The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (“The Manager’s Path”)

(instrumental music) I'm curious what it is that PMs do that annoy engineers most.

Hoarding credit. PMs, they tend to be the front-facing person for an 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 PMs, when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter. It just shows a real lack of empathy for the work that engineers are doing, and 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 assume that engineers just write code. Don't underestimate the ability for your engineers to... Who wants 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.

(instrumental music) 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 JPMorgan 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 that 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 the leap into management, and tons more. This episode covers a lot of ground, and will help you think about management, platform teams, team culture, and the PM and eng relationship in a whole new way. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Camille Fournier. Camille, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's my pleasure. I want to start by asking you a question that is on the minds of a lot of product managers, is how to be less annoying as a product manager. I know you've worked with a lot of engineers over time. I'm curious what it is that PMs do that annoy engineers most, and how can PMs stop doing that?