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

by Camille Fournier

How often do you meet 1-1 with your manager? Do you come to 1-1s with your manager bringing topics to discuss? If your 1-1 is a status meeting, can you use some other means to convey that status?

How does your company think about onboarding? Do you assign mentors to new hires? If not, can you propose to your manager that you try doing this, and volunteer to mentor someone?

Project management is the act of breaking a complex end goal down into smaller pieces, putting those pieces in roughly the most effective order they should be done, identifying which pieces can be done in parallel and which must be done in sequence, and attempting to tease out the unknowns of the project that may cause it to slow down or fail completely.

It’s important to remember that being a good leader means being good at delegating.

Continuous feedback, even if it’s just regular recognition for good work, is an important tool in the hands-on manager’s toolkit.

Have you set up regular 1-1s with your direct reports?

Your first goal is to protect your team as a whole, the second is to protect each individual on the team, and your last priority is protecting yourself.

As the manager, you’re responsible for handling uncertainty and limiting how much of that uncertainty you expose to your team. Don’t be a telephone between the engineers and the rest of the company, parroting messages back and forth and distracting people who are busy with the important tasks you’ve already committed to do. But you’re not a black hole, either. Try to get a teamwide process in place for talking about new features and customer complaints, and limit estimations that occur outside of this process.

Do your team members seem engaged with one another? Do they smile in meetings? Make jokes in chat? Get coffee or lunch together? When was the last time you all sat down together without talking about work?