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

by Camille Fournier

Ask the CTO: Joining a Small Team I’m a newly hired manager for a team of five engineers. I have been a manager before at other companies, but I’m brand new to the company, the technology, and the team. How should I think about my time in these first few weeks? Joining a small team as a manager is tough. It’s one thing to balance technical work when you’ve been promoted to manager from software engineer, but it’s another thing to come in new with a team to manage and new code to learn. There are a few ways to get into the software without annoying the team. First, get someone to walk you through the systems and architecture, as well as the process for testing and releasing the software. If there is a normal developer onboarding process where you learn how to check out code and deploy the systems, go through that process. Spend some time getting comfortable in the code bases, and start watching the code reviews or pull requests, if they exist. Plan to work on at least a couple of features in your first 60 days. Take a specced-out feature and add it. Pair with one of the engineers on a feature he’s working on, and have him pair with you as you start working on a feature of your own. Get your code reviewed by a member of the team. Perform a release, and do a rotation of supporting the systems for at least a couple of days if support is part of the team’s responsibilities. You can probably tell that this means your management onboarding may go more slowly because you’re also l...