The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

Camille Fournier was CTO of Rent the Runway and, before that, a vice president at Goldman Sachs; she has been active in the Apache ZooKeeper project for years. In “The Manager’s Path,” she walks through the stages of a technical leadership career – one at a time, from the bottom up.

The first chapter is called “Management 101,” and it starts from the perspective most of us know: before leading anyone, Fournier clarifies what you may expect from your own manager, how one-on-ones work, and how to get feedback. What follows are mentoring, the tech lead role, managing individuals, a team, multiple teams, and finally managers – all the way up to VP of engineering and CTO, and to building a company culture.

Each chapter first describes what the role is about and then gets specific: onboarding, performance reviews, delegation, skip-level meetings, dealing with brilliant jerks, spotting dysfunctional teams, and separating the technical from the management track.

Every chapter ends with a section called “Assessing Your Own Experience,” asking questions about your own situation. That part turns the book from reading material into a workbook.

I find the book valuable for two groups: developers who are not yet sure whether to take the leadership path – it shows plainly what they would be signing up for – and freshly minted tech leads and team leads who suddenly face tasks nobody trained them for.

🎧 Suitable as an audiobook? Yes. There are no code examples and no diagrams; only the question lists at the end of each chapter are worth revisiting in print.