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

by Camille Fournier

Great senior individual contributors still know how to manage projects and mentor more junior members of their team, so consider making leadership experience (usually via acting as a tech lead) a requirement for promotion to senior individual contributor levels.

It takes a lot of individual maturity to think through large projects, which is, in my view, the distinguishing feature of a staff engineer. Being a brilliant programmer is not enough to be a great staff engineer; you need to have shown a track record of completing and supporting some long-running work to justify this title.

Without any process, your teams will struggle to scale. With the wrong process, they will be slowed down. Balancing the current size and risk tolerance of your team with the processes at hand is the essence of guiding good software development and operational guidelines.

code review can be a valuable tool for ensuring the stability and long-term quality of that code base.

For the most part, code reviews don’t catch bugs; tests catch bugs.

Code review is largely a socialization exercise, so that multiple team members have seen and are aware of the changed code.

Engineers can waste absurd amounts of time on questions of style, specifically formatting. This should not be up for debate in code review. Decide on a style, and put that style into a linter that formats the code automatically.

the “postmortem” process is a critical element of good engineering.

The goal of architecture review is to help socialize big changes to the appropriate group, and to make the risks for those changes clear.

The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you have to be able to manage yourself if you want to be good at managing others. The more time you spend understanding yourself, the way you react, the things that

Great managers are masters of working through conflict. Getting good at working through conflict means getting good at taking your ego out of the conversation.

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.