These are my notes on Camille Fournier's The The Manager's Path.
I specially liked that the book is IT specific and that it lays down all the different levels on the management ladder, so you can get a feeling of what you will be expected to do at each level and decide which level is the one that you would like to aspire to.
Excellent read.
Key Insights
- The only person you can change is yourself.
- Asking for advice is a way of showing trust and respect.
- Listening is a precursor to empathy.
- If you want autonomy over your work, you must gain mastery over your time.
- Create a safe environment for disagreement to work itself out.
- Practice continuous feedback.
- Real potential in people show itself quickly.
- Be kind, not nice.
- Delegation is essential for career growth.
- Ways to say no:
- "YES, AND ..." state what would require to say yes or what it will impact.
- As a manager, your first team is not the people that report to you but your peers.
- As a manager, ask yourself:
- Can I do this faster (by cutting scope)?
- Do I need to be doing this at all?
- What value am I providing with this work?
- Management is a very culture-specific task.
- Managing outside your skill set: be curious, ask questions, learn.
- Boring meetings are a sign of dysfunctional teams.
- We learn the most from failures.
- Process is risk management.
- CTO shape business strategy through the lens of technology.
- You will be measured against the company's values.
- If your values are not those of the company, you will struggle.
- You have to be able to manage yourself if you want to be good at managing others.
- For this, you need to understand yourself.
TOC
- 1 - Management 101
- 2 - Mentoring
- 3 - Tech Lead
- 4 - Managing People
- 5 - Managing a team
- 6 - Managing Multiple Teams
- 7 - Managing Managers
- 8 - The Big Leagues
- 9 - Bootstrapping Culture
- Conclusion
Chapter 1 - Management 101
- What to expect from a manager:
- Grow your career:
- Help find the training/conf/books.
- Find "stretch" projects.
- Feedback.
- Figure out what you need to learn.
- Understand what to focus on and enable you to have that focus.
- Take your manager's job.
- Find a sense of purpose in day-to-day by connecting what you do with the overall picture.
- Grow your career:
- 1-2-1 purpose:
- Create human connection.
- Discuss privately.
- Not a status meeting.
- Must be regular.
- Feedback:
- Public for praise, private for criticism.
- Behavioural feedback.
- How to be managed:
- Spend time thinking about what you want.
- You are responsible for yourself.
- The only person you can change is yourself.
- Asking for advice is a way of showing trust and respect.
Chapter 2 - Mentoring
- Listening is a precursor to empathy.
Chapter 3 - Tech Lead
- Not a point in the ladder, but a temporal role.
- At least 30% time coding.
- Main new skill: project management.
- Learn how to balance your time of tech work vs management work.
- If you want autonomy over your work, you must gain mastery over your time.
- Tech Lead roles:
- Software developer.
- System architect.
- Business analysts.
- Project planner.
- Team leader.
- Expect the tech lead position to be a big increase in responsibility and workload.
- Project management is a necessary pain:
- Break deliverables into small tasks.
- Sort task in the most efficient way.
- Push through unknowns.
- Successful team leads excel at communication:
- Read/write.
- Speak/listen.
- Note taking.
Chapter 4 - Managing People
- New hire:
- First 1-2-1 questions.
- Create a 30/60/90 plan.
- 1-2-1 styles:
- TODO list:
- Professional and efficient but cold.
- Forces to think beforehand.
- Items to discuss should be worth the face to face time.
- Catch-up:
- Listen to what report thinks is most important.
- Careful with too much complaining.
- Feedback meeting:
- Quarterly enough for career development.
- Review process towards goals.
- Progress report (when managing managers).
- TODO list:
- Get to know your report at a personal level.
- Take notes in a shared document.
- Delegate effectively:
- Do not "intervene" if:
- Team is making progress on its goals.
- System's are stable.
- Product manager is happy.
- If a team has no goals, use what you want to monitor to help them create one.
- Gather information yourself from system instead of asking the team.
- Do not "intervene" if:
- Continuous feedback:
- You must know your people.
- Forces you to pay attention to individuals.
- Makes it easy to foster talent.
- Practice tricky conversations in the small.
- Weekly for everyone who reports to you.
- Start with positive feedback.
- Performance reviews:
- Include the whole year: summarize the 1-2-1.
- It is not a one hour process, but much longer.
- Use concrete examples to avoid bias.
- Spend plenty of time on accomplishments.
- Keep the areas of improvement focus.
- Real potential in people show itself quickly.
- Keep an eye out for opportunities for your team members to stretch themselves and grow.
Chapter 5 - Managing a team
- New set of skills and challenges.
- Engineering managers:
- Must be technically credible to get the respect of the engineering team.
- Keep contributing to code so you can see the bottlenecks.
- Dysfunctional teams:
- Not shipping: Tools/processes poor.
- People drama: negative, brilliant jerk, gossip.
- Unhappiness due to overwork:
- Pay tech debt.
- If time-critical release:
- Play cheerleader.
- Cut features.
- Push back date.
- Contribute.
- Collaboration problems:
- With other teams:
- Regular catch up with peers to work through issues.
- Actionable feedback.
- Within the team:
- Team building activities.
- With other teams:
- Learn enough about the product and customers.
- Long term vision of technology and product.
- Create a safe environment for disagreement to work itself out.
- Managing conflict:
- Don't rely exclusively on voting.
- Set up clear process to depersonalize decisions.
- Don't turn a blind eye on simmering issues.
- Don't take it out on the other teams.
- Be kind, not nice.
- Don't be afraid of conflict.
- Psychological safety: you are willing to take risks and make mistakes in front of others.
- Don't hire brilliant jerks as it is too difficult to get rid of one.
- Get rid of the people that don't respect you as a manager, or the team.
- Non-communicator:
- Raise his habits asap.
- Find the root cause of the hiding.
- Advanced project management:
- Use agile for short term.
- 10 productive weeks per quarter.
- Budget 20% for tech debt.
- Cut features as deadline approaches.
- Spend time planning and estimating.
Chapter 6 - Managing Multiple Teams
- No more coding. You will miss coding.
- Be fluent in at least one programming language before taking this role.
- Manage your own time: Eisenhower Matrix.
- How much time did you spent on non-urgent but important tasks?
- Delegate:
Frequent | Infrequent | |
---|---|---|
Simple | Delegate | Do it yourself |
Complex | Delegate carefully | Delegate for training |
- Delegation is essential for career growth.
- Ways to say no:
- "YES, AND ..." state what would require to say yes or what it will impact.
- Create policies that clearly define what is needed for a yes.
- "Help me say yes": ask questions.
- "Not right now": you must do something later.
- Ask a peer to say no in your behalf.
- Don't delay saying no.
- Your technical focus at this level is to improve the system of work that your developers are operating within.
- Durable teams are built on a shared purpose that comes from the company itself, and they align themselves with the company's values.
- As a manager, your first team is not the people that report to you but your peers.
- Ask yourself:
- Can I do this faster (by cutting scope)?
- Do I need to be doing this at all?
- What value am I providing with this work?
Chapter 7 - Managing Managers
- Same as managing multiple teams, but an order of magnitude bigger. New set of skills.
- Things are obscured by the additional level of abstraction.
- Skip-Level meetings:
- Critical to build trust and engagement.
- Either quarterly 1-2-1 or group lunches.
- Prompts in page 129.
- Open-Door policy does not work.
- Managers should make your life easier, by bringing clear problems before they turn into raging fires.
- Make managers accountable for their teams.
- New managers need a lot of coaching:
- How to do 1-2-1.
- How to let go previous work.
- How to not become a control freak.
- Find external training.
- Management is a very culture-specific task,
- Hence is better to promote people that has been in the company for long and already understand the culture.
- Culture fit more important than industry-specific knowledge.
- Hiring managers - Page 140:
- Do reference checks.
- Managing outside your skill set: be curious, ask questions, learn.
- Boring meetings are a sign of dysfunctional teams.
- People need to feel an understanding and connection with the purpose of their work.
- Your technical responsibility is to optimize tech investments by matching it to future product or customer needs.
Chapter 8 - The Big Leagues
- As tech senior managers, we bring a willingness to embrace and drive change as needed.
- Be a leader; your company looks to you for:
- What to do.
- Where to go.
- How to act.
- How to think.
- What to value.
- Make hard decisions without perfect information.
- Understand current business landscape and plan for possible futures.
- Hold individuals/teams accountable.
- 4 tasks:
- Information gathering or sharing.
- Nudging.
- Decision making.
- Role modeling.
- Possible roles:
- R&D.
- Tech strategy.
- Organization.
- Execution.
- External face of technology.
- Infrastructure and tech operations manager.
- Business executive.
- CTO must care about business and shape business strategy through the lens of technology.
- CTO without management responsibilities will have little influence.
- To make something top priority, ou need to explicitly kill or postpone in-flight work.
- You need to communicate things three or more times before it sinks.
- Setting strategy:
- Improve operational efficiency.
- Expand features.
- Grow the business.
- It entitles:
- Tech architecture.
- Team structure.
- Understanding direction of business.
- Delivery bad news:
- Do it by individuals or small groups.
- Must be in-person.
- Don't force yourself to delive if you cannot stand behind it.
- Be honest.
- CEO as a boss:
- Getting 1-2-1 time is a challenge.
- Bring topics, set up agenda.
- Bring solutions, not problems.
- Ask for advice.
- Don't be afraid of repeating yourself.
- Be supportive.
- Look for coaching and skills development in other places.
- Getting 1-2-1 time is a challenge.
- Your team:
- Peers in other functions.
- First focus on the success of business, then on their departments.
- You trust them as experts in their areas.
- You trust they are not trying to undermine you.
- Disagreement in leadership team is ok, but once a decision is made, team shows a united front.
- You need to detach from your previous team:
- Avoid having favourites.
- People to take you seriously.
- People will copy your behaviours.
- Your presence will change the behaviour.
- Do not discuss uncertainty with your old peers.
- Care even more about individuals.
- True North: core principles that a person in a functional role must keep in mind as he does his job.
Chapter 9 - Bootstrapping Culture
- You need an hypothesis to learn from new processes and structures.
- Structure allow to scale, diversify and take on more complex long-term tasks.
- We learn the most from failures: examine failures to decide what structure needs to be added.
- Culture is how things get done, without people having to think about it -- Frederick Laloux.
- You will be measured against the company's values.
- If your values are not those of the company, you will struggle.
- Culture:
- Map company values to tech team, maybe adding a couple that are specially important.
- Reinforce by rewarding people that exhibit the values in a positive way.
- Use when hiring.
- Create a career ladder - Page 202.
- Process is risk management.
Conclusion
- You have to be able to manage yourself if you want to be good at managing others.
- You need to understand yourself.
- Masters of working through conflict.
- Meditate.
- Get curious.
- Look for the other side of the story.
Top comments (2)
Wow, that's an awesome summary of the book I was planning to read that book as well in the future..
It will be worth the time!