Browse the Knowledge Hub211 resources
The Manager's Path: is it worth reading?
The standard guide to the engineering management ladder, from mentoring to senior leadership.
We earn nothing from any link on this page. No affiliate links anywhere in this library.
- published
- 2017
- key ideas
- 3
- reading path
- 1
The Manager's Path
A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
by Camille Fournier
- Publisher
- O'Reilly
- Year
- 2017
- ISBN
- 9781491973899
Useful when you are: Senior / lead, Manager
Verdict
Should you read it?
Read it if
You lead a QA team or are about to. The content is engineering-management general and applies to a test lead or manager essentially unchanged.
Skip it if
You are certain you want to stay technical. Though the chapter on being managed is worth reading regardless.
The argument
What it argues
Structured by career stage: being mentored, mentoring, tech lead, managing people, managing a team, managing managers, and beyond. Each chapter describes what the job actually is at that level and what changes from the one before.
The tech lead and first-time manager chapters are the most useful, because those are the transitions people are least prepared for and where the previous skill set stops being the relevant one.
It is direct about the parts of management nobody enjoys: performance problems, difficult feedback, and deciding whether you actually want the job at all.
Key ideas
Ideas worth taking from it
- 01
Management is a job change, not a promotion
The skills that made someone a strong individual contributor are not the skills required, which is why strong engineers frequently become unhappy managers.
- 02
The tech lead transition
The first role requiring influence without authority, and the one most people handle badly because nobody describes what it actually involves.
- 03
One to ones that are not status updates
The most frequently wasted management ritual, and what it should be used for instead.
Criticism
What has dated, and what it gets wrong
Written from large, well-funded technology companies, so the organisational assumptions do not always transfer to a smaller company or a consultancy. The later chapters on senior leadership are thinner than the early ones and less widely applicable.
Reading paths
On our reading paths
Leading a quality team
Book 4 of 4 · QA and engineering managers
The practical guide to each step of the management ladder, from mentoring one person to leading other managers.
1. Peopleware
2. The Mythical Man-Month
3. Team Topologies- 4. The Manager's Path (this book)
Keep reading
What to read next
Reading about quality is cheaper than learning it in production.
QAble runs QA for products in BFSI, gaming, healthcare and SaaS, with engineers who have read these and argued about them. Start with a free QA audit.