Founder Mode & The Manager’s Path 👑 — with Camille Fournier

because you have to figure out how to hold people accountable if you want to lead at scale. All of us do founders or otherwise. We all, that, you know, if you can figure out the accountability part of leadership, you will not be able to scale and you're going to create bad situations, whether you try to be in the details or not. (upbeat music) - Today's guest is Camille Fouñet. Camille is one of the giants of our industry. She's been in tech for more than 20 years, has been CEO and executive at many successful companies and she is an accomplished author. She wrote the manager's path, possibly the most influential book ever about engineering management and has a new book coming out this fall about platform engineering. With Camille, we talked about good versus bad management, the controversial new founder mode and career advice for managers. So let's dive right into it after a short word from our sponsor. 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Check out sluth.io for more information. - Hi Camille, welcome and thank you so much for being here with us today. - Thank you for having me. - So Camille, you are an extremely accomplished tech executive former city or different companies. You're also an author, you have written the timeless the managers path and you also have a book coming out this fall about platform engineering. And first of all, I want to say that the managers path, I think was the first book I have ever read specifically about engineering management that gave me a sound mental model about what good management, a good engineering management look like and to incredibly useful for me as a young manager and young co-founder and city actually. So first of all, thank you so much for that. - Oh, I'm so glad it was helpful for you. - Yeah, absolutely. So I want to start exactly from there because as you know, this new essay from Port Graham that came out just a few weeks ago called Founder Mode, which kind of challenges exactly this idea of what good management looks like. So to summarize it describes this kind of bad manager culture where teams become black boxes, you assign managers, you manage through outcomes and you stay out of details. USA founder or USA executive. And Port Graham says this doesn't work and proposes this quote unquote Founder Mode without going really into the details of what this look like. But it's about doing the things he says that founders can do which managers can't apparently. So I know you have replied that you have written a great medium post. So what do you think about about this? Does this Founder Mode exist? Is it aspirational? Is it misguided? - So I mean, look, you know, as you said, it's really kind of vibes, right? Because the post is very much like, I don't like the post. I think the idea of dichotomies of like you are either in Founder Mode or Manager Mode. - Yeah. - You know, it's just as very simplistic, right? And of course the world is never that way. I have worked at massive companies where I would say that large parts of the companies were not run in whatever the sort of model of quote unquote manager mode that was sort of the straw man put in that blog post. Right. So I think already to me, it's a little bit of like a flawed premise because I'm just not, it's not that I don't believe that there are people who make the mistake of trying to find the algorithm for running their company. I actually was thinking about this topic, you know, in preparing for our conversation and I do think that one of the challenges you see particularly with technical, you know, executives and leaders is that they want the algorithm to tell them how to like lead, tell them the two things. I'm a technical person, right? You learn algorithms in school, you learn, you know, the steps and instructions that you need to create to make something happen, right? And if you write a computer program with the right steps and instructions, it will reliably do what you need it to do, right? assuming it doesn't have any bugs, it will reliably do that thing you can predict from the input what the output will be, right? Okay. Leadership is not that. And so I absolutely do agree that, you know, if you think that there's an algorithm whereby you hire good people and you treat their teams like black boxes and you the founder, I don't know actually what the founder is doing in this case, I don't know maybe being a, you know, being a figurehead. I think you're, I think he's absolutely right that that's not going to end up well for you, right? It may not be because the executives are all these sort of malicious liars as the code is applied or, you know, but someone does have to have kind of a strategy and driving force to move the company forward. What I don't agree with though is like, you, that the driving force is therefore you want to be in the weeds of all of the details and all of the decisions everywhere. Because I think that, you know, one point that I would make about that is I actually think you train people to do the exact thing he talks about being bad, which is you train people to manage up to you and lie to you and otherwise like, you know, tell you, tell you incomplete stories about what's happening when you treat them in this way of like not trusting them and kind of micro managing everything that they do. I actually think that that kind of behavior ironically creates the worst situation that you're trying to avoid, right? That's not to say that, so I don't think you should avoid, you know, understanding what's going on and, you know, being in details or appropriate. I also don't think you should micro manage to the instigree all of the time because I think smart executives learn how to manage up from leaders like that who exist everywhere. They are not just founders, right? We see them all over every company. - Yeah, yeah. - Some of those people and they teach people how to manage up to them because nobody wants to be micromanaged and so smart, capable people are just going to figure out how to feed you the information that they know you want to see in the format that you, that you really respond to and they're going to use that to hide the stuff that you don't want to see. And you can think that you're smart enough to out with them and figure out what's going on and sometimes that's probably true, but it's not always going to be true and it will be less and less true the farther away they are from your area of expertise. So you have to figure out what I definitely disagree about is don't just manage by outputs. You have to figure out how to hold people accountable if you want to lead at scale. Elves do founders or otherwise. If you can figure out the accountability part of leadership, you will not be able to scale and you're going to create bad situations whether you try to be in the details or not. That being said, I totally agree that there's no algorithm. You can't just hire people and trust them to do the right thing and expect that good things will happen. I think engineering leadership also makes that mistake sometimes, right? Hiresmart people, get out of their way, let them build whatever they think is right. I've worked at a lot of companies on a lot of teams where that was an approach for a while and did you get a few good things out of it? Absolutely. But maybe for every one great thing you got from that sort of free form model, you got 10 things that actually were not great and maybe even slowed the company down because of the approach that the engineers took or the time that they spent on that instead of actually growing the business, right? So we've got to have balance. We've got to have balance. A founder mode is a catchy term. It's definitely not going to go away. Way too catchy to go away. But if a founders are listening to this conversation, what I would encourage you to remember is, it is absolutely correct that you can't take your hands off of your business and for a long time, most likely, right? Eventually, if you're very successful, right? You will retire, you will hand the business over to someone else. You'll probably be sad about what happens because it was your baby. I'm sure Bill Gates probably sometimes looks at Microsoft and it's like, oh my God, what happened to my baby? But like, you know, whatever, like that's going to happen unless you want to like run the business until you die, you know, eventually you will. if you're business is in supply, eventually you're gonna have to let it go. And if you're lucky, you'll hire a Satya Nadella or somebody eventually, you know, like a Satya Nadella will come over and they will change the business in totally new ways that maybe you never would have thought of but that make it even better and stronger for the future, right? But, you know, it is absolutely appropriate for you to be involved in your business, for you to be a leader, for you to make decisions, sometimes unpopular decisions. That is not the same, that is not, but that is not a, that's not a pissy thing and that doesn't mean you don't need strong executives and good managers to have a successful company. That merely means this isn't actually a formulae process, right, so, you know, get over the idea that there's a formula you can use to solve, you know, company success. - Yeah, and I think that's where things get leader-be-confusing for many people because it's one of those cases where it seems like one side of the advice is fine and the counter-advices fine as well. Like, maybe the best example for this is the legacy and myth of Steve Jobs that was this kind of famous micomanager apparently getting into all the details, but if you just do his interviews, he, all the time, leader, he says, "Hi, great people and let them tell you what to do." So, these are apparently like two opposite views. So, makes me think you have to stay like in the weeds, but there may be good weeds and bad weeds to stay into. And, but how should you navigate that if you're an executive or a founder? Does that depend on your strengths, you know, your aptitude or the people you work with? - Yeah, so I think it's a few things. I think that, yes, like if you are probably unique in some aptitude. I worked for Renta Runaway, I was the CTO at Renta Runaway and the CEO, Stolzitio, the founder of their Jen Heimann was very unique individual. She was one of the most brilliant product strategists and marketers I've ever seen. And she would go in and out of kind of being in the weeds of those areas. And I'm sure she, I mean, she kind of drove all of us crazy in the process. You know, as happens, frankly. But, you know, at the time I was still, you know, a new executive, I was still learning how any of this should work. And, you know, it would be very frustrating. I think I got overly frustrated often about it because, frankly, when the CEO comes in and decides that you're gonna do something completely different and you're gonna take the businesses a different way, you know, you often, you're like, what the heck? Like we have all these ideas. It's gonna be very different from my team. They're already working on all these other things that they care about and that I've told them on and now you've taken me to change everything. And that's, that can be very frustrating. But I think, you know, in retrospect, what I see is like, she, you know, most of the time when she had those ideas, she was right and it was her business. And she was the visionary leader behind that business. And so I think she was absolutely right in, you know, making and being willing to make hard, not always internally popular product pivots in order to ultimately make the company successful. So I think as a founder, you know, you've got to figure out what your thing is, like what is the genius that you have brought to this business where you just have that clarity of view and that is probably some aspect of the product or the, you know, the marketing or the whatever, as well as possibly the culture, right? So I think the culture is the other side of that, that can kind of go either way. You know, I think Bill O'Reilly, if there was a Bill O'Reilly post from a, from a while ago, that Brian Cantrell linked to and when he was talking about founder modes, if you Google Brian Cantrell, Brian with a Y, you know, he wrote a post about founder mode and he links to an O'Reilly post where O'Reilly himself, like, talks about a lot of the things he did well and he didn't do well in sort of the early to middle days of O'Reilly and growing that company. And I think that's actually a great example of like, what founder mode really means and like, you know, places where he's like, I should have stayed more in the details of like the company culture and handbook as we, you know, sort of turned into a proper company with an HR department and a legal department and all of that, right? Yeah. Versus areas where he was like, I was not an expert and I think finance was just an example. And, you know, instead of trying to force myself to become a finance expert, you know, for so long, I just wasted a lot of time where I could have just really delegated that to the great people that I hired and they would actually figure out how to make this business more efficient in those ways, right? So, you know, I just think you should figure out, you know, I think it is very realistic and good to stay deeply involved in the things that are your area of genius. You should also always though be challenging yourself, like, you know, if the company has grown and scaled 10x, are you still actually like really able to, you know, to be a genius at the 10x of this particular X, Y, or Z, maybe, maybe not, right? You know, you may need to learn some new things. But, you know, delegate, but then you have to be willing to get out of your comfort zone and figure out how to hold people accountable for those things that you delegate. So, there's no world where you get to get out of the hard work of like thinking about things that you'd probably find kind of boring occasionally, right? We all find something kind of boring occasionally. And if you're leading people that do that thing, you don't have to, you can delegate a lot of it to them, but you have to pay some attention. Unless it's totally unimportant. And then you may ask yourself, why are we doing it at all? If it's really this unimportant, should be outsourced, should be by a product to do it for us, should be whatever, right? You know, like, you know, unless it's a philosophical, I don't think HR is important, which, I'm sorry, you're wrong about that, but like, you know, generally speaking, like, you know, for the major important functions of your business, you need to pay enough attention to understand how to manage them effectively from an accountability perspective. And that can be boring sometimes, but, you know, that's like founder like is not all glamour and doing the cool stuff. Yeah, love this take. So basically find your own area of genius where you can contribute probably long term, whatever the scale or maybe something changed with scale, but it's what makes you special, as a founder, probably from the times, even when you were a small company, and you still contribute to that and find those other areas where you should delegate and delegate well, and that's hard work. Anyway, it's not that, it's easy to do that. I love this take. And I want to get back to what you said before that we are often guilty of trying to find algorithms to do everything. We are all engineers, so we see a problem like scanning a company, scaling organization, and we want to find the formula that works in every case. And do you think that we are guilty of that when it comes to these topics, scaling an organization? And maybe that's why we are seeing this kind of backlash, maybe a guy against this, you know, management structures that we have got from Big Tech, that's one of the reasons why maybe the programs are actually made such a splash in the industry. - Yeah, I mean, it's, I do, like I do totally agree that I actually, what I agree most strongly with, even though again, I think it is like a, I don't love to like stereotype and scapegoat people as much as possible, but like, I do agree that there are absolutely, you know, sharks out there at the executive level that, you know, they just want to do what they want to do. And they are very political, they are very good at, you know, at managing up, they are very good at making it seem like they are doing good things while doing very bad things. And you see them everywhere. I don't think I've ever worked at a company where they haven't been a few of these folks somewhere, right? And, but I don't, you know, if you're, like, the problem is, so I don't think the problem is like that we're inheriting a bunch of stuff from Big Tech, but if you're hiring senior executives from Big Tech, you are more likely, I think to get those people, just because like, you really have to learn that skills to be successful at really big companies. Not everybody, like, not everybody got successful because of that, but like, I do think that at big companies, there's so much politics, just inevitable at fail, that there are absolutely people who are just, you know, they got to where they are, but being very good at, you know, making friends with the right people or saying the right thing, or sometimes just like outrunning their mistakes. I definitely think there are a lot of executives out there who like do a really good job for, you know, a couple of years, and then they move on to the next thing, and they leave behind giant mess that like, you know, a few people know about, but a lot of people didn't know about, and they just kind of, you know, there are, I think there are genuinely a lot of those, those types kind of kind of running around. So I don't think, like, I don't actually think that the, I think that if you, if you go to a big company, There are big company things you have to learn how to do, like, you know, complex processes maybe for like performance reviews or, you know, like, you know, fancy business review type processes that could be useful in a small company or may just be overhead and bureaucracy in a small company. And I do think he's how you hire, like a manager from a big company. You need to make sure they aren't just trying to like copy paste the things that worked in that context into your world. Which by the way, is actually true kind of anytime you move from one company to another, there are inevitably inevitably going to be slight differences in the context that will make some of the things you did at the last company work and some of them not really fit. But big company to small does have that big risk of like, I think, I think it's really not about, like, manager or something, just like bringing in unnecessary bureaucracy that just doesn't serve you. Yeah, but so do you think that this bureaucracy is a necessary for smaller company, but it's a necessary evil in bigger company? Or do you think that, given, I don't know, advances in tooling productivity, what we know about good management, maybe today, the classical management model of big tech companies is a little bit bloated. Maybe we're seeing more layoffs and companies still going fine, even with less people. I don't know, actually, like, I don't know, I don't know that tech companies, I guess I don't know enough of the actual details of like, what the spans of control and blah, blah, blah look like in big companies to have a smart opinion because a lot of big companies still have, they actually seem to have like both ends of the problem. You have too many situations where you have somebody managing two or three people, which if it's a transitionary period where somebody, you know, you're growing a team or you're sort of growing a new manager and it's kind of a, you know, you're teaching them kind of the ropes for a short period of time. Maybe that's fine, and I think that's the challenge at a big company. You're going to see that all the time because you're always, there's always these sort of shifts and growth and changes, but if that's like a strong habit in your company where you have lots and lots and lots of managers, managers who are managing two or three people, you've got something of a problem. On the other hand, you also almost always see people where they have way too many direct reports where it's like, oh, we, you know, this person has 20 direct reports that got 25 direct reports and you're just like, there's no way they're managing those people effectively. Like you just, yeah, at that scale, maybe they're all contractors, it's a little bit of a different thing, right? Yeah, yeah. If you're, if you're, you know, Jensen, among the, the, you know, the Nvidia CEO, right, that's just a completely different world. If you are managing executives, totally different world than managing even just like senior managers, let alone individual contributors or linemen. Yeah, he said, because I think you mentioned to the interview where he said he has like 40 direct reports, Jensen, from video and before taking him, is an example of what a middle manager maybe he should look like. Like he should, like he, that's just not, he's not a friggin CEO. It's a go and a go video. That's, he is very successful. That does not mean that that is the lesson to take away from his success. Maybe those are the successes if he are a founder of like a massively quickly growing company, hire really, really amazing people to your leadership team so that you don't really need to, you're not really worrying about like, to bad deceive them. Yeah. Like layers and whatever and you don't, and you don't need to have one on one's, you don't need to do that stuff. That's, but that's just like, those people have a very different job than almost anyone else. When you are in that level of senior management, your job is very different. I have worked for senior managers in that kind of position. Their job is very different than even my job. Right. And so I, I think that the problem is not that big tech is bloated. The problem, you know, because I think big tech can be both bloated and, you know, completely, poorly laid out. Right. Both of those are not really successful ways of like, sort of setting up management. But I think, you know, I think the real thing that you need to worry about is not like them, is not as much like, do we have too many managers? It's again, are we creating too many unnecessary processes? Are we creating a lot of unnecessary overhead? Are we, you know, are we trying to do like too many really elaborate like project management, you know, things like, you know, agile plus plus double, double extra, right? Where, you know, if you look across your teams and like all of your engineers are just in meetings all the time, yeah, you for sure have a problem. I don't know what it is, but you for sure have a problem if your engineers are in meetings all the time. Sometimes that problem is that engineers all feel like the only way for them to get anything done is to talk to 20 people, right? Sometimes you are causing the problem because you can't agree on a direction with your peers or with the product team or whatever and so people are just getting thrashed in a million different directions and they, you know, they want to write code, but they can't because no one agrees what needs to be done and every time they try to make forward progress, they get shot down, you know, they end up in some more ass of approvals that just never ends, right? So yes, pay attention to your bureaucracy. Please pay attention to your bureaucracy. That is one of the most important things you can do if you want to stay in founder mode or just be a successful company is like constantly evaluate the processes and ways of working and ask yourself, you know, do we need this extra approval? Do we need this meeting? Do we need this, you know, if you are in a highly regulated business as I most recently have been, the answer may very well be yes, actually we kind of have to, but you can always ask, like, could we automate it? How could we, how could we lower the burden of this necessary process as much as possible even though we are, you know, we're a giant company, we're operating in Europe, we have these data, presidency requirements that require these kinds of sign-offs, like how do we, how do we make that as painless as possible despite, you know, the necessity of doing it? Yeah, yeah, I agree because I think it has been really fascinating to see the kind of response sometimes even emotional response, maybe attach it to their to programs piece for such a, let's say, high level, not to say, vogue piece, right? And it made me really think and once that one angle is the one that you mentioned also about bureaucracy about maybe big companies versus small companies, but I think there is also another another angle that is more about identity and culture. Probably, I mean, I've written about this even in the past, I feel to me there's this kind of divide between companies where, you know, hustlers all in the same room, long hours, you know, Silicon Valley, type and companies that instead more calm, remote first, thoughtful, and everyone thinks bad things about the other, you know, either it's lazy or it's unhealthy on one side or the other side, and I think that this kind of pieces, founder, mode gets, get easily hijacked by this part is for, you know, to push this kind of culture or agenda. I don't know if we can bridge the gap or it's just a cultural thing that appeals to different types of people and companies can function well in either case. I do know if you see any of these and if you have any thoughts. Yeah, I mean, I do, I definitely agree with what you're sort of seeing. You know, and I do think like look, you're never going to perfectly bridge bridge these kinds of gaps. There's always going to be if you have a successful business, you can, you know, you can and you probably will do do it however you want, right? So if you have a successful business that's relatively calm and I've seen some of those, right? They don't necessarily remote first, but sometimes they are. And you've got a successful business. It's probably not a giant company. I actually find that while there are plenty of like calm people at giant companies, most giant companies are not calm. There are a lot of like real hustlers at every big company, whether you work with them much or not. Well, you know, sometimes you just have to be a hustler to get anything done, right? Yeah. You know, but I think, you know, I do think that like a lot of you see the Silicon Valley hustler company partly because just to start a new business requires some amount of hustle, no matter what, right? Yeah. You know, so unless you're sort of in that kind of lifestyle business that somehow you manage, maybe you manage to take a lifestyle business and really just like go big with it or you decide consciously once the company gets to a certain size to adjust the culture in certain ways and, you know, and calm it down maybe a little bit. But I think you see hustlers at calm companies and calm people at hustler companies. But at the same time, like, you're absolutely right. There is an identity. There is an identity of war. And I mean, I guess it's okay, Right? I kind of think. that I kind of think that, you know, we would all do well to like try not to demonize one another and, you know, and totally stereotype, you know, one another. Because I just don't think I think most of the time that just doesn't really, doesn't really go anywhere positive for for us for the world. Like I'm sort of sick of it. I'm sort of sick of it. You know, I think we all kind of got into it for a while there. You know, the more I work, the more people I work with, the more different types of cultures that I work in, you know, I do learn so a lot about myself. You know, because like I'm like a calm hustler. Like I'm, you know, I think I'm actually pretty thoughtful. I don't tend to be one of those people that's like, you know, in the office 12 hours a day. But I work very hard and I think about work all the time and I like, I want to win. I want to be at, you know, I want to like be around success and creating success. So, you know, it's like I am myself and like I'm not really one or the other. I'm sort of like this weird. You know, and I'm not saying that to be like, oh, I'm like awesome. Like I actually, you know, frankly, I think sometimes I'm like, man, I wish I had more like stamina to work longer hours sometimes or, you know, I wish I could shut off more frankly like I'm not a great. I don't love remote work. I'll do it a little bit but like I'm not the greatest. I love to see people in person and that, you know, that like quiet contemplation type of remote work sometimes makes me like a little. So, you know, so it's like I don't think I'm, I think I am like a person. I think I'm a human being. I'm perhaps all human beings and it's hard to put us, you know, in one bucket or another. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's on one side is not black white and they're the side is not helpful to bucket ourselves, you know, in into this strict categories because we are we are all a blend and we it doesn't take us, you know, closer one another but it just fuels. Words and conflicts and it does really it doesn't do good, I think. And we have talked about management. We talk about trends while management is usually the domain of time less advice, right? I mean, we have incredible management books that are like 40 to 50 years old. And I remember when I when I read the managers path some of the best lessons I learned about things that were not even technical right so things like expect to view like communication feedback adaptability and more. But do you think that has anything changed instead? Do you think for you know if you think about today, 2024, is there anything that you would write differently for example for to give advice to engineer managers and mind you, I mean, no is a perfectly acceptable answer. Yeah, so I have to I have to make the the admission that like I haven't read the managers have all the way through probably since right about when I published it because you ever read a book you will realize like yet of your book by the time it's actually published. The one so there are two things to say here one is that most of the things I wrote in the book and often when I come back to it for reference I'm going to talk to someone about some specific part of it. I think wow, I was I was smart like back then. I often think, oh man, I had you my editors were really helpful when I wrote this like, I, you know, I sound really good, but I think I had a lot of. I have to myself this. But I think a lot of it like I still believe a lot of it, I think a lot of it is still useful. I'm actually, you know, what's been very interesting to me is I wrote the managers have. Right after kind of having grown, grown through the management ranks frankly very quickly. This is something that I'm only starting to kind of admit when I talk about it now, which is that like now that the book I think has settled into. Frankly being way more successful than I ever expected it to be I'm just blown away, but I'm also like so proud of myself to be honest on, but. You know, now that it's not that settled in like the truth of the matter is I have not been managing for very long when I wrote that book. Like this is not a book of someone with 20 years of management experience putting all of their wisdom. This is a book of somebody who. Had grown very quickly as a manager in a very high stress high pressure situation mostly in startup. And he just wanted to get all of the things that she had learned, you know, through very the rapid kind of trial and error that you can have when you work at a startup on the page right that plus a lot of you know I have an amazing network of friends who are also had gone through that maybe they had gone through it a couple times and you know who could also for you know sort of helped me and we would talk about these topics a lot. But this was a book that was written, you know, kind of very fresh. I was very fresh experience for me. I think that's the only way I ever could have written it. I actually think, you know, once you've been doing it for so long you forget what is novel and important and and that people need to learn because you've just been doing it for so long. You have to like someone has to ask you specifically before you think, oh yeah, that's not something that everybody just knows how to do because they've been you know they've been doing one on ones 10 times a week for you know 15 years right like it's like oh yeah I forget that that can be. So I'm so you know so I wrote that book seven years have passed I've been managing you know frankly much larger teams since then I've managed you know 100 200 800 like very very large organizations and I think there are additional things that I have learned about managing at that kind of scale. But I think almost everything I wrote in the managers past still kind of stands up like it's all it's all useful so useful stuff. The one thing I'm not as sure about is actually the the stuff that I wrote about hiring interviewing managers that may I would I may rewrite I might change it's probably the only thing that I can think of that I'm very clear about like I'm not totally sure because I hadn't hired that many managers when I wrote it. I think that now now I'm not you know I actually think hiring managers is much more about the culture of the company that you're hiring them into and like you know there's just a lot of nuance to that that doesn't doesn't come out quite as well in the book. But what I will say is so I don't think that there's a lot that I would change about the managers have I have learned a lot since then a lot of that actually is in my new book which is about platform engineering. Yes, it is about like a specific type of it's really for engineering and people and technical and product leaders sort of look at the book is aimed at leaders not necessarily managers but people and leadership positions but you know it's a book about like how do you make this platform engineering thing kind of work. Work at scale which is what I have been really focused on for since I you know since I wrote the managers path and moved on in my career and so on the one hand it is a little bit specific about that type of engineering and that type of engineering and product leadership but on the other hand it actually is there's a lot that you need to learn about scaled leadership that comes through in that book so about or you know leading product teams. You know or working with product teams are doing you know doing sort of thinking in a product mindset you know a lot about like you know hiring different types of roles. You know dealing stakeholder management is a big part of it right running and execute you know running and executing long running complex projects where you need to explain what your team is delivering. So it doesn't perfectly translate to what you know product or application engineering which is where you really have something that's a little bit more externally facing to clients or customers or whatever or you're working very very directly with the business whereas I think platform engineering all of what we're talking about there is like the internal technology that you build to support the engineering teams at your at your company and create kind of that leverage for more sort of internal developer. And you know application engineer productivity but there's a lot that is in fact still kind of general leadership lessons about more scale like thinking about these kinds of things more at scale. This is so interesting both the idea of the additional learnings that got into the new book and also the fact that you said that maybe the fact that you were more fresh into this very fast career when you wrote the first book was even an asset. You know you're writing in writing the book this kind of you know naifty maybe and you are unburdened with respect from someone would be like 25 years in the industry maybe and I mean I remember made me think that I found that the start up in the travel space when I was very young I did know anything about that. And one of my investors told me this thing that if I had known anything about the industry I would probably have never started this and because and instead I could bring this kind of ingenuity and it's is this what you mean it's it's very interesting to me. Yeah yeah no I just think sometimes the best time to write is when it's just really. fresh and you know sometimes you need to marinate right but but I think I liked I do like to write things when they're really fresh because I can still feel them I feel you know for me a lot of like writing I have to feel a strong opinion about something before I'm willing to like put you know fingers to keyboard and like write about it because if I don't I don't have a strong opinion about how something should be done like who might I tell you like I don't know you know you know what I feel strongly about something and usually I feel most strongly when I'm when it's very fresh for me yeah yeah I think this is a great litmus test for for what great writing looks like I mean I write a newsletter full-time and you know you develop your kind of instinct about what what an article is going well it's gonna go the well and when it's not gonna do well and many times it bolts down to is this opinionated I mean many other people really disagree mentally with that and if you if they don't but but it's not good enough I mean you're not really putting yourself out there and I mean that's how it works for me sometimes yeah no I mean I think you're right and it's it is it is scary to do that right and that is the other thing is like the longer you stay in management actually the more you have to kind of temper that big opinion like you you will have them occasionally but like this more senior you are the more your job is not to have it's not to dominate everybody with your opinions all the time but rather to like nudge and guide and you know you open-minded to the ways that they want to do things because it gets back to that sounderboard thing like you know you gotta pay very choosy about the things that you're gonna be really opinionated about and you should have some opinions like don't give you wrong even if you're not a founder right here a leader part of part of a great leadership I think is being willing to you know being willing to stand your ground on the things that really matter to you but if you want to do that you gotta let the stuff that doesn't matter like you've got to be much more willing to be nuanced and subtle and ultimately like let people make mistakes on on the stuff that you're not as sure about or maybe that doesn't matter as much to you yeah yeah absolutely agree so I want to shift a little bit of perspective to focus more we have talked about management to talk a little bit more about individual managers and people who may be listening to this chat because this is of course a period of transition that has been layoffs this this trend of companies running linear managers getting unfortunately more direct or getting more technical and we've even run a survey on the newsletter about well-being and how people feel about their working on something that we discovered is that managers have more trouble in visualizing their impact and and figure out you know what they're bringing to the table with respect to I see many times so what's your advice for engineering managers want to stay valuable and how they should think about their career and how to prove your value I know it's a very both question but you have any tips yeah I mean it's it's it's it's it is tough right like I sometimes with this you know it's like oh my god like what do I tell people I did right I managed 800 people you don't really do the work right you know all these brilliant people who were working you know in the in the teams that works for me they did all the work like I what did I do you know what what was the point of me in the dawn you do like so I actually I feel exactly who have that that that you know that that existential angst about what is it that I do so I'm gonna give like a meta answer which is not a great answer because I need to think about this market you a really good one but a lot of like a lot of how you stay valuable is that people want to work with you so first as a manager or people want to work for you right if people don't want to work for you if you can't hire good people if you hire good people and they constantly quit you know that is not you know that's not great right you're never gonna be the right manager for everyone I I've worked with some great people who I don't think would want to work for me again and we like each other as human beings but like we're not a good match right but but ultimately like you know number one people have to want to work for you you have you know you have to be seen as a credible leader and I do think that that you know depending on what kind of thing you do for me big part of that is is that I do stay like technical ish and that like I can ask people really good questions about what they're doing and often understand what they say to me and so for you know for a lot because I work in pretty heavily technical areas people like that right like people like that I actually seem like I understand and appreciate their work but so you people need to want to work for you people need to want to secondarily work with you so you need to play nicely with your peers this is one where I think more senior people often fail if you're constantly like that team should work for me that manager is a bozo look there's always gonna be one or two bozo's around you you know right you'll they'll think of but like a lot of the time like if you are constantly in conflict with your peers or with the products team or with you know the DevOps team or whatever right you've got a problem right so so you know being a good collaborator is a second you know part of staying valuable because if people like you and your team and want to work with you and your team you are showing value you know and a lot of value as managers is kind of as meta is vibes right because of course number three is people want you to work for them right so unless you're the CEO or the you know the founder you have a you have a boss right you have you know you have a boss you may have you know you have all layers of bosses above you right if people if people you know see you and see your abilities and they're like oh I'd love to have that person you know leading my team I'd love to have them you know that you're doing you're doing well of course you know that a little bit brings us back to manager mode right some of that is like how are you presenting what you're working on how are you presenting your team has accomplished and making sure there's visibility you know in that how are you showing up at you know when you when you're in meetings when you're in when you're interacting with people how do you show up are you engaged if your remote is a camera on I know people hate this but like I'm sorry so turn this camera on it is it is it is bad bad vibes not to see people turn off self-refuel selfie will make you insane but like leave like as much as possible you know when when it is you know when it let you know unless you've got like kids running crazy in the background or whatever which I understand happens you know it happens on occasion like you know be there be be engaged I think the other thing that managers should remember is that like you you are the company you are a representative you know you are representative of the company you you can you know you can influence the company culture but a lot of like the value and the expectations of you is like are you if your boss you know says you have to do something or something has to happen how good are you at driving that thing to happen right you know because if you are just constantly going to push back and cause trouble and you know well why do we have to do performance reviews and by the way I've been that person so I actually I've totally sympathized like sometimes it's like this is stupid this is a stupid process we shouldn't do it this way I've got way better ideas about how to do it but I think the more senior you get and the more experienced you get you got to realize that like you know it's not valuable to just like complain and say no you know a valuable a valuable leader brings sort of thoughtfulness at to like how can this be how can we make this thing that needs to happen go as well as it can and maybe influence it to be better in the future yeah love this answer I mean I think you you touched on so many great topics first though at full I think it's reassuring to hear that this kind of anxiety even about you know your contribution your role is totally normal at any level even for the most accomplished leaders and I love those to the angle about the fact that you have like two teams you have the team of your the reports of your reports and then you have your peers which is like your second team and you have to work well with both which it's it's too very different things I think at the at different skates companies and do you think the I mean this was all an angle about your contribution to your to the team and to the company do you think there is something about your skills that you can work on you know I mean this is easier for I see is you know you study things languages frameworks but do managers have a way you know to sharpen the sword of if anything yeah I think so I mean so first of all I think that that whole like accountability thing we talked about earlier and goal setting is really hard. It is super hard. I think you can spend your entire career as a manager figuring out how to help your team, your organization, your people depending on what level you're at, like set good goals and measure them and learn from them and accomplish them. And it's just, I mean, it's just hard and it's going to require, you're probably going to play around with a bunch of different frameworks in the process of doing it, right? You might try OKRs. OKRs have, I'm generally a fan of OKRs, but they're hard, they're hard to do. The hardest part of OKRs is teaching people how to do them and they can take a long time to get right and get the sort of muscle of doing that. You know, how, you know, so like thinking about how you set, how you set goals, how you figure out what's important to work on. At least for the kinds of teams that I lead, I actually think that is just an incredibly important skill. Then maybe there may be times when that's not actually the most important skill for you to work on. Some, there are definitely leaders in tech who get a lot of their goals extravagantly, right? For better or worse, a lot of the goals come from, let's say, like the product lead is like, we've got to shift these things in this period of time and you don't have as much like play with what you're doing. Then I think, you know, there's the skills of like, how are my making sure my organization is delivering optimally. And again, nobody has perfectly cracked that code. There's always work to be done there, right? What are the, you know, what are the checks and balances? Do we have the right people? How do we know? How do we, you know, what's the, you know, are we, are we building a, a good culture for, again, for collaborating with, you know, other teams that we have to work with, or other roles that we have to work with? I think, you know, so I think, I think, the, I mean, I think the major skills of managers are really like goal setting and sort of organizational goal setting and accountability, you know, and bleeding into like, how do we know that we're getting things done? How are we, you know, how are we constantly challenging ourselves to do more and do better? And then of course, like, all of that also requires like people who are inspired and want to work with you and you've got a good balance in you thinking about things like diversity, which I think is still a very important thing. Like, you can't just sweep that under the row. You need, you know, I do think that you want to have, you know, psychologically safe teams, which means you've got to figure out how to bring together different types of individuals and have them successfully and happily work together, right? I feel like they have a career at this company, you know, and sometimes you're going to have people that are not going to have a career at that company. And how do you, how do you handle those hard conversations? You know, and so I think then there's just all of the many skills around, you know, people and talent and inspiring and leading those people and kind of bringing out the best of them above and beyond just sort of general efficiency and productivity. And how, you know, and I do think like a lot of how you learn them is like, you've got to challenge yourself to, you know, look outside of your own worlds, talk to managers other places, make friends externally that are managers and hear about what they're doing and just take curious, you know, because like, look, you're going to read lots of things so you'll be like, oh my gosh, I'm on this program talking about this stupid founder road thing, like, you know, actually, you're going to read things and you're going to sit with the fact that it makes you uncomfortable and ask yourself, like, do I have a good reason for dismissing this or not? Like, is there a kernel of truth in this thing that I just heard about that I don't agree with that's worth like bringing in even though I think most of it is is wrong or, you know, sometimes you'll read things like, oh my god, I never even thought about it that way, but that is amazing. And how can I start to bring some of that into me? There's a lot of skills, but a lot of skills you can keep learning. Yeah, love this. I think first of all, it's a great checklist of areas that need constant work to be, you know, kept in check. And I also totally agree about keeping a healthy network of peers outside of your company. I mean, if I think at other interviews we're done in the podcast, one of the most recurring ideas when people are asked about what has been the most impactful for their careers is having this kind of relationships with people from other companies to compare notes with and compare the things the day to the same as you and things to do differently, maybe because of themselves, because of the team, because of the company culture or whatever. And I think it's such a learning opportunity. So I wanted to keep the last few minutes to talk really about what you're doing right now, because I know you're moving on from your previous job and you're also the platform engineering book coming out this fall. You have briefly talked about this already. So what is going on and what is next for you? Yeah, so I am, you know, I'm in a transitionary period. I have a book coming out on platform engineering that I mentioned earlier that I wrote this book with my former colleague in mind, Ian Nolan. And you know, I'm very interested to see how it will be received by the wider world. So I think platform engineering, which is sort of that discipline of building and operating internal platforms that, you know, kind of enable productivity and leverage for our business. I do think that it is sort of a topic that a lot of people are sort of talking about and around and defining and redefining and, you know, is it, you know, is an internal platform Kubernetes? Is it this is that right? And I'm very passionate about, I'm very passionate about like using technology to make people able to focus on what's important for them. And, you know, but also leverage. Yeah, to create leverage. And but also to like, you know, also very passionate about, you know, doing that with a very high standards of operational excellence, you know, and and building things that people actually want versus tech that you think would be cool or fun. So, you know, I'm very interested to see how this is received by the industry. You know, that is platform engineering is what I love is what I love doing. It's what I'm most excited about. You know, and so as I am, you know, sort of thinking about what's next for me, you know, taking a little time off to kind of, you know, get word about about the book and do some, you know, writing, you know, I do think that I want to continue to work in that platform engineering space. Either through, you know, advising, consulting or possibly at some point, you know, going back and running another large, or, you know, medium-sized student platform engineering is not something that, like a tiny startup should be doing. I think it's a question being a lot. This is not something that is for your 20 person startup, right? This is for you're getting to some amount of scale where you actually have, you know, share problems that multiple engineering teams are kind of kind of either all solving independently or stepping on each other's toes trying to solve, you know, that you kind of need to think about how you pull that out and make that more of a of a shared function. So, so yes, so that's kind of that's what I'm up to and so, you know, I'm definitely, I'm definitely excited, excited about what's what's going to be happening, but, you know, also open to hearing about opportunities from people if anybody on this podcast is like, oh my gosh, you know, come here, we'd love to talk to you more about this in some way or another. I'm, you know, definitely reach out. Really excited about the book and excited to discover what you will do next. So, thank you so much Camille for this great chat and thank you again for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me, it was fun. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this chat valuable, you can subscribe to the show on YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a livinga review as that really helps other listeners find the show. You can find all past episodes and learn more about the show at refactoring.fm. See you in the next episode.