[DanielBMarkham]

Disclaimer: my day job is helping companies continue to operate at scale the same as they did when there were only 5 of them. Turns out this is not a trivial thing to do.

Agile/XP practices are a good starting place in-between cowboy programming and micro-management hell -- as long as you don't take them as a recipe book. They're simply best practices that you can and should learn. Then prune/modify as necessary. There are really too many books to list separately. I'd advise joining a local Agile User's Group and noticing who has their shit in one sock. Then find out what they're doing. You can also bring in external coaches.

You need a couple of good books on the people part of things. I can guarantee you that the people part of things is where you'll screw up. "Drive" is really good. http://amzn.to/1qtZdEd So is PeopleWare http://amzn.to/1iBnasO

For strategic stuff, especially in a growing company, you're going to have to master large work queues without having them eat you alive. If you'll allow me to self-promote, my Backlogs series is geared exactly towards this problem. http://tiny-giant-books.com/backlogs.htm

One observation: as you grow, it's not enough that you pay extremely careful attention to whom you hire. You also need to create an on-boarding system where new hires can learn and adopt the culture -- things like pair programming, how the build works, good coding etiquette, and so on. Setting the table for strategy to work is actually more important than whatever the strategy is.

Second observation: I imagine you're going to be swimming in business book recommendations. Business books are like dieting books: everybody has a few favorites. (I imagine this is because the material inside matches how they already feel). Better to identify specific areas, like Agile Requirements Modeling, and find books targeting those areas. Then look for practical advice. Otherwise you'll just have a ton of books that you'll spend hundreds of hours reading and not really have much to show for it at the end of the process.

[chollida1]

Links to the books Drive: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004P1JDJO

and Peopleware: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321934113/

for those who are worried about clicking url shortners

[davidw]

DanielBMarkham has been on this site for a long time and is pretty well known, so I would trust him not to put shady links.

I also heartily agree with him that lots of business books are best digested as summaries - look them up on wikipedia, for instance. The fundamental problem is that many have a simple idea, but you can't sell a 10 page book. So it gets fluffed up with lots of case studies and extra material until it's long enough to sell as a book.