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

by Camille Fournier

Great managers notice when your normal energy level changes, and will hopefully care enough to ask you about it.

Ideally, the feedback you get from your manager will be somewhat public if it’s praise, and private if it’s criticism.

Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something.

Your manager should be the person who shows you the larger picture of how your work fits into the team’s goals, and helps you feel a sense of purpose in the day-to-day work.

remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.

Ultimately, the value of planning isn’t that you execute the plan perfectly, that you catch every detail beforehand, or that you predict the future; it’s that you enforce the self-discipline to think about the project in some depth before diving in and seeing what happens.

Many companies expect you to be acting at the next level before you get promoted to it. This practice exists to prevent the “Peter Principle,” in which people are promoted to their level of incompetence.

you need to stay enough in the code to see where the bottlenecks and process problems are.