# Engineering Leader Guide

> Lead the team that builds it.

Bicycle Guide reconciles the best books on a topic into one sourced guide and shows where they disagree.

Categories below are subject shelves: each groups guides that answer one kind of work or life problem. A guide's link points at its canonical home, which may be a persona front rather than this domain.

Engineering leadership is its own discipline, and most of it is learned the hard way. This is the travel-guide version: we read Apollo and Mission Control, Skunk Works, the software-management canon, and the people building frontier AI, planned the route, and marked every stop worth making — honest about where they disagree, grounded in research, made to stick.

Every guide linked below has a main guide free to read. Some clearly mark additional paid sections, tools and downloads. Guide pages include source information. Links point at each guide's own canonical home, which is not always this domain.

## Lead Teams & Organizations
- [The Bicycle Guide to Lead a Hardware / Deep-Tech Engineering Team](https://engineeringleader.guide/guides/lead-a-hardware-engineering-team): Delivery Performance and Progress Velocity becomes something you produce by design, not by luck.
- [The Bicycle Guide to Run a Big Mission or Program](https://engineeringleader.guide/guides/run-a-big-mission-program): Mission Success and Objective Achievement becomes something you produce by design, not by luck.

## People Analytics & Measurement
- [The Bicycle Guide to Measure and Improve Software Delivery](https://engineeringleader.guide/guides/engineering-analytics): Organizational and business becomes something you produce by design, not by luck.

## Careers & Professions
- [The Bicycle Guide to Lead an AI / ML Research Team](https://engineeringleader.guide/guides/lead-an-ai-ml-research-team): Alignment with Human Values becomes something you produce by design, not by luck.

## Capabilities
- The skills, knowledge, abilities and dispositions taught across multiple guides, joined to the books that ground them and the jobs that require them — see https://engineeringleader.guide/capabilities
- [Team Composition Management](https://engineeringleader.guide/capabilities/ce_team-composition-management): taught across 2 guides, grounded in 5 books.
- [Incremental Mission Design](https://engineeringleader.guide/capabilities/ce_incremental-mission-design): taught across 2 guides, grounded in 4 books.
- [Reward Function Design](https://engineeringleader.guide/capabilities/ce_reward-function-design): taught across 2 guides, grounded in 4 books.
- [Reward Hacking](https://engineeringleader.guide/capabilities/ce_reward-hacking): taught across 2 guides, grounded in 4 books.

## Disagreements
- [Where the books disagree](https://engineeringleader.guide/disagreements): 8 named disagreements with cited books on both sides — tension name, poles, and sources only.

## Books
- [Book library](https://engineeringleader.guide/books): the source corpus every guide cites, browsable by subject.

## More
- [Full guide index](https://engineeringleader.guide/guides): every guide this site serves, organized by shelf.
- [Sitemap](https://engineeringleader.guide/sitemap.xml): every URL on this site, for a complete crawl.
- [MCP server](https://engineeringleader.guide/mcp): remote Model Context Protocol access to the guide registry, taxonomy and capability spine — read-only, no auth required. Also served at https://engineeringleader.guide/api/mcp.
- [MCP well-known descriptor](https://engineeringleader.guide/.well-known/mcp.json): the same transport + tool list as machine-readable JSON, for a probe that checks .well-known before opening a session.
- [OpenAPI](https://engineeringleader.guide/openapi.json): the same registry as a REST machine-readable spec.