CatB is a fine book. That feels like such add choice for the situation, aside from just seeing if the person was willing to engage with ideas within software.
I'm curious what texts people would suggest for a non-developer to get some insight.
The ones that come to my mind are the Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Glass, or maybe even the 1968 NATO report on software engineering.
What you really need to do is schedule daily status meetings, a longer weekly status meeting, and -- this is the real velocity trick -- monthly OKR reviews as well as quarterly slide presentations.
It's important the slide deck be polished for all the people who want to come learn about the project, so it makes sense to spend at least a month preparing it.
And the neat thing is that all this work will get you lots of suggestions from executives about how you could address all the velocity issues that your project seems to have all the time! So you'd better budget 2-4 weeks after the presentation to follow up, have stakeholder meetings, and make sure everyone really feels heard.
With just these few simple techniques, you too can get your engineers moving at the blinding speed of an average FAANG engineering team.
I'm curious what texts people would suggest for a non-developer to get some insight.
The ones that come to my mind are the Mythical Man Month, Peopleware, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Glass, or maybe even the 1968 NATO report on software engineering.