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

by Camille Fournier

The Hardest, Shortest Lesson of Becoming a Manager As a manager, I have this mental list of things about what my team needs. Things that I’m monitoring, things that I’m trying to fix, things that I’m trying to find for them. It’s my job to understand what is going on and what the team as a whole needs to be effective. Maybe you can look at the state of things and say, “We have a deadline right now, and what we need is another engineer for the next month. That engineer is me.” But more likely you look at the state of things and realize that what your team needs is a manager. Because you need to hire X more people. Because Y has a lot of potential but needs some coaching. Because product or design or some other team hasn’t given you what you need, so you need to go and get it. Because process is important, and the process you have is insufficient or just plain wrong. If your team needs a manager more than they need an engineer, you have to accept that being that manager means that you by definition can’t be that engineer. I know some people manage both, but you need to decide, if you’re going to suck at one, which one that will be. I feel bad when I suck at being an engineer, but sucking at being a manager would be a choice I inflicted on other people. That’s not fair. So at the end of another day when I feel like I didn’t write enough code and I have no way to quantify what I’ve achieved, I tell myself I was being as good a manager as I know how to be. And that has to be en...