thinking got lost. In a world where shipping is fast but impact is rare, Product Driven offers a new model for engineering leadership. One built on outcomes, not output. If you’ve ever led a software team and wondered why the work feels disconnected, why your best engineers start coasting, or why everything still flows through you no matter how senior your team gets, this book is your roadmap out.

In Agile Leadership Toolkit, longtime agile leader Peter Koning provides a practical and invaluable steering wheel for agile leaders and their teams. Drawing on his extensive experience helping leaders drive more value from agile, Koning offers a comprehensive toolkit for continuously improving your environment.

In Understanding Software, Max Kanat-Alexander, Technical Lead for Code Health at Google, shows you how to bring simplicity back to computer programming. Max explains to you why programmers suck, and how to suck less as a programmer. There's just too much complex stuff in the world. Complex stuff can't be used, and it breaks too easily. Complexity is stupid. Simplicity is smart. 

Is your team agile and self-organizing? What is your role as a leader? Team leadership is the missing link that connects all the buzzwords you hear these days to the real world where actual people have to learn, implement, and mainly, believe and push for this stuff to happen. This audiobook is meant for software team leaders, architects, and anyone with a leadership role in the software business. Hear advice from real team leaders, consultants, and everyday gurus of management.

What is the true meaning of quality? How can you influence positive attitudes towards quality within the workplace? Leading Quality teaches you how to influence and align your company’s definition of quality, so that you can deliver the best possible experience to your clients. You will learn the techniques successful leaders use to make their strategic decisions and you will be given the tools to ensure that your team is in alignment to achieving common goals.

OKRs are about goals bigger than the next story, or even epic. They prioritise purpose and strategy over the ever looming, high maintenance backlogs we all know too well. OKRs are important to agile teams because they deal with the big things, they inspire forward thinking, encourage engage senior leaders, and help debug strategy. Acclaimed author Allan Kelly describes why you should use OKRs, how to write them successfully, how to set measurable KRs, execute against OKRs in an agile environment to deliver outcomes, and the pitfalls and problems to avoid so you can deliver your outcomes.

How to negotiate and manage your software portfolio without getting taken advantage of by your suppliers. The fuse on your software budget is BURNING fast! Software companies have crafted a one-sided business model, and they are the only winners. BOOM! You need to understand NOW how one-sided your software relationships and contracts are. Leveling this playing field will provide you with an advantage over your competitors who do not understand the complexities of one of the most critical contracts in your business.

Offering a critical guide for CEOs, CTOs, and all stakeholders weary of software failures costing their companies dearly, Jeffrey Palermo uses his book to address the pervasive issues in software development that threaten business continuity and growth. This five-step process to ensure software success starts with a stark reminder of how poor software can cripple even the largest enterprises.

Waterfall methodology is part of the linear, scope-driven lifecycles family of approaches. As it is the manifestation of the command-and-control organization, it is highly prescriptive. Almost all organizations using the methodology have a similar set of processes, mostly based on the PMBOK (more on that later).