The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway)

I'm curious what It is that PMs do that annoy engineers most. PMs they tend to be the front facing person for initiative. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM takes all the glory and all the credit for the project that they really worked very hard on. I find the best PMs are the ones that talk the least and Encourage other people to do the presenting. The next thing that engineers really get annoyed about with VMs when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter. But just shows a real lack of empathy for the work that engineers are doing. I think it really can be very off putting. Is there any insight you can give about what people maybe miss about the motivation of engineers, what gets them excited? A lot of people People assume that engineers just write code and don't underestimate the ability for your engineers to want to understand the business problem, want to understand the customer problem. I think the product managers that have done the best, they're not threatened by other people having ideas. Today my guest is Camille Fournier.

Camille is one of the most respected technology executives in tech and the author of The Manager's Path. which many consider the definitive guide for navigating your career and moving into management. Over the course of her career, she was CTO of Rent The Runway, VP of Technology at Goldman Sachs, Global Head of Engineering and Architecture at JP Morgan Chase. and head of platform engineering at two sigma. She's also releasing a new book later this year called Platform Engineering, a guide for technical, product and people leaders, which you can actually pre-order today and we get into this topic in the latter half of the conversation.

We also dig into what PMs do the most annoys engineers and how to stop doing these things. Why major rewrites are often a trap? Why you may want to be doing fewer one on ones. What most surprises people when they become a manager, and some really useful heuristics for how long you should stay in IC before you make a leap into management, and tons more. This episode covers a lot of crown.

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