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

by Camille Fournier

The secret of managing is keeping the people who hate you away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds. Casey Stengel

For me, basic standards meant things like how much unit testing we expected to happen with each change (generally speaking, as some tests were always required), and at what point technical decisions should be reviewed by a larger group (like when someone wants to add a new language or framework to the stack). As with goal setting, putting standards in place here helps people know which details are important to think about when they’re creating the technology.

Create a Data-Driven Team Culture When you have a product or business head, she should be accustomed to using data about the business, the customers, the current behavior, or the market potential to justify her decisions. Start adding other data to the mix. For example, give that person data about team productivity (such as the time it takes to complete features) or data about quality measures (like how much time is spent dealing with outages, or the number of bugs found in QA or after releases). These efficiency and technical data points can be used to evaluate decisions on both product features and technical changes.

Delegate Complex and Frequent Tasks to Develop Your Team Tasks like project planning, systems design, or being the key person during an outage are the biggest opportunity you have to grow talent on your team while also making the team run better. Strong managers spend a lot of their time developing members of their teams in these areas.

Some suggested prompts to provide the person you are holding the skip-level 1-1 with include: What do you like best/worst about the project you are working on? Who on your team has been doing really well recently? Do you have any feedback about your manager — what’s going well, what isn’t? What changes do you think we could make to the product? Are there any opportunities you think we might be missing? How do you think the organization is doing overall? Anything we could be doing better/more/less? Are there any areas of the business strategy you don’t understand? What’s keeping you from doing your best work right now? How happy (or not) are you working at the company? What could we do to make working at the company more fun?

In the group setting, these questions can be used to draw out information: What can I, your manager’s manager, provide for you or your team? Anything I should be helping with? Is this team working poorly with any other teams, from your perspective? Are there any questions about the larger organization that I can answer?

Technology leaders must help set the standard for True North in their organizations for different types of projects and exposures. Another way to think of this is through the lens of risk analysis. Risk analysis doesn’t mean that we don’t take risks. Some things that are generally considered “bad” can be OK under certain circumstances. These include: Having a single point of failure Having known bugs and issues Being unable to tolerate high load Losing data Putting out code that is undertested Having slow performance

Recommended Reading Arbinger Institute, Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2000). Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (New York: Gotham Books, 2012).

Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive (New York: HarperBusiness Essentials, 2002). Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (New York: Hyperion, 2007). Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (New York: Portfolio, 2012).

One of the greatest writings about organizational politics is a piece called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” by Jo Freeman. While the article is about early feminist/anarchist collectives, Freeman’s insights apply equally well to startup culture.

For me, having a meditation practice has been essential to developing self-management and self-awareness. Meditation isn’t a cure-all, but it can be a useful exercise to practice that awareness of your own reactions, and for that reason I recommend trying it for a while if you are interested. Some of my favorite resources include the podcasts on tarabrach.com and the writings of Pema Chödrön.