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

by Camille Fournier

Here’s the thing. Is your team working to its full capacity? Are your engineers challenged and growing? Is your product team excited by the progress you’re making? Are people able to spend most of their time on writing new code and evolving the systems? If so, great. Ignore me. You’ve got it under control. If not, you have a problem, and you’re ignoring that problem at your peril. It’s important to remember that, as a technical leader, while you may not be writing code much, you’re still responsible for the technical side of getting work done. You’re also responsible for keeping your team happy and productive, and often the solution to this is not cheerleading or paying them better or praising them more, but instead enabling them to be more productive, challenging them to go faster and do better work, and helping them find the time they need to make their work more interesting. You have to be the advocate and push for technical process improvements that can lead to increased engineer productivity, even if you’re not implementing them all yourself.