- Tags:: #📚Books , [[Engineering Management]] - Author:: [[Camille Fournier]] - Liked:: #3/5 - Link:: [Amazon.com: The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change: 9781491973899: Fournier, Camille: Books](https://www.amazon.com/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth/dp/1491973897) - Source date:: [[2017-05-02]] - Read date:: [[2020-09-04]] - Cover:: ![[cover_the_managers_path.png|100]] ## Why did I want to read it? It's the canonical book that gets recommended to you when you become a manager for the first time. ## What did I get out of it? >The secret of managing is keeping the people who hate you away from the ones who haven't made up their minds [[Casey Stengel]] ^8e7689 [[An EM needs to be technical]], or not... > I'm one of those deeply technical managers, and I have opinions about the way systems should be built and operated. Letting go has been hard for me... (p. 60) ^814f5c >I had an interesting conversation once with a friend, another CTO who has a lot of management experience. He sheepishly admitted to me that he didn't like doing regular 1-is because he himself had always resented being forced to do Is with managers that he felt he didn't need. **"Regular 1-is are like going to a psychiatrist when you're fine and discovering you have depression."** (p. 52) ^9efd98 ### Managing multiple teams #### What's important? > A big part of the challenge of time management emerges when you start to lose the sense of importance. (p. 104) >It's likely that you're spending a lot of your time on things that are urgent but only slightly important, and sacrificing things that are important but not urgent. (p. 104) Don't stop going to team meetings or you miss detecting problems early (p. 105) > Have I managed to carve out enough time for things that are not urgent? (p. 106) #### Decisions and delegation OMG, it's [[TBM 238 Spinning Plates]] in positive! >The best way to describe the feeling of management from here on out is plate spinning. (...) Honing your instincts about when to touch which plate is the name of the game (p. 107) ^05ed4a #### Laziness and impatience > We focus so we can go hone (p. 122) ### Managing managers >...follow through on things that you're not sure are actually important, but you just sense are off. (p. 126) >...find your discomfort, chase it down, and sit with it unblinking for a while. Here, you need to follow up on all the little things until you figure out what you don't need to follow up on. (p. 126) > There exists an idea that if you make yourself accessible, hold office hours where anyone can meet with you, and tell the team that you are always available, people will naturally bring their problems to your office. There's no need to seek them out, because your team trusts you enough to come to you when things are going wrong. Except this basically never happens. (p.127) >they should make your life easier. Your managers should allow you to spend more time on the bigger picture, and less time on the details of any one team. (...) you can't just expect that they'll magically make things better- you have to hold them accountable. (p. 131)