Awesome Team Management

A curated list of the best resources about team management for managers, Directors, and VPs responsible for building and leading high-performing teams.

Inspired by awesome lists. Maintained by Rework.

Contents

Articles

Books

  • High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove - Intel CEO's foundational management operating system for running high-performing teams. (classic)
  • The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier - Practical guide through every stage from engineer or IC to senior engineering leader.
  • An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson - Systems-thinking approach to management challenges in fast-growing organizations.
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni - Foundational model for diagnosing and fixing what breaks most management teams. (classic)
  • Radical Candor by Kim Scott - The manager's guide to caring personally while challenging directly in every team interaction.

Videos & Talks

Tools & Software

  • Lattice - Performance management platform combining goals, reviews, feedback, and compensation in one system.
  • Culture Amp - Employee engagement and performance platform with analytics for understanding team health.
  • 15Five - Continuous feedback and check-in platform built around coaching-oriented weekly manager rituals.
  • Notion - Flexible team wiki and project management tool for documenting team norms, processes, and goals.
  • Asana - Work management platform for tracking team projects, priorities, and cross-functional deliverables.
  • Linear - Fast, opinionated project management tool built for engineering teams and technical managers.
  • Leapsome - People enablement platform combining 1:1s, performance reviews, learning, and manager development tools.

Templates & Frameworks

Case Studies & Real-World Examples

  • Google (Project Aristotle) - In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle to find out what made its teams most effective. The team analyzed 180 groups over two years and expected to find that the best teams had the best individuals. Instead, the biggest differentiator was psychological safety — whether team members felt safe taking risks without being punished. Teams with high psychological safety were 35% more likely to stay, 20% more effective according to executives, and generated 19% more revenue. Google used the findings to redesign its manager feedback processes and team norms. Source

  • Shopify - Shopify grew its engineering organization from roughly 300 to over 10,000 employees between 2015 and 2022 and built its management model around a concept called "trust through transparency." Every engineering manager was required to publish a written "manager README" — a document explaining how they work, what they expect, and how to communicate with them. Shopify reported that new team members who received a manager README reached full productivity 30% faster than those who didn't, and the practice has since spread across dozens of other tech companies. Source

  • Stripe - Stripe's management culture is built around written communication, long before remote work made it mainstream. All major decisions, project briefs, and performance feedback at Stripe are written down before any meeting happens. Stripe's internal data showed that teams using written briefs resolved ambiguity 50% faster than teams relying on verbal communication, and the practice became foundational to how Stripe scaled its global team past 8,000 employees while maintaining high execution quality. Source

  • Airbnb - After its near-death experience during COVID-19 in 2020 — when bookings dropped 80% in eight weeks and the company laid off 25% of its workforce — CEO Brian Chesky publicly shared how he managed the team through the crisis. He communicated directly, personally, and in writing to every laid-off employee with the specific reasons for their departure and LinkedIn profile boosts. The transparency led to unusually high trust scores in post-departure surveys and Airbnb's remaining team maintained engagement through the recovery, enabling the company to go public in December 2020 at a $47 billion valuation. Source

  • GitLab - GitLab operates as an all-remote company with over 2,000 employees across 65 countries and has built the most documented team management system of any remote company. Its "GitLab Handbook" — published publicly — covers everything from how 1:1 meetings should be run to how managers should handle underperformance. GitLab reports that its approach to asynchronous communication and written norms has kept its manager-to-IC ratio at roughly 1:7, higher than most comparable companies, without sacrificing team coordination quality. Source

  • Intel (Andrew Grove era) - Andrew Grove's management system at Intel, documented in High Output Management (1983), introduced the concept of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to the tech industry. Grove required every team to define quarterly objectives and measurable key results — not tasks, not outputs, but outcomes. Intel's adoption of OKRs correlated with 10 years of sustained market leadership in the semiconductor industry. John Doerr later brought OKRs to Google in 1999, where they've been used ever since, and the framework now governs team management at thousands of companies including Spotify, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Source

Communities & Newsletters

  • Manager Tools Community - The world's most downloaded management podcast with a community of 70,000+ practicing managers.
  • LeadDev Community - Community and conference for engineering managers and technical leaders at all career stages.
  • First Round Review - Newsletter and article archive from First Round Capital featuring management insights from the best operators in tech.

Rework Resources

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Contributing

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