5 AI Tools to Build to Be a Better Engineering Leader in 2025
5 stories, 5 tools, 5 actions to take to level up as an engineering leader in the gen AI world!
Intro
The future of engineering leadership isn’t just about managing people. It’s very important to leverage different tools to expand your impact.
As AI continues to progress and new tools are being created almost daily, it’s important to keep finding ways to use different tools to help you. The most effective leaders in 2025 and beyond will do exactly that.
The best way to start?
Start building your own tools that’ll make you a better engineering leader. You’ll increase your overall knowledge of AI, LLMs and different tools available + you’ll build useful things to help you!
Lucky for us, we have Gilad Naor with us. In his career, he worked as an engineering leader for more than a decade for different companies including being an Engineering Manager for companies like Amazon and Meta.
Let’s get straight into it!
The times they are a-changin'
Every week there is another groundbreaking Large Language Model (LLM). It’s exhilarating. And exhausting.
As an engineering leader, you already have so much on your plate. You have to:
Coach a struggling engineer
Interview candidates for the team
Work with stakeholders to align on what to build
Handle the latest crisis, like the defect that broke prod.
And that’s just before you’ve had your morning coffee break.
How do you find the time to stay up to date on the latest AI change?
Here is a powerful tip that you can steal: Benchmark yourself against the Best.
I know that you are busy. Are you busier than Dr. Werner Vogels, AWS’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO)?
A few months ago, he went out and built Distill CLI. It’s an AI tool to capture meeting notes and action items. He uses it when he meets members of his “Office of the CTO.” This is a small team of Distinguished Engineers who work closely with the CTO.
Why did he carve time out of his busy day to build this?
Three reasons:
He had an itch to scratch.
He wanted to learn more about AI.
He wanted to learn more about Rust.
The best way to learn is to build something that you need!
In today’s post, I will show you how to build your own “Office of the CTO,” or “Office of the EM.”
I will share five management stories. For each story, you will learn how to build an AI tool to help you. And in each step, you will learn more about how to make the most out of LLMs.
Once you’re done, I’ll share three mistakes to avoid.
Let’s get started.
Five stories, five tips, five tools
1. The (nearly) botched promotion
The story: The promotion was supposed to be a no-brainer.
Out of nowhere, a senior manager from another team pushed back. His take: she didn’t help an engineer on his team.
My saving grace?
I took copious notes during our 1:1s together. In a couple of hours of work, I was able to find the relevant notes from a few months back. Turns out that the other team didn’t need her help.
Promotion saved.
The tool to build: The first persona that you should build for your Office of the EM (O-EM) is your Executive Assistant. This agent will help you prepare for upcoming meetings, search through your notes, and form connections between meetings.
The insight: LLMs are only as good as the information that they have access to. You can expose your code base and documents to the AI. However, AI cannot help you with information that is not saved anywhere.
The action: Start transcribing and summarizing all of your meetings. Including your walking 1:1s. If you want to build your own tool, OpenAI’s open-source whisper model is a great tool to use.
2. The VP review
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