The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

Ask the team what their goals are. Can they tell you? Do they understand why those are the goals?

Estimates are often useful even if they aren’t perfectly accurate because they help escalate complexity to the rest of the team.

As the senior manager, you may need to play tiebreaker and make decisions about which features are worth cutting, and which features are essential to the project’s success.

You ensure that engineers make decisions with an understanding of the business perspective and the future of the product roadmap.

When technical work requires uncertain research and development, you’re capable of explaining why that uncertainty exists to your nontechnical counterparts.

As technical senior managers, we bring special skills to an organization. In particular, we bring a willingness to embrace and drive change

We’re able to question the way we do things now, and try different things if our current way of operating isn’t working.

Your first job is to be a leader. The company looks to you for guidance on what to do, where to go, how to act, how to think, and what to value.

You understand how to disagree with a decision and commit to deliver on it even though you disagree.

Information gathering or information sharing Sitting in meetings, reading and writing emails, talking to people one on one, gathering perspectives. The strong senior leader is capable of synthesizing large quantities of information quickly, identifying critical elements of that information, and sharing the information with the appropriate third parties in a way they will be able to understand.

Nudging Reminding people of their commitments by asking questions instead of giving orders.

Decision making Taking conflicting perspectives and incomplete information and setting a direction, knowing that the consequences of a poor decision will impact both you and possibly the whole team.

Role modeling Showing people what the values of the company are. Showing up for your commitments.

It took me a long time to realize that my job wasn’t to be the smartest person in the room. It wasn’t to be “right.” Rather, my role was to help the team make the best possible decisions and help them implement them in a sustainable and efficient way.

A good leader shapes technology discussions to inject the strategic objectives and take into consideration the nontechnical implications of a technical decision.

“strategic”? The CTO thinks about the long term, and helps to plan the future of the business and the elements that make that possible.

“executive”? The CTO takes that strategic thinking and helps to make it real and operational by breaking down the problem and directing people to execute against it.

If the CTO doesn’t have a seat at the executive table and doesn’t understand the business challenges the company faces, there’s no way he can guide the technology to solve those challenges.

the CTO must understand where the biggest technical opportunities and risks for the business are and focus on capitalizing on them.

When you feel the need to ask it of your own teams, ask yourself why they don’t understand what the priorities are and what they should be cutting to address them.

Do you know what the top priority is? Do your teams know what it is? Do the developers on those teams know what it is? Sometimes the answer to this question is simply a matter of communication.

You didn’t explicitly go through the list of things in flight and kill or postpone work in order to make room for this priority. You need to do that, if it’s truly urgent. Saying something is top priority is one thing, but making the actual tradeoffs on the schedule to get people moving on it is completely different.

when you’re taken to task for not focusing on the right priority, it’s a sign that you and the CEO have a misaligned understanding of reality, and you need to get on the same page.

If you think a big project should be finished before slotting in new work, get as many details as possible about the value of that project, its current status, and the expected timeline. Be realistic.

the job becomes making sure that the organization moves in the direction it needs to move in, and that includes changing direction when needed.

You do this by clearly communicating the direction to your teams, and making sure they understand it and are taking the necessary steps to change course. Ask your teams for the list of projects the change will impact, so that you can communicate it upward. This will force your management team to actually think about the new initiative and start to plan for it. Ask for the goals of the initiative from its originator, and see how you can combine those goals with work already in flight.

never underestimate how many times and how many ways something needs to be s...

The best thing you can do to manage this situation is to proactively keep the CEO informed about what’s happening and why. Do your best to show that you understand his priorities and tell him about the concrete steps you’re taking to meet those priorities.

difference between my ability to lead in a reactive fashion, looking at the known environment and making plans to accommodate it, and my ability to lead in a forward-thinking fashion.

Try to bring solutions, not problems to be solved.

Ask for advice.

Be supportive. Always ask if there is more you can be doing to help. As much as you can, show that you are there to support

Senior leaders, more than any other group in a company, must actively practice first-team focus (introduced in Chapter 6). They are dedicated first and foremost to the business and its success, and secondly to the success of their departments as a way of contributing to the overall business success.

cone of silence. Disagreements that happen in the context of the leadership team don’t exist to the wider team. Once a decision is made, we commit to that decision and put on a united front in front of our engineering teams and anyone else in the company.

You’re no longer one of the team. Your first team is comprised of your peers at the leadership/executive level,

You need to detach for a few reasons. First, if you don’t detach, you’re likely to be accused of playing favorites.

Second, you need to detach because you need to learn how to lead effectively, and leading effectively requires people to take your words seriously.

If you openly make mistakes and apologize, they learn that it’s OK to make mistakes. If you always ask the same set of questions about a project, people start to ask those questions themselves. If you value certain roles and responsibilities openly above other roles, ambitious people will seek out those valued positions.

It’s deeply tempting to rant to those people you consider friends in your reporting team about the challenges of your position, but this is a bad idea. As their leader, you can easily undermine their confidence by sharing worries that they can’t do anything to mitigate.

Instead of getting tense and angry, he gets curious when things don’t seem to be going well. His first instinct is to ask questions, and these questions often cause the team to come to their own realizations about what’s going wrong.

If you want a team that feels comfortable taking risks and making mistakes, one of the core requirements is a sense of belonging and safety. This means you need to take a little time for small talk.

Most people are scared to take risks in front of people they think will reject them if they fail.

The goal with apologizing is to show people that you know your behavior has an impact on others, and to role-model for them that it’s OK to make a mistake but that you should apologize when you hurt other people.

apologizing doesn’t make you weaker — it makes the whole team stronger.

Get curious. When you disagree with something, ...

How do you measure success? Does the team have the capabilities needed to succeed? Are you providing feedback along the way? I think many leaders forget these requirements and hope they can get a junior team to achieve something just by setting the goal clearly, or believe a more experienced team shouldn’t ever need feedback.

Are you holding yourself accountable for setting them up for success?

True North represents the core principles that a person in a functional role must keep in mind as he does his job.

For a technical leader, True North means making sure that you’ve done your job getting things ready to go into production. It means you have honored your agreed-upon policies for review, operational oversight, and testing. It means that you won’t put something into production that you don’t believe is ready for your users to experience.

Cultivate decisiveness in the face of a massive number of options.