The Engineering Executive's Primer
Will Larson
- Status
- Reading now
- Phase
- 1 — Strategy & executive narrative
- Started
- September 8, 2026
- leadership
- engineering
- executive
From the publisher
A field guide to the engineering-executive role — VP of Engineering, CTO — written for people entering it for the first time. Larson covers the jump from engineering management, building executive presence, setting technical and organizational strategy, running planning and headcount, managing up to a board and sideways to peers, and the parts of the job nobody warns you about.
My notes
Reading log
2026.10.09 - Across the chapters, I am truly appreciating how Will Larson lays out the challenge and his approaches with concrete examples. In some recent chapters, he has also contrasted how he looks at things now versus how he looked at things before. Seeing the growth and perspective change is so helpful because it provides me a way to orient where I am in my journey. This contrast was highlighted in his chapter on Leadership Styles when he spoke about how to navigate around micromanagement. Larson argues that most young managers stay out of the details to avoid being a "micromanager", but that digging into the details does not make you a micromanager. Instead it gives you the ability to support your team better. You become a micromanager when you are giving directions on tasks that can be accomplished just fine without you, not by knowing what is going on with your team.
2026.09.14 - I just finished Chapter 3, Writing Your Engineering Strategy. Much earlier this year I read Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, and this chapter was a good overview of that book with a particular focus on Engineering (of course). I appreciate the concrete examples of guiding policies and coherent actions in the engineering world. Strategy should be tangible, that is what the guiding policies and coherent actions work to enable.