57 engineering leaders answered this question. Their responses, alphabetically.
These excerpts come from interviews collected by Vidal Graupera. Each response links to the original interview for the full answer and context. Roles and companies reflect the interview at publication.
Head of Engineering at Code Climate
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI use Todoist to track my personal and work todo lists. I’ve set up Todoist, Zapier and Slack in a very convenient way where I can add/edit/mark as done todos from Todoist, as well as receiving todo reminders all in Slack.
MBA student at MIT Sloan School of Management (and formerly Application Engineering Manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific)
Link to this answerRead the full answerYeah. Would podcasts fall under this?
Manager, UX Research and Strategy, Cisco Cloud Security
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI record the things I need to do as they come in, in a format where I can easily take action later. I take very loose notes in TextEdit and immediately dump any to-dos into a Trello or Milanote board. Trello is great for to-do list management, and Milanote is great for visualizing things on a whiteboard, collage-style. I use them together all the time, it’s easy to link from Milanote back to Trello.
Director, Core Engineering at BAMTECH Media
Link to this answerRead the full interviewBear. It is the first app I’ve ever used that’s managed to take over some of the responsibilities of my notebooks, and I’ve tried oh-so-many. It’s beautiful. Its opinionated bits are limited to areas that don’t flare my distaste for restrictions. It knows exactly what kind of text editor it wants to be, and excels at it.
Five stars. 10 out of 10. A-plus-plus. Whatever the thing is that the rating system you use uses, it gets the most of them.
SVP of Engineering at Kindred.ai
Link to this answerRead the full interviewIn terms of engineering tools, I use Confluence, Jira, and Build tools among others. But more generally, I think Google Slides are great for presentations. I also keep up to date with my LinkedIn news feed and like everybody else rely on my smartphone when I’m on the go. Nothing replaces learning from contacts and human beings. So using all these tools to get real and direct human insight on various technologies /challenges is what I cherish the most.
Web Engineering Lead at Asana
Link to this answerRead the full interviewOf course, I have to say Asana 🙂 I live, breathe and build Asana! The inbox feature is crafted in a way, unlike generic email. The design encourages you to be productive; notifications are highly customizable, so you can opt out of push notifications on status updates that might not be pertinent to your work. Aside from Asana, I use the calendar on my phone to keep me sane. It tells me where I need to be, what my day will look like, what time I have to get work done, and I even use it to remind myself of what happened a few weeks or months before.
Director of Engineering at PlanGrid
Link to this answerRead the full answerActiveInbox. It’s a Gmail plugin that allows you to treat emails as tasks. I have a workflow in which I touch every email exactly once and then archive it. If I need to follow up on it I can tag it as an email that requires action by a certain date. If I’m waiting for a response from someone else, I can mark that as well. ActiveInbox then provides me with a dashboard that shows me which emails I need to respond to and which ones I’m waiting on. Not having to keep track of all of that mentally is great.
VP of Engineering at Ticket Evolution
Link to this answerRead the full interviewMedium.com as an internet resource. Evernote as tool to keep track of information. Slack as a communication tool. Grafana for tracking the health and trajectory of the systems I manage.
Director of Engineering at Teradata
Link to this answerRead the full answerIn a fast-paced environment, no one project management tool fits the bill. Most tools (such as JIRA or Asana) are too granular or busy. There is still a need for an executive summary view of what-who-when.
Director of Engineering at VTS
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI’m pretty low-tech. For my day-to-day management, I depend heavily on a handful of to-do lists (action items from 1:1s, leadership tasks, operational issues, a couple of others). I’ve tried managing these lists in a notebook, various mobile apps, text files in Dropbox, or in personal Trello boards (this is my current approach). These approaches are all pretty much the same in practice, so I wouldn’t say there’s any one tool I’d find irreplaceable; the important thing has been making sure I give myself time to regularly review the things that are currently on my plate, clean-up as needed, and have an opportunity to think.
Director of Engineering at Modern Tribe
Link to this answerRead the full interviewSlack, Google Calendar and Zoom are pretty important to my life in its current form. But I’m going to give a shout out to Calendly. It’s made my life much easier by removing the hassle of scheduling most meetings and interviews.
Host, Coaching for Leaders podcast
Link to this answerRead the full interviewThe Look & Sound of Leadership podcast from my friend Tom Henschel. His show is 15 minutes, once a month, and he shares a dramatization of a coaching interaction he’s had with an executive leader. It’s really well done, and he’s very gifted at making things very simple but also powerful.
Director of Engineering at Nuance Communications
Link to this answerRead the full interviewEach day we use so many tools and products to do what we have to do! Skype and HipChat are two such tools that help us connect and interact, each day.
Director, Software Development at Box
Link to this answerRead the full answerThe two things that I use most frequently, domain specific, I read Hacker News, and I listen to Software Engineering Daily podcasts.
I also like to tinker with new things and try new stuff out, so I’m always trying a new app or a new system for notetaking, information capture, etc. I’m very interested in security and privacy. I love to play around with devices or applications that support security and privacy in the modern age that we live in and the future that we’re moving toward, which removes these things as a standard experience for most people.
Backend Engineering Manager at DataFox
Link to this answerRead the full answerI hate doing anything on my phone: the screen is tiny, the keyboard is small, there aren’t enough shortcuts, and web pages are trimmed. I’m convinced it’s always worth it to get a laptop rather than to try to solve your problem on your phone. So I would say I can’t live without my laptop. If I’m in bed checking Slack, I’ll pull out my laptop just to be able to see it properly. I’m sure mobile apps are the future, but I hope full web apps never die. My phone is great at providing a hotspot though, that was a great investment.
Build, CI & DevInsights Manager at Netflix
Link to this answerRead the full interviewBullet journaling helps me stay on tasks and remember things. Youcanbookme helps me coordinate phone screenings with candidates by syncing with my Google Calendar availability. Boomerang helps me pre schedule follow up emails with ease. Google Canned Responses helps me be more efficient with stock message templates for communication I send frequently.
VP of Engineering at Xero
Link to this answerRead the full answerYou know, I actually tried quite a few and I realized I’m kind of really organized myself. For me, I don’t really need to use any tools aside from just making sure I’m really disciplined with my inbox and calendar. But I read some good suggestions on previous interviews on your website and I’m going to try them. So far, from a productivity perspective, I found that zero inbox and using the calendar as your tool is the core principle which lets you not really use additional tools.
Engineering Manager at Airbnb
Link to this answerRead the full answerI tried a couple but then the more I try I realized that there’s none that worked for me. And this is really bad, but I end up in spreadsheets and Google Docs. I’m guessing Google Docs and Gmail. They make fun of me because I could potentially live with just an iPad. I really don’t need a computer anymore. For me Google docs I have, well actually, so for me having templates, I have a lot of templates because if I’m writing a memo, boom. And I just fill it in. If I’m writing an eng proposal if I’m writing… I need a decision to be made.
Chief Technology Officer for Badger Maps
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI fall apart quickly if I’m not organized, so aside from Google Calendar, I couldn’t live without some kind of product or project management tool. We adopted Asana at an early stage in our business as a project management tool, and it has stuck with me for organizing our roadmap, backlog, and sprints, as well as keeping track of follow-ups from one-on-one meetings. I also recently started using Craft.io for more of an agile product management tool, and really appreciate the simplicity of their UX and workflow, but Asana still acts as my brain’s external hard drive for everything else I need to keep track of.
Engineering Manager at Uber
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI’d say Audible. Whenever I take a walk or go to the gym, I listen to audiobooks, either for education or for fun.
Engineering Manager, Technologist, Writer, Speaker, Mother
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI have many tools that I like and use. Google products like Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides for personal and work projects, and then Slack for communicating with my team members.
Engineering Manager at Linkedin
Link to this answerRead the full interviewEvernote. It is lightweight, syncs across all devices, and can be as simple as you want it to be. I use it to keep track of my meeting goals, my daily goals, and miscellaneous to-do’s-all organized as notebooks.
Senior Director at Groupon
Link to this answerRead the full answerI don’t have a single resource where I can pull information from, but in general, I’m more in favor of reading good books than articles, because I think people’s time is very precious. There are tons of really good books written on management. Typical managers, are sort of all over the place, so it’s hard enough to carve out some time for self-improvement, and how to use that time more effectively.
Director of Treatment Delivery Applied Research at Varian Medical Systems
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI desperately need a desktop search tool. As my employer uses the Windows environment, I use the search tool called X1 (there are probably other search tools as well). I find the X1 UI to be just what I need, making it very easy for me to search my emails & files.
Link to this answerRead the full answerI recruited a really large amount of my team through Twitter, so I’m going to say Twitter is right up there.
But let’s see … I think in the past we’ve talked about this, I’ve never been able to even come up with one. Okay, yes. Notion.
Notion is a tool I cannot live without now. It’s great for organizing notes. I can write my notes, my talks, my outlines, my meetings in Notion and markdown. I run all my meeting agendas in Notion, I have a separate board for every one of my one-on-ones. The day before, people throw in items into those boards and then we catch up on them during our meeting. So, I’d say Notion.
Senior Engineering Manager at Target
Link to this answerRead the full interviewActually, the Rands Leadership Slack workspace where I met Vidal! I only discovered it a couple weeks ago, but have been amazed by the community. It is a great place to seek advice on a specific topic or issue, and also discover new resources, events, and tools.
CTO at One Medical
Link to this answerRead the full answerOne is OmniFocus. I have used other to-do lists before (I used a paper to-do list for a long time), and OmniFocus is the only thing that is scaled to the workload that I have today. OmniFocus allows you to enter tasks and filter by project or context. At any given time, I can find the set of action items that are relevant.
For example, over the course of the week, I file projects to delegate, projects to check in on, meeting agenda items, etc. under each of my team member’s names as a context. When we have our one-on-one, and I can filter by that person and get everything related to them in one view.
Software Development Manager at Amazon
Link to this answerRead the full answerWikipedia is one of those underrated tools which I absolutely love and adore for two reasons. Number one, it provides a comprehensive, extremely detailed knowledge at one place rather than you trying to search 50 sites and 50 links, this is the one-stop for anything technical that I want to learn, or everything even nontechnical about people about personalities, about a country, about some other technology, something which is about a product. This is a great resource. I cannot live without Wikipedia by the way. It’s installed on my phone and the app is installed. And that is something that I keep looking at for learning various technologies…
VP of Engineering at Quora
Link to this answerRead the full answerI have a couple of tools that I depend on every single day at work that I feel are the most efficient. I don’t think any of them are surprising, but I’m happy to share.
As a manager, a large part of my day-to-day, tactical job is responding to emails, reading and writing documents, and attending meetings. As a result, Gmail and its mobile app are essential to me. My calendar is important to keep my work day as well as my personal life optimized. I use Google Calendar with no complaints.
Director of Engineering CircleCI
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI love Pocket. I’ve been using it for reading (though, frankly, more saving articles than reading) for many years, and continuously add content and maintain existing information. At this point, my archive within Pocket contains hundreds of articles on topics related to my work, such as people management, agility in organisations & agile process, diversity and inclusion, hiring, and many more, and it’s become my go-to source when I have questions, or to help others out.
President, Technology at Affirm, Inc.
Link to this answerRead the full answerI try to simplify things. My day basically revolves around my inbox. And so that is basically the core of it. I try the actually strip down the number of tools and ways of getting things done, back to time management. Attempt to serialize my day and my tasks as much as possible. To just create focus on the task at hand and to get it done. And so, for me, it’s actually usually compelling the rest of my team to narrow down the avenues in which we engage.
Senior Vice President at Barracuda Networks
Link to this answerRead the full interviewActually the one resource I really love is the First Round Capital Review. I don’t know if you’ve had the opportunity to read it, but it’s a blog that’s being managed by a famous venture capital fund called First Round Capital. It’s a really, really high quality resource on a lot of things that relate to my world. It’s about technology and leadership and engineering and product management and growth and hiring or recruiting. It’s a little bit more targeted at startups than larger companies, but I think there are a lot of, a lot, a lot of useful tools and frameworks there and really, really great interviews with people that are world class at…
Senior Director of SBU Solutions Enablement at ANSYS
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI am a big user of LinkedIn. Coming from the Semiconductor and EDA industries, it’s a small world, and this helps me stay connected to friends and colleagues. Also, I learn a lot from the posts and comments from my network, especially about the latest trends around 5G, Semiconductors, Autonomous Systems and Digital Health – some of my favorite topics. It’s a great way to keep on top of the latest technology news as well as stay connected to my network.
Engineering Manager at Etsy
Link to this answerRead the full interviewSlack, or more specifically the Rands Leadership Slack. I’ve found a great deal of community there, as well as mentorship by a diverse set of leaders. When I’m faced with a challenging decision, need some copy-editing, or need help processing how I feel about something, I seek help there.
Outside of that slack, I rely heavily on Twitter for insights from other leaders. @lara\hogan, @maascamp, @KieranSnyder, @EricaJoy, et al. They all make me a better manager and human.
Co-author: Managing the Unmanageable and Founder/CEO Wanderful interactive storybooks
Link to this answerRead the full interviewThe one tool I can’t live without is one I have used for almost 25 years now – an electronic “Rolodex” for maintaining contacts. It allows you to scan in business cards, making the collection of contacts easier and each contact can be categorized by one or more (editable) types. But it’s the capability to add free form notes of all kinds with a “keyword” search capability that makes it so powerful. I keep all kinds of information in this searchable database of information and can dig up almost anything that I need to access immediately. Another plus is it keeps all my contacts securely in one place, without needing to go on-line to access…
Head of Product Development and Engineering for Sonatype
Link to this answerRead the full interviewThis perhaps isn’t novel, but Google’s G Suite certainly fits the bill. With our fully remote work environment, the combined synchronous and asynchronous collaboration this platform enables provides extraordinary benefit. I’ve witnessed situations where we were on a short timeline to release a high-profile application security advisory to customers and users. We had 10 or more people simultaneously fleshing out the content, very quickly, very effectively. It was like watching a time-lapse video of a sculptor at work.
VP Software Development at Viscira
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI have become a fan of OfficeVibe.com, which does anonymous employee surveys that measure the employee engagement. It has allowed me to speak directly to employee concerns, get in front of hidden issues and ensure that I have communicated effectively all organization and team positions and policies. I receive direct feedback and I am able to respond to the anonymous commenter with a clear response while working to ensure they are aligned with whatever the stance is. Often, I use this to flag organizational issues that need to be addressed at the company level. It is a great tool and well worth the expense.
Senior Engineering Manager at Google
Link to this answerRead the full answerNotebook and a pencil. Not an internet resource, but super useful. I’m left-handed, so I write everything with a pencil. I remember things better, as I mentioned, when I write them down so a notebook and pencil are my best tools.
I also use Google Calendar a lot. I use it for my professional life as well as my personal life. I think it’s a good tool for coordination and time management. It definitely helps me to stay organized.
VP of Engineering at Codecademy
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI’m a huge fan of LinkedIn. I find myself on it many times every day to review candidates, find potential future hires and connect with people in the community. It’s also a great resource for catching up on various topics related to hiring, technology, etc.
Director of Engineering at Stitch Fix
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI’ll do the two I already mentioned:
1. Things – How I manage my life. I’d be lost without it. 2. iA Writer – Writing helps me think. At this point, I pretty much think in Markdown. iA Writer gives just enough formatting to help clarify my thoughts while being restricted enough that I stay focused on the words.
Senior Director of Product at Redfin
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI like to listen to different podcasts, so there’s just lots of great product podcasts out there. And I think they just help me think about the world differently and there are lots of great product thinkers out there. Listening to different podcasts, it brings a fresh perspective into my work.
Delivery Lead for Celerity Consulting
Link to this answerRead the full answerI want to mention the Deming Blog at https://blog.deming.org/ because that’s something I go back to pretty often.
And John’s curiouscat management blog. Lean Enterprise Institute has it’s own blog https://www.lean.org/. Those are the three things I constantly go to often.
VP of Information Security at Veterans United Home Loans
Link to this answerRead the full answerWell, I thought about this one a little bit. There’s not specifically one, but I think there’s one that I use inadvertently that is actually pretty important. Generically, it’s YouTube. There’s so many free training resources that are available. Yeah, it’s also possible to waste a lot of time. But if I’m looking for something of a how-to, or information about leading, there’s a lot of YouTube videos that are there. That’s probably not the answer you were looking for, but there’s really not another resource that I use on a regular basis other than just searching and looking for people who are thinking new thoughts, different things or…
Head of Payments at Stripe
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI love Google tools. For both my personal and professional projects, I do everything using a combination of email, slides, docs, and spreadsheets, easily cross-referencing them and using collaborative editing.
CTO of Mitterra Ecommerce Solutions and Author of This is Professional Services
Link to this answerRead the full interviewThe entire SAAS suite of tools from Atlassian. I’m a huge fan of documenting our processes so we know what we’ve done in the past and learn from, but I HATE documents. Documents are so lonely, so impersonal. When you want to share a document, you have to consciously select someone and give it away ONLY TO THAT PERSON… it’s exclusive and doesn’t promote team learning and growth. A wiki-like confluence allows a team to document at their own pace (and their own styles), and it’s shared amongst the team in an open and collaborative way. JIRA is absolutely fantastic too… you can do so much with it. Spend a little time to understand custom…
Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom
Link to this answerRead the full interviewThe PDF summary of the book Crucial Conversations is an internet resource that I can’t live without. An internet tool that I can’t live without is Audible.com for listening to audio books.
Consultant, Interim VP Engineering and Author
Link to this answerRead the full answerIt’s not an internet tool, but I’ve moved it to the cloud. I started using a personal CRM system way back when I was at Apple. It wasn’t called a CRM tool back then, of course. It’s a Macintosh application that was then known as Quickdex, was renamed InfoGenie, and is now known as iData. Some of the PC people I know use Microsoft OneNote. Some who started keeping track after the dawn of the internet use Evernote. Or a wiki like PBworks. But I find it essential to have a tool that’s stable over time (decades for me!) for keeping track not only of my network of people but also tools and technologies and thoughts and “stuff”.
VP of Engineering at Abstract
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI’m a huge fan of Medium. I spend about 15 minutes of my day reading articles on Medium. I love all the publications and the variety and especially around leadership, I think there are several journals that have very good articles to read and it offers me a different viewpoint and an insight into how others are doing leadership.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
VP, Engineering @ Box
Link to this answerRead the full answerThat’s easy: Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. I think that I would trade ten other things for that in a moment, e.g. Medium, Stack Overflow, any of those other great sources like Martin Fowler’s blog, etc. Stratechery has been one of the most powerful reads for me the last few years, it has really expanded my business acumen.
Director of Software Engineering, NationalMI
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI use the Safari online library that has quite good videos and books on technical as well as managerial topics. I also use Feedly as a collector of RSS feeds about topics of interests.
Engineering Manager at Slack
Link to this answerRead the full interviewGoogle Calendar, Bear & Pocket. I love to read and I use Pocket to keep up with latest articles. Being a very organized person, I use my calendar to plan my days and Bear for my to-do list My to-do list used to very long and never ending which didn’t allow me to focus on the right things. Now each day, I come up with 3 top things to focus on.
Director, Green & Energy Services at GRS Group
Link to this answerRead the full interviewLinkedIn. I love actively networking and LinkedIn has allowed me to create a worldwide network. The information that they share about their experiences in engineering has helped me grow in my work. I have also had the opportunity to connect with many younger engineers to help mentor them in one form or another.
Engineering Manager at Helpshift
Link to this answerRead the full interviewOrgMode, my secret weapon 🙂
I’ll sneak in another one, because this one’s more on-topic : https://softwareleadweekly.com/
Engineering Manager at DoorDash
Link to this answerRead the full interviewIt’s hard to choose just one but I could name a few. We use Slack to stay connected and many monitoring and alerting tools like Splunk, Wavefront and Chatio to help us catch issues as soon as they happen. In general, DoorDash employs a KPI system to stay accountable and march toward shared goals. Of course, I use email to communicate but I try not to get bogged down by my inbox.
VP Global SaaS Operations at Aktana
Link to this answerRead the full interviewYeah, really I’m more active on LinkedIn than on any other social app. You get to get the views off a lot of people and you get to learn a lot of good articles that have been posted by the different magazines, like posts or CNN or CIO.com. I’m part of those groups and LinkedIn is one of my favorite apps. That’s where I’m more socially active almost every day.
Senior Director, Software Engineering at Thumbtack
Link to this answerRead the full interviewI don’t use anything too fancy – Gmail and Google Docs/Sheets are pretty much my home base. One more specific thing is that having a great data analysis stack is really important – for example, using Mode Analytics on top of Bigquery works well for us.
VP of Technology at Motive Retail
Link to this answerRead the full interviewIf I have to pick a single one, it has to be Pocket (https://getpocket.com/). Having a “read-it-later” list keeps me sane. It allows me to prioritize my reading, and also bookmark sites that I want to check later. Here’s how I use it: I have Pocket installed as a Chrome extension and it comes bundled with Firefox. I have it as an application on my iPad and my iPhone. During the day, if I come across an interesting article, video or a website, I add it to my Pocket list. After work, when it’s time to read, I go through my daily list, I create a quick mental priority map, and I choose the article that tops it. This is my way to dedicate my…
