The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand

Camille Fournier, author of The Manager's Path and former CTO of Rent the Runway, discusses how product managers can work better with engineers, when rewrites are a trap, and how engineers should approach management, one-on-ones, and platform teams. The conversation also covers focus and sustainable productivity, and the upcoming book on platform engineering.

01Key learnings

• Share credit generously with engineers and give them room to present their own technical contributions rather than taking the spotlight.
• Show genuine interest in engineering details, even if you don't need to master them, since dismissing them signals a lack of empathy.
• Avoid acting as a go-between for engineers and stakeholders; if you keep relaying questions back and forth, connect the people directly.
• Include engineers in ideation so their creative energy goes into the product rather than into over-engineering technical choices.
• Be skeptical of full rewrites: migration takes far longer than estimated, legacy systems hide undocumented logic, and old systems must be supported meanwhile. Prefer staged uplifts of well-contained parts.
• Stay hands-on long enough to reach real technical mastery (roughly a decade of serious coding in her view) before moving into management, and keep a network of smart technical people to stay credible.
• As a manager, you don't own your time; limit one-on-ones to direct reports and manager, since broad one-on-one networking doesn't scale and can backfire with stakeholders.
• Periodically audit your time, delegate more than feels comfortable, and test what you can cut, accepting that some cuts will be mistakes.

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.