Engineering Leadership: The Hard Parts

Whether they’re building a startup or scaling an established org, engineering leaders know the real job is keeping chaos at bay. In a world of shifting priorities, scarce resources, and rapid change, leadership means embracing the unknown, managing moving targets, and creating clarity where there’s none. Sometimes, you’re building the plane as you’re flying it—writing the roadmap as you go, designing processes in real time.

Engineering Leadership: The Hard Parts cuts through the noise, offering a guide for tackling these gritty, real-world challenges. Current and future leaders, this is your toolkit. It’s packed with principles, techniques, and mental models for thriving in uncertainty.

Navigate the full scope: Step into engineering leadership’s complex, multifaceted role
Build high-impact teams: Master advanced techniques to grow and lead your technical talent
Align and execute: Connect strategy to business outcomes, scale effectively, and balance innovation with precision
Lead with resilience: Adapt quickly and drive continuous improvement
Accelerate your career: Develop your leadership edge and unlock new growth

Stay ahead. Lead with purpose.

Author Biography

Juan Pablo Buriticá knows what it takes to build and scale distributed engineering teams that thrive—whether at fast-moving startups or public companies. As he writes this book, he leads global technology at Convergint as CTO. He has built product engineering teams at Stripe and Splice, always focused on technical excellence and strong team culture. Beyond his work in the industry, he has helped bootstrap the tech community in Colombia and across Latin America through conferences, meetups, and continuous community advocacy, including founding one of the largest Spanish-speaking JavaScript collectives. James Turnbull is CTO at Smartrr, an e-commerce startup focussing on subscriptions and post-sale experiences for customers and merchants. Before Smartrr’s, he was SVP of Engineering at Sotheby’s, ran startup advocacy at Microsoft, founder and CTO at Empatico, CTO at Kickstarter, VP of Engineering at Venmo, and in leadership roles at Glitch, Docker, Timber, and Puppet. He also had a long career in enterprise technology, working in banking, biotech, and e-commerce. He chaired the O’Reilly Velocity conference series, is a startup advisor and investor, and has written eleven technical books.