Book Review: “The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change” by Camille Fournier
The book’s main goal is to describe steps in the career ladder of a technical manager and I believe it fulfills this promise very well starting the story with discussing mentoring and finishing it describing roles of CTO and VP Engineering.
If you are already in your current role of a technical manager for a while, I don’t think you will find a lot of advice in the book that could broaden your horizons considerably for that particular role but also I don’t think it is possible to dive deeper given the size of the book and I don’t think that was the author’s goal.
The main value of the publication is a complete description of the “manager’s path” and I need to admit that this is both pretty unique and very valuable perspective that we receive here.
The book covers the manager’s path “chronologically”, starting with an overview of engineering management and then explaining intricacies of:
- Mentoring
- Leading engineers as a tech lead
- Leading engineers as an engineering manager
- Leading multiple teams as an engineering director
- Leading an organization or department as VP Engineering or CTO
On the way, you will also find very helpful chapters dedicated to
- Managing people
- Managing managers
- Managing culture
and you will read about some typical management tasks like
- One-on-one meetings
- Performance reviews
- Firing under-performers
- Debugging dysfunctional teams
- Delegation
All of the topics enumerated above have been discussed in the book from the engineering management perspective, as the book’s title suggests. This is for sure not a definitive list of topics that you will find in the book but for that, you will need to go ahead and read it.
Now, what I really liked in the book is the actual structuring of the path, as you can see it above in the bullet points. Before reading the book I have never thought too much about the path completely from the beginning to the end and here we get the full picture. Following the path in the book, you read about typical problems that you stumble upon in different roles and techniques to solve these problems. You are not going to find very thorough descriptions of these techniques but first of all, this is not that type of a book and second of all this is much better than what most of the posts on the Internet can offer you.
Thinking about what I didn’t like that much in the book I would point out its structure. We read about the roles as they happen to us “chronologically” from the least senior to the most senior roles and this is very natural and very smooth to read. I have a problem though with the management roles and management problems mixed up on the top level of the book’s contents and in some cases not having indicated explicitly which role a chapter is about. Such an organization doesn’t affect the smoothness of reading, as mentioned above, but it makes the book difficult to work with when you want to use it as a reference and get back to some of the topics already after reading it. I admit there is an index at the end of the book and you can use it to find things but this is, by definition, finer-grained and slower to use.
Concluding, I believe the book is a great read for everyone who thinks about getting on the manager’s path in the engineering or is already there but didn’t get to CTO or VP Engineering role yet and hasn’t spent years in it. I would definitely recommend reading it if you are not yet a seasoned CTO or VP Engineering and for the most senior managers, it is probably still interesting publication but might simply not be the most optimal way of investing time. Please keep in mind though that as long as this is a very good and pleasant read, it will most likely not be that pleasant experience for you if you are planning to use this book as a reference after having the book already read.
