Book clubs

From time to time, we run internal book clubs on a book from one of our resource lists. All are welcome! However, each club has a suggested audience to indicate roles to which the content is tailored.

To propose a new book club, create an issue in the book clubs project. Individual book clubs which need a dedicated project can create on in the book-clubs group (example).

Better Onboarding

Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments (A Practical Guide to A/B Testing)

  • Dates: 2021-03-11 to 2021-06-10 (every week)
  • Time: 08:00 PT / 15:00 UTC
  • Zoom (password is in the calendar event info)
  • Meeting agenda
  • Discussion issue
  • Suggested audience: growth, product & engineering

Ruby under a Microscope

Software Engineering at Google

The Principles of Product Development Flow

High Output Management

Crucial Conversations

This book club was internal-only.

  • Dates: 2018-10-01 to 2018-11-05
  • Notes
  • Recordings
  • Suggested audience: engineering managers

Suggestions on running a book club

  1. If possible, find a partner. Having two people run the book club has a number of advantages:
    1. Reduced pressure and workload.
    2. Lower chance of needing to reschedule due to illness or other emergency.
    3. Meetings start as a conversation, not a monologue.
    4. Add your buddy as a co-host in Zoom so that meetings can be recorded in your absence
  2. Add the book’s title to the handbook if it isn’t already listed.
    1. Books that are also available as audiobooks increase the potential audience. The more ways people can experience the book, the more people can attend.
  3. Set up the meeting schedule.
    1. Record the meetings and post them to YouTube. If the participants agree, make the videos public.
    2. Consider having the same section of the book covered in different meeting slots, to allow people in different time zones to attend.
  4. Set the expected reading schedule for the entire book before starting, so people know what level of reading is required.
  5. Create an agenda for each session seeded with interesting quotes and concepts from the relevant section of the book.
    1. If possible, prepare topics for all of the sessions before the starting, too - although this requires the hosts to read the whole book up front.
  6. Once the book club is done, seek feedback and update this handbook page!
Last modified December 22, 2023: Migrate all links to the engineering section (88e02786)
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