The Manager's Path Quotes

“Knowing yourself is step one. Step two is going after what you want.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“There’s a saying in politics that “a good political idea is one that works well in half-baked form,” and the same goes for engineering processes. The processes should have value even when they are not followed perfectly, and that value should largely lie in the act of socializing change or risk to the team as a whole.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“When talking about structure with skeptics, I try to reframe the discussion. Instead of talking about structure, I talk about learning. Instead of talking about process, I talk about transparency. We don’t set up systems because structure and process have inherent value. We do it because we want to learn from our successes and our mistakes, and to share those successes and encode the lessons we learn from failures in a transparent way. This learning and sharing is how organizations become more stable and more scalable over time.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“a shared understanding of the goals, risks, and the questions to answer before making a decision.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“The worst scheduling mistake is allowing yourself to get pulled randomly into meetings. It is very difficult to get into the groove of writing code if you’re interrupted every hour by a meeting.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Instead of filtering requests, they relay them to the team and then relay the team’s response back up to management. This is not a value-add role.​”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“You will not get everything you ask for, and asking is not usually a fun or comfortable experience. However, it’s the fastest way forward.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“The second purpose of a 1-1 is a regular opportunity for you to speak privately with your manager about whatever needs discussing.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“First, they create human connection between you and your manager.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Managers who care about you as a person, and who actively work to help you grow in your career.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Code Review Code review is, for better or worse, a modern standard. Once you have a team of a certain size with a certain number of people working on a code base, code review can be a valuable tool for ensuring the stability and long-term quality of that code base.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“This is where going home comes in. Go home! And stop emailing people at all hours of the night and all hours of the weekend! Forcing yourself to disengage is essential for your mental health, believe me. Burnout is a real problem in the American workforce these days, and almost everyone I know who has worked sustained excess hours has experienced it to some degree. It’s terrible for individuals, terrible for their families, and terrible for teams. But this isn’t just about preventing your own burnout — it’s about preventing your team’s burnout. When you work later than everyone else, when you send those emails at all hours, even if you don’t expect your team to respond to those emails or work those hours, they see you doing it and think it’s important. And that overwork makes them less effective, especially at the detailed knowledge work that engineers need to perform. When”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team2 write”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“it doesn’t start with responsibility and end with consequences.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“When you get curious and learn how to turn that disagreement into honest questioning, you can learn more about other perspectives on the issue because your team will open up.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Your first team is comprised of your peers at the leadership/executive level, and your reporting structure has now become your second team.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“We therefore need to figure out how to communicate the complexity of our work in a way that an intelligent but nontechnical peer can understand.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Another is between the people who prefer to embrace agility and change (and, yes, sometimes disorder) and those who push for more long-term planning, deadlines, and budgets.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“A very common clash occurs between people who are extremely analytically driven and those who are more creatively or intuitively focused.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“How to Be Managed”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“​What you measure, you improve. As a manager you help your team succeed by creating clear, focused, measurable goals.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“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.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Bring agendas to your 1-1s when you have things you need to talk about. When you want to work on projects, ask. Advocate for yourself. When your manager isn’t helpful, look for other places to get help. Seek out feedback, including constructive feedback on areas to improve. When that feedback comes to you, take it graciously, even when you don’t agree with it.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“It’s unlikely that you’ll get fired for being a bad mentor (unless, of course, you behave in an inappropriate manner — please don’t hit on your mentee!). For many mentors, the worst that can happen is that a) the mentee is a drain on their time and they get less coding work done, or b) they do such a poor job that someone whom the organization might otherwise want to hire/keep around has a bad experience and doesn’t join the organization, or opts to leave the organization sooner than she otherwise might. Sadly, the second outcome is far more likely than the first.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Empire building. Leaders who favor an us-versus-them style tend to be empire builders, seeking out opportunities to grow their teams and their mandates without concern for what is best for the overall organization.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Even if your company doesn’t love him, you want him to love you, because he’ll go back and tell all his friends about the summer he had working for your company. That can have a big impact on your ability to hire full-time from the graduating class, and the fact that you pulled interns from that school probably indicates a serious interest in hiring new graduates full-time as well.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“The secret of managing is keeping the people who hate you away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds.”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change