This is part 2 of 3 of my summary of Camille Fournier's "The Manager's Path". Part one is here and part 2 is here.

Ch04 - Managing people

• Build trust and rapport - ask questions to get to know the aspects of a person that will affect your ability to manage her well
• Create a 30/60/90-day plan, so that there are clear goals to show if she's learning the right things as she gets up to speed
• Encourage participation through updating the new hire documentation
• Be clear about your style and expectations
• Get feedback from your new hire
• Have regular 1:1s
• Start with weekly 1:1s, and schedule them so they can actually happen!
• Choose your 1:1 style: to-do list meeting, catch-up, feedback meeting?
• Keep a shared doc with a running list of topics
• If there are performance issues, feedback meetings should be happening regularly.
• Don't wait for the 1:1 to give feedback - and the same goes for praise
• If you're working closely with people, getting progress reports from them wastes time
• Show that you care about your people as individuals
• Mix it up
• Delgating effectively: use the team goals to understand which details you need to dig into
• If the progress is good, systems are stable and the product manager's happy, you probably don't need to dig into detail
• Get the information from the systems before going to the people
• Be prepared to adjust your focus as the project progresses through stages
• Establish standards for code and systems to help the team communicate
• Treat information sharing in a neutral to positive way, regardless of good or bad
• Continuous feedback means regularly sharing positive AND corrective feedback
• Improving continuous feedback: know your people, observe them, provide regular lightweight feedback, provide coaching
• Performance reviews - they go wrong because they're not prioritised, and people find them hard to write
• Give yourself enough time to prepare - and that takes longer than you think
• Try to account for the whole year, not just the last few months - use the running summary of your 1:1s
• Use concrete examples, and excerpts from peer reviews (anonymize if needed)
• If there isn't a concrete example, is it something you should be communicating in a review?
• Celebrate achievements and strengths
• Keep improvement areas focussed: saying no to distractions? hard for others to work with? can't balance planning with doing? don't work well with other teams? don't follow best practices?
• If there's little meaningful feedback to give, the person's ready for promotion
• Set expectations before the reviews are delivered
• Make enough time to discuss the review
• People are uncomfortable being told that they just meet expectations
• Underperformance: coaching someone out starts long before HR gets involved in performance improvement plans
• Don't put someone on a performance improvement plan that you wouldn't be happy to lose

Ch05 - Managing a team

• Your job will require you to guide technical decision making
• You must be seen as technically credible if you want to command respect
• Stay in the code enough to see where the bottlenecks and performance problems are
• You'll need to guide what's possible and impossible
• Dysfunctions: not shipping - balance pushing the team and holding back
• Dysfunctions: people drama. Be brave and stop it fast. Negative people are easier to handle than brilliant jerks. Don't tolerate vocally negative behaviour for long
• Dysfunctions: when people are unhappy because of overwork, you should be playing cheerleader. Learn from the crunch, and don't to it next time
• Dysfunctions: if the team isn't working well, make space for social hangouts
• Humans need context about why their goals have been set
• Don't pretend there isn't any drama in the outside world
• You're a shield, but not a parent
• Your teams are adults, and should be treated with respect
• Create a data-driven culture
• Take the time to develop customer empathy
• Think two steps ahead, from product and technology perspective
• Ask the product team what the future might look like
• Review the outcome of your decisions, and run retrospectives for processes and day-to-day
• Managing conflict: don't rely on consensus, and take responsibility for delivering bad news
• Use clear processes to depersonalize decisions, and ensure shared understanding of goals and risks
• Don't ignore simmering issues
• Address issues without courting drama - is this an ongoing problem? Are there power dynamics at play? Are lots of people struggling?
• Remember to be kind - not nice
• Don't be afraid
• Stay curious, and be thoughtful about your behaviour
• Team cohesion: don't rely on the "will they stay for pizza" test
• Your goal is psychological safety, and that starts with friendliness
• "culture fit" often means "people I can be friendly with"
• The brilliant jerk: creates outsized results, but is ego-driven
• Don't hire them in the first place, and expect it to be hard if you've already got one
• Don't tolerate bad behaviour
• Control your own reactions - be neutral in public, and prepared to challenge in private
• First priority is protect the team, last priority is protect yourself
• The non-communicator: stop this behaviour as soon as possible, and address the root cause of the hiding
• The employee who lacks respect: you can't have them on your team if they don't respect you
• Project management: you've got 10 productive weeks per engineer per quarter
• Allow 20% of time for generic engineering work
• It's your job to say "no" as deadlines approach
• Double your quick estimates, but estimate longer tasks properly
• Be selective about what you bring to the team to estimate