The Manager's Path Quotes

“As you go through various stages of your career, you’ll start to realize how much uncertainty there is in the world. It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected. In all of this uncertainty, the only person you can rely on to pull through it is yourself.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“For example, if overwork is due to (in)stability of the production systems, it’s your job as the manager to slow down the product roadmap in order to focus on stability for a while. Make clear measures of alerts, downtime, and incidents, and strive to reduce them. My advice is to dedicate 20% of your time in every planning session to system sustainability work (“sustainability” instead of the more common “technical debt”).”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Senior engineers can develop bad habits, and one of the worst is the tendency to lecture and debate with anyone who does not understand them or who disagrees with what they are saying. To work successfully with a newcomer or a more junior teammate, you must be able to listen and communicate in a way that person can understand, even if you have to try several times to get it right. Software development is a team sport in most companies, and teams have to communicate effectively to get anything done.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Humans, by and large, feel good when they set small goals and meet them regularly.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Split management and technical tracks. It’s pretty obvious in this day and age that you need separate tracks for management and individual contribution.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“I understand that you don’t feel like that human side is all that interesting in the workplace. Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however. The bedrock of strong teams is human connection,”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“At their worst, alpha geeks can’t let anyone else get any glory without claiming some of it for themselves. They are the origin of any good ideas but had no part in creating the bad ideas, except that he knew they would fail. The alpha geek believes that every developer should know exactly what she knows, and if you don’t know something, she will gleefully point out your ignorance. The alpha geek can be very rigid about how things should be done and closed off to new ideas that he didn’t come up with. Alpha geeks get very threatened when people complain about systems they built or criticize their past technical decisions.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Set expectations appropriately before reviews are delivered. If someone is underperforming across the board, the review should not be his first time getting that feedback. Similarly, if someone has recently been promoted, you may want to prepare her for the fact that she will be reviewed based on higher standards.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Regular 1-1s are like oil changes; if you skip them, plan to get stranded on the side of the highway at the worst possible time. Marc Hedlund”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“I am not a buddy-buddy person at work. I feel the need to say this because I think that sometimes we give ourselves a pass at caring about our colleagues because we’re introverts, or we don’t want to make friends at work. You might think that I am the sort who loves to make lots of work friends, and therefore I don’t understand how this feels to you, but I assure you: I understand that you don’t feel like that human side is all that interesting in the workplace. Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however. The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust. And trust, real trust, requires the ability and willingness to be vulnerable in front of each other. So, your manager will hopefully treat you like a human who has a life outside of work, and spend a few minutes talking about that life when you meet.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Urgency is often more clearly felt than importance.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Autonomy, the ability to have control over some part of your work, is an important element of motivation. This is why micromanagers find it so difficult to retain great teams. When you strip creative and talented people of their autonomy, they lose motivation very quickly. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you can’t make a single decision on your own, or feeling like every single piece of work you do has to be double- and triple-checked by your manager.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“good 1-1s are not status meetings.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“On describes the earliest startup as like driving a race car. You’re close to the ground, and you feel every move you make. You have control, you can turn quickly, you feel like things are moving fast. Of course, you’re also at risk of crashing at any moment, but you only take yourself down if you do. As you grow, you graduate to a commercial flight. You’re farther from the ground, and more people’s lives depend on you, so you need to consider your movements more carefully, but you still feel in control and can turn the plane relatively quickly. Finally, you graduate to a spaceship, where you can’t make quick moves and the course is set long in advance, but you’re capable of going very far and taking tons of people along for the ride.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“A bunch of people who never talk to each other and are always working on independent projects are not really working as a team.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Don’t rely exclusively on consensus or voting.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“you’re a leader with no power over business strategy and no ability to allocate people to important tasks, you’re at best at the mercy of your influence with other executives and managers, and at worst a figurehead. You can’t give up the responsibility of management without giving up the power that comes with it. The CTO who doesn’t also have the authority of management must be able to get things done purely by influencing the organization. If the managers won’t actually give people and time to work on the areas that the CTO believes are important, he is rendered effectively powerless. If you give up management, you’re giving up the most important power you ever had over the business strategy, and you effectively have nothing but your organizational goodwill and your own two hands. My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job first and foremost. It’s also a management job.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Many pieces of management advice tell new managers that part of their job, if they are effective, is to be a shield (or, less politely, a “bullshit umbrella”). They should help their team focus on what they need to get done without being distracted by the wider drama, politics, and changes happening in the company around them.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Figuring out what to do in a workplace is hard enough for experienced hires, so it’s an especially tall order for an intern.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“My job as tech lead was to continue to write code, but with the added responsibilities of representing the group to management, vetting our plans for feature delivery, and dealing with a lot of the details of the project management process.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“It’s hard to accept that “new manager” is an entry-level job with no seniority on any front, but that’s the best mindset with which to start leading.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected. In all of this uncertainty, the only person you can rely on to pull through it is yourself.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“As you grow more into leadership positions, people will look to you for behavioral guidance. What you want to teach them is how to focus. To that end, there are two areas I encourage you to practice modeling, right now: figuring out what’s important, and going home.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“However, tech leads will be working on one major new technical skill: project management. The work of breaking down a project has a lot of similarity to the work of designing systems, and learning this skill is valuable even for engineers who don’t want to manage people.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“You can’t lead without engaging other people, and people skills are what we’re asking the new tech lead to stretch, much more than pure technical expertise.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“could be the tech lead, despite not being the most senior person, because I was willing and able to take on the responsibilities of the role, while the rest of my team were more interested in staying purely focused on the software they were writing.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“like First, Break All the Rules1 are excellent”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Interestingly, Freeman describes a set of circumstances in which the unstructured group can, in fact, work: It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity. It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a “common language” for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others’ experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other’s behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, they can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise. There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily. There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts. Here”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change