Book Report: The Manager's Path

This is a review of the book “The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth & Change” by Camille Fournier (website, blog).

Read this book if:

• You’re curious about management
• You want to be a more effective colleague
• You’re curious about the responsibilities of middle management and senior leadership

I love this book. I read it twice years ago when I became a team leader and then read it for the third time as I started my mentorship business.

The book goes over the management path for the software engineering industry, starting from the basics of mentoring and management to how to manage a team to middle management to CTO. The book is well organized, and real-world scenarios aren’t ham-fisted or shoehorned in. It’s structured to be a resource for people to return to, but it also doesn’t take a long time to read cover to cover.

The first three chapters of this book would benefit everyone in the software engineering industry. In fact, I highly recommend buying the book just to read these chapters. They are absolute treasure troves for people of every experience level and job title. The chapters are Management 101, Mentoring, and Tech Lead.

Fournier doesn’t attempt to be novel for novelty’s sake. The book contains historically good ideas such as one-on-ones are important, praise in public (though ask first), and criticize in private. I deeply resonated with her section on How To Be Managed¹. She points out that a person must take responsibility for themselves and that the manager can’t do everything for them.

The Tech Lead chapter² really hits home on how challenging that role is for folks. She points out how it’s part business analyst, part project planner, and part team leader. And you’re still writing code! It’s where people truly learn how to balance responsibilities.

Part of this chapter discusses project management, where³ Fournier describes it as:

Project management is the act of breaking a complex end goal down into smaller pieces, putting those pieces in roughly the most effective order they should be done, identifying which pieces can be done in parallel and which must be done in sequence, and attempting to tease out the unknowns of the project that may cause it to slow down or fail completely.

To help you with this effort, she provides five guidelines with several details in the book:

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

Later in Chapter 5, she explains how to do project management from a strategic level.

What’s wild is how helpful the first few chapters are to everyone. As the book goes on, it continues to move up the management ladder, ending with CTO and cultivating culture. Throughout, there were excellent points, perspectives, and opinions. Here are some sections that I took note of:

• How to provide feedback to direct reports⁴
• Team cohesion destroyers (brilliant jerk, noncommunicator, employee who lacks respect)⁵
• How to delegate effectively⁶
• Cultivating careers and promotions as a manager⁷
• Driving good decision-making as a manager⁸
• Ways to say no as a manager⁹
• Performing culture fit checks when hiring managers¹⁰
• Startups require many decisions, so be decisive!¹¹
• Structureless organizations can work, but they typically have hidden power structures¹²
• Structure in organizations is about learning and failure¹³
• Good engineering processes help you scale, even when they’re not followed perfectly¹⁴

I found “The Manager’s Path” to be an excellent book, and it’ll always have a place on my shelf. It’s well written, easy to understand, and covers so many relevant topics for the software industry. I can’t recommend it enough.

So, I’d like to end with the same mantra that Fournier concludes her daily writing sessions with, “Get Curious.”