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

by Camille Fournier

Read the code. Occasionally taking the time to read some of the code in your systems can help remind you what it looks like. Sometimes, it also shows you places where things have gotten ugly and need attention. Looking over code reviews and pull requests can give you insight into changes that are happening. Pick an unknown area, and ask an engineer to explain it to you. Spend a couple of hours with one of the engineers who is working on something you don’t understand, and ask him to teach you about that area. Go to a whiteboard or share a screen and have him pair with you on a small change. Attend postmortems. When outages happen, make it a priority to attend the post-outage debriefs. These meetings are often full of details about the process of writing and deploying software that you miss when you aren’t coding every day. Standards that you thought were obvious have been neglected or ignored. Communication between teams is lacking, and tooling is hurting more than it is helping. In times of failure you can most clearly see where problems have built up, and you learn where your attention is needed. Keep up with industry trends in software development processes. One major weak spot for managers is losing touch with the tools and processes for actually developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring code. These are the places where new ideas can make your teams significantly more effective. Not every trend is worth pursuing, but make time to learn about how other teams delive...