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.

Emotional labor is a way to think about traditionally feminine “soft skills” — that is, skills that address the emotional needs of people and teams. Because the outcome can be hard to quantitatively measure, emotional labor is often dismissed as less important work than writing software.

obsession with process can be related to a fear of failure and a desire to control things to prevent the unexpected.

“Regular 1-1s are like going to a psychiatrist when you’re fine and discovering you have depression.”

conflict-avoidant managers tend to favor harmony above functional working relationships. Creating a safe environment for disagreement to work itself out is far better than pretending that all disagreement does not exist.

And yet the product team will never have technical debt on their roadmap, so the planning process often means there is no time allotted for this type of work.

It took me a long time to realize that my job wasn’t to be the smartest person in the room. It wasn’t to be “right.” Rather, my role was to help the team make the best possible decisions and help them implement them in a sustainable and efficient way.

I believe the struggle with respect is a side effect of the current tech culture, which tells us that engineers are the smartest people in the room. It can’t be said strongly enough: your peers who are not analytically driven are not stupid. On the flip side, we undermine ourselves when we fail to talk so that nontechnical peers can understand what we’re saying.

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.