A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth & Change
By Camille Fournier
Are you aspiring to a tech lead role or a management position, and you need a starting guide? Or maybe you want to know what to expect from a manager in your job? This book will be your key piece in that direction. I found out about this book in a moment when I wanted to know more about the manager role. I wanted to know what makes a manager a good manager, and what are those things that are needed to be one, and I think this book covered well those needs.
About the author
Taking it from her own LinkedIn description:
Camille Fournier is an experienced leader with the unique combination of deep technical expertise, executive leadership, and engineering management. Strong, proven experience scaling systems, teams, and companies.
I’m impressed by her book, which was translated as far as I know 6 languages, including Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Spanish, and English. This can tell us about the book’s engagements and also that it was well-received by readers.
About the book
Getting into the matter, the book starts getting straight to the point of what management is, the author tells us what to expect from a manager, and what ceremonies could be part of the manager’s role, for example, the establishment of 1-1 meetings, and this is what I also like of this book, during the reading you will find diverse buzzwords part of the managements, such as 1-1, buddies, peers, mentees, menthors, etc. I consider this to be important, especially if you are not familiar with these. In my case, until I joined the current company I work for, I didn’t know those buzzwords, and when others mentioned them, I needed to Google them in order to understand their language.
Camille also introduces three sections into the book, which are:
- Ask the CTO – it could be considered practical advice from a company CTO.
- Good Manager/Bad Manager – used to highlight common dysfunctions of engineer managers and provide some strategies for identifying these bad habits and overcoming them.
- Challenging solutions – The author proposes some challenging scenarios that could happen in the industry
Some of those sections will appear in all of the chapters of the book, and I consider them a good approach in order to facilitate learning through learning. I like the “Ask the CTO” section with their advice.
The book also talks about an important topic within companies, which is “Promotions”, tells us what they are, which people and which not should have a promotion, and how to look for people skills, not only technical but also soft or personal skills, how to envision people that needs to be promoted as a recogniztion part and also part of the company´s structure health. As part of this topic, it also mentions activities to look into people’s,s for example:
- 1-1s
- Feedback, as part of a continuous process
- Peer reviews
- Performance review
- and others.
These and more are so important and key points of management, and a must-have for every engineering manager.
About managing teams, the book also covers important topics such as how to identify the health status of a team, for example, to identify dysfunctional teams, and how to address those situations. The book also mentions how to stay technical as a manager, since it’s well-known that the higher the lead role, the less technical work you do, so it’s important to stay at least up to date in the technical stuff, or updates, but at a high level, for example, clean code/architectures frameworks.
Overall, this book works both as an introduction for people new to engineering management and as a reference you can come back to when you’re dealing with growth, change, or tough leadership moments. If you want a clearer picture of what the management path looks like, this is one of the most practical guides you can pick up.
Useful Links
Where to get the book: https://www.amazon.com.mx/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897
Also, if you like to read about book reviews, I will be writing about them here: https://blog.alangaelrojas.com/index.php/book-reviews/
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