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

Ch05 - Managing multiple teams

• Engineering directors won't necessarily be writing code every day
• Be realistic about your schedule - any code you write will be slow
• Code reviews are a good way to stay in practice
• Spend time to gain mastery of at least one language before moving into management
• Try to keep a half-day a week free from meetings and use this for something creative
• Understand the difference between important and urgent tasks
• Important but not urgent: preparing for meetings so you can guide them in a healthy way
• Pushing an efficient meeting culture down to your teams can win back a lot of time
• Look around the room during meetings to gauge engagement - if everyone's asleep, it's wasting their time
• You'll get better at delegation and decisions over time
• Use the simple/complex versus frequent/infrequent grid to figure out what you should do versus what you should delegate
• Simple & frequent: delegate
• Simple & infrequent: do it yourself
• Complex & frequent: delegate carefully
• Complex & infrequent: delegate as a training opportunity
• Strategies for saying NO: use the "yes, and" approach
• Combining positivity while articulating boundaries of what's possible will get you into the management major leagues
• Strategies for saying NO: creat policies
• When you start repeating youself, you've got the basis for a reasonable policy
• Making a policy enables your team to know what they need to do to get a yes
• Strategies for saying NO: "Help me say yes"
• Ask questions and dig in on the questionable details
• Curious interrogation of ideas can help you say no and teach at the same time
• Strategies for saying NO: Work as a team
• Don't prevaricate: better to say no quickly than delay and drag it out
• Questions to ask yourself: Do I know wha's expected of me? Do I have what I need to get the job done right? Do I get to do what I do best every day?
• Frequency of release is a team health diagnostic - good teams move fast and deliver small chunks of the big picture
• Good teams check in code frequently - lack of this suggests poor planning and chunking
• Good teams have a low frequency of incidents
• Poor teams are: fragile to the loss of the leader; resistent to outside ideas; build empires; inflexible
• Durable teams are: resilient to the loss of individuals; driven to find better ways; focussed on the company first; open to changes that serve their purpose
• Impatience, laziness and hubris are virtues of engineers according to Larry Wall
• Any time you see something inefficient, question it
• Develop and show the value of laziness

Ch06 - Managing managers

• The expectations for managing managers aren't that different to those of managing multiple teams
• Things are now obscured through an additional level of abstraction
• You won't detect problems when you're in this role for the first time
• This is a place where you need to find your discomfort, chase it down and sit with it unblinking for a while
• Skip-level meetings - one of the critical success factors in managing managers
• A meeting with people who report to people who report to you
• Short 1:1 with each person in the organisation
• Skip-level lunches with the whole team
• Aim is to maintain trust and engagement, and detect places where you're being "managed up" to
• A reality check from the people on the ground
• Relationships with your reporting managers should make your life easier
• Often hard to hold your managers accountable because accountability is muddled
• Common scenarios: unstable product roadmap; errant tech lead; ful-time firefighting
• Spend time with your managers to get to know them as people, and pay attention to their strengths and weaknesses
• The people pleaser: their team loves them as a person, but get frustrated
• The people pleaser: they're more interested in a team that runs smoothly than pushing them
• The people pleaser: they wear their mood on their face
• The people pleaser: they never push back on work
• The people pleaser: they overpromise and underdeliver
• The people pleaser: they say yes to everyone
• The people pleaser: they know all about the problems, but never address them
• Help them feel safer saying no, and externalise more decisions
• Create better processes for getting work scheduled
• Show them that they're exhibiting the behaviours and highlight the downsides
• Spend quality time with your new managers
• Use skip-level meetings to detect areas where you need to support them
• Watch for overwork, which is a sign they think they're the taskmaster
• Beware poor relationships with other teams and product, which can be a sign of a control freak
• Managing experienced managers: make sure this person fits with the culture of your team
• Hiring managers: make sure they've got the skills, and they're a culture match
• Have them role play a few 1:1s as part of the interview process
• They must be able to debug teams
• Try role-playing with someone who's thinking of quitting