In every product I've worked on, UI tests were always flaky. You can either live with it - spend time maintaining them, do manual testing on every PR - or delete them and accept lower quality.
Someone finally solved this!
Meticulous records real user sessions and automatically builds your test suite from them. On every PR, in under 5 minutes, you see exactly what broke. 30-40 seconds to know if you're good to ship (the unique way they achieved it is surprisingly complex and genius, definitely worth a read).
Oh and it’s not sponsored today! I want them as a sponsor (love their direction and product), and want to show it’s a good fit for my audience :)
3 months ago, my team got moved off our main product and into a group that builds greenfield projects.
Three months in, I have two takeaways:
First - our expertise isn't going anywhere. Even with Opus 4.8, engineers have a huge advantage in building things that won’t break.
Second - every engineer (and especially their manager 🙋♂️) is now expected to do far more than pure engineering. And I’m not talking about just Product Management and basic UX skills:
We are all ‘product engineers’, taking vague pains and distilling them into minimal features, constantly trying to figure out whether we are going in the right direction, or are too deep in a rabbit hole.
We dabble with marketing and growth engineering - watching where people come from and shipping ideas to improve it. Suddenly PPC is a word I care about.
We read summaries of customer discovery sessions, and in a couple of weeks we'll start leading those calls ourselves, 1:1 (something I’ve very rarely done in my career!).
Each new skill has a whole profession behind it, and we can’t really be excellent in everything. But learning the basics of each is possible, and doesn’t even require any lengthy courses.
I’ve chosen a single book (short-ish, accessible and fun!) for every profession an engineer needs to know:
Product Management
Design
User Research
Customer Experience
Business
Marketing
Growth
1. Competing Against Luck
Clayton M. Christensen · Product Management ·⭐ 4.15 · 6.1K ratings · 2016
Christensen’s ‘Jobs to be done’ framework is in my opinion the very basis of product management. Why do customers ‘hire’ our product?
It became so easy to just add feature after feature into your product, making it bloated and unusable.
If you want to get even deeper into product management, I recommend Inspired by Marty Cagan.
Customers don't want products, they want solutions to their problems.
2. The Design of Everyday Things
Donald A. Norman · Design ·⭐ 4.15 · 48.3K ratings · 1988
I have a terrible ‘design’ sense. I’m a bit color blind, and everything I design is always ugly. The critical part about user experience and design is NOT the polished/perfect look - it’s whether customers can achieve what they need.
The book is old but timeless. It was published before the internet, but is full of amazing day-to-day examples, and immortal concepts like discoverability, affordances, and signifiers, which are relevant for every type of product.
Question everything. I am particularly fond of “stupid” questions. A stupid question asks about things so fundamental that everyone assumes the answer is obvious. But when the question is taken seriously, it often turns out to be profound: the obvious often is not obvious at all.
What we assume to be obvious is simply the way things have always been done, but now that it is questioned, we don’t actually know the reasons. Quite often the solution to problems is discovered through stupid questions, through questioning the obvious.
3. Unreasonable Hospitality
Will Guidara · Customer Experience⭐ 4.41 · 40.0K ratings · 2022
If you have to pick just one book - pick this one. It’s about the creation and running of the best restaurant in the world. It’s fun, engaging, and even though it’s about a restaurant - it’s super relevant for tech.
Loyal customers might be the biggest moat a company can build today, and every engineer should think more deeply about delighting customers.
Too many companies have left the human behind. They've been so focused on products, they've forgotten about people. And while it may be impossible to quantify in financial terms the impact of making someone feel good, don't think for a second that it doesn't matter. In fact, it matters more.
4. The Mom Test
Rob Fitzpatrick · User Research ·⭐ 4.36 · 14.2K ratings · 2013
The days of engineers building in the basement are over. In every company that is founded right now (and also in many established ones), engineers and EMs are expected to be part of conversations with customers.
And from personal experience, doing it right is harder than you’d expect…
Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but it's fragile. While each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth, you're liable to smash it into a million little pieces if you use too blunt an instrument.
5. The Personal MBA
Josh Kaufman · Business ·⭐ 4.09 · 48.8K ratings · 2010
A company is a money machine. Engineering cannot be just a cost center anymore. If you want to succeed in your job, you need to understand how all the financial parts work.
Roughly defined, a business is a repeatable process that: Creates and delivers something of value... That other people want or need... At a price they're willing to pay... In a way that satisfies the customer's needs and expectations... So that the business brings in enough profit to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.
6. This Is Marketing
Seth Godin · Marketing ·⭐ 3.92 · 18.0K ratings · 2018
You have a product, but what about distribution? This isn't a territory usually associated with EMs, but the more noise there is in your category, the more your company needs your help figuring out how to get new customers.
This one is not the most popular marketing book, but I found it very accessible, outlining the basic concepts.
People don't want what you make. They want what it will do for them. They want the way it will make them feel.
7. Marketing Moonshots
Tom Orbach · Growth · 2025
My favorite book to get some creative juices flowing. Engineers can be involved in growth through mini-games, side tools, and product experiences.
I got this one by being a paid subscriber of Tom Orbach's newsletter, Marketing Ideas - worth every penny imo (not sponsored!).
Bonus
Secrets of Closing the Sale · Zig Ziglar · Sales ·⭐ 4.17 · 10.4K ratings · 1984
Last week I wrote about persuasion, but another name for it is selling.
This one was written for salespeople, but almost everything in life involves selling. Most EMs hate anything to do with selling and pitching. If you want to be even a little better at it, this is the book for you.
You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.
Books are a topic that's dear to my heart - I’d love to hear your opinions and get any recommendations for books I must read (you can reply to the email, I read everything).
Discover weekly
Essential books for product builders - if you are into books, Lenny’s list has many more great ones!
Your best decision last year might be your worst decision today. On knowing when to evaluate your past decisions.
A counterargument to “AI will replace us all”. A straight to the point one I really enjoyed reading.
