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

by Camille Fournier

You can make decisions — well, some decisions. Realistically, you can maybe narrow down the things that will get decided. You can focus your team on some things, like writing better tests, but they still have a product roadmap to implement, and they have their own ideas for what technical tasks should be prioritized. So, more than making decisions yourself, you’re helping the team make decisions. Your manager gives you goals but then sometimes changes those goals completely, and it’s up to you to explain the changes to the team. You do set the standards for culture on your team, which is good and bad. It’s good when they take after your best aspects, and it’s bad when you realize that your team is also mirroring your faults. Your team does not naturally just agree with you, respect you, or even like you. You realize that authority requires more than a title. You find yourself scrambling to motivate them through tough periods when the projects aren’t going well, or when you have to tell individuals that they aren’t ready to be promoted just yet, that they aren’t getting a raise, that there’s no bonus this year. Some of them don’t bother to tell you when they’re unhappy; they just get fed up and quit before you’ve noticed there’s anything wrong. When the company is doing well, and you have lots of money to pay, and there are plenty of exciting projects, life is great; but when things are stressful, you see how little power you have to make people happy. And what’s worse, you...