The Manager's Path

Fournier structures the book as a career ladder, giving a chapter to each rung from being managed, through mentoring and the tech lead role, to managing people, managing teams, managing managers, and senior leadership. Each chapter describes what the job actually is at that level, what good support from your own manager looks like, and the specific failure modes such as the tech lead who cannot stop coding or the new manager who micromanages. There is practical material on one to ones, performance problems, hiring, and the difference between technical leadership and people management. The closing chapters deal with culture, process debt and building an engineering organisation. Written for technology companies and useful to anyone weighing up the move into management.