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

by Camille Fournier

Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems. Try not to make every 1-1 about how you need something, how something is wrong, or how you want something more.

One of the early lessons in leadership, whether it is via direct management or indirect influence, is that people are not good at saying precisely what they mean in a way that others can exactly understand.

Be prepared to say anything complex a few times, in different ways.

Teams often fail because they overworked themselves on a feature that their product manager would have been willing to compromise on.

I don’t even like hiring project managers because they often act as a crutch for engineers to use instead of learning to think through their future work and ask real questions about what they’re doing and why, and their presence means that you have more waterfall-style projects instead of an agile process.

Determine which decisions must be made by you, which decisions should be delegated to others with more expertise, and which decisions require the whole team to resolve. In all of these cases, make it clear what the matter under discussion is, and communicate the outcome.

One of the basic rules of management is the rule of no surprises, particularly negative ones.

All the evidence in the world can’t change a person who doesn’t want to change.