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

by Camille Fournier

Here are some tricky but common scenarios I’ve experienced: Unstable product roadmap The team doesn’t feel very productive, the systems are unstable, and there is some attrition happening, but the product organization keeps changing the goals for the team and everything is always an urgent mandate. Is the manager accountable? Errant tech lead The tech lead has been down a rabbit hole trying to redesign one of the core systems. The design doc is still barely started, and work is piling up, but the tech lead insists that this is a big problem that can’t be rushed. Is the manager accountable? Full-time firefighting mode The manager inherited a team with a bunch of legacy systems that are constantly broken, and the team seems to spend all their time fighting fires. They also support other teams who are using those systems, and the other teams are constantly asking for help and distracting the team with requests. There’s a roadmap to move out of these systems, but you haven’t heard any reports on the progress against this roadmap, and you know the team is killing themselves to keep things stable and manage the support requests. Is the manager accountable? The answer to all of these questions is yes. Yes, despite the mitigating circumstances in each case, the manager ultimately needs to take responsibility for pulling the team out of these situations and getting them moving forward, because the manager is accountable for the health and productivity of the team.