EM Compass

A practical field guide for engineering managers

Understand your context. Choose what works.

Develop the judgment to identify the right problems, focus on the work that matters most, and balance your team’s reality with the company’s direction.

By Dünya Kırkalı and Maxim Schepelin

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Cover of Engineering Manager’s Compass by Dünya Kırkalı and Maxim Schepelin

Inside the book

The engineering manager’s role, in seven chapters.

Move from understanding your context to setting direction, delivering projects, strengthening team systems, developing people, and managing yourself.

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  1. Understanding your role

    Learn how company size, industry, organizational structure, and team context shape your priorities and leadership approach.

  2. Defining your team's direction

    Assess your team’s current state, build alignment, and set objectives grounded in qualitative and quantitative evidence.

  3. Planning and executing projects

    Define project value, surface risks and assumptions, build useful plans, and adapt as new information emerges.

  4. Boosting your team's productivity

    Design communication, information flow, and processes that help the team deliver quality software at a sustainable pace.

  5. Developing your team

    Shift between executing, enabling, and evolving while building autonomy and shaping team culture.

  6. Managing people

    Build trust, hold meaningful one-on-ones, support growth, and address performance issues clearly.

  7. Managing yourself

    Manage your attention and workload, protect your well-being, and build feedback loops that help you keep improving.

About the authors

Engineering management, made explicit.

Two perspectives shaped by building software, leading teams, and navigating organizations at different stages.

Portrait of Dünya Kırkalı

Dünya Kırkalı

Dünya Kırkalı is an engineering leader and software engineer whose journey spans building mobile apps, web services, data pipelines, and visualizations across diverse industries and teams. Along the way, this breadth of experience shaped him into a true generalist. This generalist perspective became his greatest asset when leading engineers from different disciplines, ultimately guiding him toward the field he truly fell in love with: engineering management. Left to his own devices, Dünya enjoys putting on a Joe Pass record and reflecting on ways to create tools and techniques to help engineering managers discover their own global maxima.

Visit Dünya’s website
Portrait of Maxim Schepelin

Maxim Schepelin

Maxim Schepelin is a solution architect at Booking.com. Over the past fifteen years, he's led teams that turned ideas into systems that hold up at scale—and kept them running. He's picked up the art and science of leading engineering teams, along with how to exit both Vim and Emacs.

Visit Maxim’s website