
Ask HN: What are some good books for a new CTO to read? - victorbojica
I am CTO for some time now, but i now just realised that i may be missing different soft skills. What are some good books to read?
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laurentl
Daniel Jarjoura recently published a fairly complete reading list that might
be useful: [https://techleadership.substack.com/p/the-product-leader-
rea...](https://techleadership.substack.com/p/the-product-leader-reading-list)

Some books I’ve read and enjoyed and/or found useful: The hard thing about
hard things, the innovator’s dilemma, High output management, Accelerate, The
Phoenix project (though I much prefer The Goal)

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AnonHP
I’m getting a non-functional page for that link. The page says that the
content has moved to tlt21.com, but provides no links (I checked after
disabling blockers on my browser too). If I go to tlt21.com, there doesn’t
seem to be an easy way to find this article.

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minhaz23
hey not op but try this webcached page and make sure you dont let it load
completely or else you'll get a page not found error:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_fkbEo...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_fkbEoFW24cJ:https://techleadership.substack.com/p/the-
product-leader-reading-list+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
laurentl
Seems I can't reply to parent so putting the link here:
[https://www.tlt21.com/the-product-leader-reading-
list/](https://www.tlt21.com/the-product-leader-reading-list/)

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commonturtle
I'm not a CTO (yet?) but I've begin to grok some of the stuff involved in
managing teams of engineers. 'The Manager's Path' by Camille Fournier was
really helpful. Lots of very practical advice for all sorts of technical
leaders: senior ICs, front-line managers, managers-of-managers, CTOs.

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mxxx
+1. Great book.

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sarcasmatwork
"Jocko Willink - Extreme Ownership" is a good start. I've got his older books
and newest book on my desk to read next. Good leadership skills and
perspectives etc.

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maps7
While the concept is good the presentation of it is very.. not to my taste.
From what I remember, it relates a lot back to Willink's military background.
After you read a lot of it you realize a lot is common sense.

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rocketpastsix
Each point they (there is two authors, not just Jocko) make has two points:
how they learned it from leading SEALs in Ramadi and then how they helped a
company apply it to their leadership.

The audiobook definitely has that military style to it: they speak is short,
very terse sentences not using more words than necessary. It took me a minute
to get used to it however I quite enjoyed it overall.

Yes it's a lot of common sense, but when you are running a company or a team,
it's easy to have blinders on and miss these obvious things.

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giantg2
Getting to Yes; Exactly What to Say; The Coaching Habit

These are a few that I read and found useful. I'm not a CTO, just an
intermediate developer.

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poushkar
I've put this list together for Tech Leads, but the non-technical parts of it
are very much relevant for CTOs as well: techleadcompass.com

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stevenalowe
Peopleware, Evolutionary architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Ship It

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mars4rp
Bullshit Jobs - David Graeber

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aprdm
Radical Candor is great!

