《The Manager's Path》 —— Camille Fournier

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1. Management 101

The secret of managing is keeping the people who hate you away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds. —— Casey Stengel

One-on-one meetings (1-1s) with your direct manager are an essential feature of a good working relationship.
1-1s serve two purposes.

• They create human connection between you and your manager. Great managers notice when your normal energy level changes, and will hopefully care enough to ask you about it. 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.
• The second purpose of a 1-1 is a regular opportunity for you to speak privately with your manager about whatever needs discussing.

Spend Time Thinking About What You Want

Your manager can point out opportunities for growth. She can show you projects. She can provide feedback on your areas of learning and development. But she cannot read your mind, and she cannot tell you what will make you happy.

You Are Responsible for Yourself

2. Mentoring

• Listen carefully
• Clearly communicate
• Calibrate your response

3. Tech Lead

• Regular (weekly) 1-1 touchbases
• Regular feedback on career growth, progression towards goals, areas for improvement, and praise as warranted
• Working with reports to identify areas for learning and helping them grow in these areas via project work, external learning, or additional mentoring

If a tech lead is not managing directly, they are still expected to provide mentorship and guidance to the other members of the team.

The tech lead is learning how to be a strong technical project manager, and as such, they are scaling themselves by delegating work effectively without micromanaging. They focus on the whole team’s productivity and strive to increase the impact of the team’s work product. They are empowered to make independent decisions for the team and are learning how to handle difficult management and leadership situations. They are also learning how to partner effectively with product, analytics, and other areas of the business.

Tech leads are in the position to act as strong technical project leaders, and to use their expertise at a larger scale so that their whole team gets better.

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.

The Main Roles of a Tech Lead

• Systems architect and business analyst
• Project planner
• Software developer and team leader

Managing a Project

• Break down the work
• Push through the details and the unknowns
• Run the project and adjust the plan as you go
• Use the insights gained in the planning process to manage requirements changes
• Revisit the details as you get close to completion

4. Managing People

• Taking on a new report
• Holding regular 1-1s
• Giving feedback on career growth, progression toward goals, areas for improvement, and praise as warranted
• Working with reports to identify areas for learning and helping them grow in these areas via project work, external learning, or additional mentoring

Create a 30/60/90-Day Plan

Practical Advice for Delegating Effectively

• Use the Team’s Goals to Understand Which Details You Should Dig Into
• Gather Information from the Systems Before Going to the People
• Adjust Your Focus Depending on the Stage of Projects
• Establish Standards for Code and Systems
• Treat the Open Sharing of Information, Good or Bad, in a Neutral to Positive Way
• Creating a Culture of Continuous Feedback
• Performance Reviews

5. Managing a Team

Staying Technical

How to Drive Good Decisions

• Create a Data-Driven Team Culture
• Flex Your Own Product Muscles
• Look into the Future
• Review the Outcome of Your Decisions and Projects
• Run Retrospectives for the Processes and Day-to-Day

6. Managing Multiple Teams

7. Managing Managers

8. The Big Leagues

9. Bootstrapping Culture

10. Conclusion

The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you have to be able to manage yourself if you want to be good at managing others. The more time you spend understanding yourself, the way you react, the things that inspire you, and the things that drive you crazy, the better off you will be.

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. To find a clear view of a complex situation, you must see past your interpretations and the stories you’re telling yourself. If you want to be able to tell people hard things and have them hear what you have to say, you must be able to tell them without embellishing the facts with your storyline. People who seek out management roles often have strong views on how things should be. That decisiveness is a good quality, but it can hinder you when you fail to see your interpretation of a situation is just that: an interpretation.

One other trick I use to get away from my ego is curiosity. I also have a daily habit of writing a page or two of free-flow thoughts every morning, to clear my mind and prepare for the day. I always end with the mantra “Get curious.” For me, becoming a great leader was a series of difficult lessons, mistakes, and challenges. Nothing about it was easy, and I was often frustrated with the interpersonal situations I found myself in. Inevitably, when I told my coach about these situations, she would advise me to think about things from the other person’s perspective. What are they trying to do? What do they value? What do they want and need? Her advice, always, was to get curious.

So I leave you with that thought. Look for the other side of the story. Think about the other perspectives at play. Investigate your emotional reactions, and observe when those reactions make it hard to see clearly what’s going on around you, what needs to be said. Apply that curiosity to people. Apply it to process. Apply it to technology, and strategy, and business. Ask questions, and be willing to have your notions proven wrong.

Stay curious, and good luck on your path!