YouSaid · the spoken record
Camille Fournier
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- 86
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- 2024-09-15
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- 2024-09-15
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“I have a new book coming out. I have another book that I've already written. Obviously, I love it when people buy my books. So when people share my books with other people, my first book is translated into like a bunch of languages, which is super exciting. So, you know, and I hope that if you read it and enjoy it and learn something from it, he will let me know, tag me on some social media. I think that's just awesome. And, you know, stay tuned. And look, if you're looking for people potentially to come talk to your company about platform engineering, I could be interested in that. But, you know, I always love to meet interesting people if you're in New York, you know, reach out. Who knows? But this, you know, this has been an amazing, amazing time getting to chat with you, Lenny. Thank you so much for inviting me on the show.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so with the weird state of social media now, that's actually a harder question to answer than it normally is. I am on LinkedIn. So you can always follow me on LinkedIn and I will probably, I haven't traditionally put that much there, but I'm expecting, I'll probably start putting more there in the coming months. I also still use medium when I write. I actually like medium. So medium.com is my username. Those are two good ways. have a Twitter slash I guess X account that is currently locked and I may or may not unlock it at some point. But social media, as I said, has gone weird. So I think probably LinkedIn is the easiest way for this kind of stuff.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have been lifting rates probably for a longer than some of your podcast listeners have been alive. Which says more about my age than anything else. So I used to be, I now have two kids. So I lift weights to sort of maintenance, but like I used to be a very like, I could deadlift more than twice my body weight and I was just a very, very strong person. Now, of course, everybody's into weightlifting, which makes the gym really annoyed. So partly why I have a set in here, a small set with a baby sized bar is so when I can't make it to the gym, I can at least, you know. lift a little bit at home.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you don't challenge yourself, if you don't take risks, you'll never grow, that's a big one. I think you've got to, you know, challenging yourself, taking risks is how you grow. I think the other one for me is stay curious. You're just, you know, the more you can remember that there's more that you don't know than that you do know. And seeing open-minded and being willing to be wrong, you know, I think the happier you'll be. the better you'll be as a leader for sure”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't know about recent. I'm a bit whoop fan. I got it during the pandemic and it is like one of my I'm just a weird fangirl for it. I don't know. I just really enjoy it. I use it every day. Maybe it's totally inaccurate, but it seems accurate enough. And I just find it a very interesting and cool product.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first one is what got you here will get you there. I love it. I think anybody who is trying to challenge themselves and grow should read it. It's fantastic. The second one is called When Things Fall Apart by Pemachodron. That is when you are, for me anyway, when I am struggling with whatever circumstances around me, I find it a very soothing reminder that like. Life is hard and the best way to just sort of have to breathe with it and be with it and let it remind you of how life is hard for everyone and sort of make you a kinder person in the process.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I have not figured out the prop engineer thing at all. It literally gave me the summary of a different paper. And then I asked friends, and they were like, well, here's the summary. I was like, actually, that seems like a good summary. And they're like, well, you know, first I told the AI that it was like an expert in the field and then it needed to read carefully and that it was really smart. And I'm just like. How do I have to manage the machine? Like, I already have to manage all these humans. Like, why are you making me manage machines now too? Please.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, you know, I actually had that scenario where I was like, I need a quote. I was looking for quotes, you know, for the book. And I was like, maybe, you know, the chat GBT knows what I was like, can you give me any good quotes on like, I forget what it was. Let's just say it was on complexity, managing complexity or something like that. And it, you know, gave me this really interesting quotes. I was like, that's great, but I better double check that. And they were not real. They were never real. Not a single quote. And I'd be like, that's not actually a real quote. Oh, yes, you're right. That's not. Here's a different one. It's like, that's still not a real quote. So don't ask it for quotes because, or if you do, make sure it's a real quote and not just an interestingly phrased summer. I mean, in good summarization in some ways of like the text it was sort of quoting from just not an actual quote.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't always work well, but like sometimes it does. It's like, oh yeah, if I just like switch this around or change this word choice, it's a much easier to read sentence. I do think it's, I think it's useful for that and like small. I think it's large, large blocks of text I haven't had as much luck with. I'm a little bit of an AI novice still, I would say. What I will say is that AI is really bad if you try to ask it for quotes or at least chat GPT as I don't, I haven't used a lot of the other ones that much. I actually saw there was like some Twitter or somewhere, some social media thing that's like, did Francis Ford Coppola get like fake reviews from like ChatGPT of the new, what is it, Megopolis movie?”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find it helpful, for example, if I've written a sentence and I'm like, I like this sentence, but I feel like I don't like the phrasing. I don't like the phrasing or the format that I've used. It needs to be edited, but I can't quite figure out how I will often, you know, put it in ChatGPT and be like, can you reframe this? Can you rephrase this for me?”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's actually pre order on Amazon now. It's called Platform Engineering, and then there's, I think it's like a guide for technical product and people leaders, something like that. But I think the release I don't know exactly when the Kindle release will be, but we're still in copy edits, but it should be done pretty soon”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's kind of the fast listen. Anybody who's interested, my book will be coming out in the next couple months from O'Reilly.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stakeholder management and really learning how to do that well. And that is not always, I think, universally agreed to be the least fun part of the job. I don't think anybody loves it. But it is certainly a skill set. I'm glad that I have. And so I think if you, you know, if you're thinking about like building one of these teams and you're like, I can just do the fun tech stuff or like the cool product stuff I'm really passionate about engineering productivity or I'm really passionate about scaled storage systems and I don't want to think about any other stuff You may not actually be happy in the long run in leadership positions. It may be fine as an individual contributor, but like for leaders in particular there's a lot more to it than the fun tech problems, the fun operations problems, even the product.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part is like the stakeholders are a nightmare. My friend who wrote the question about like how his product or his platform partners drive him crazy like I have no doubt he drives them crazy, right? Because you've got all of these stakeholders, you know, your peers in tech, you know, maybe product managers, maybe executives that are like, what is this team? Are they really worth the money? Like, why are we spending so much on it? I don't understand what they're doing. I can do it better in some cases, right? Like there's just, you know, and so there's actually a big part of the job, particularly as either product managers or engineering leadership is like”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you've got to be willing to get into that kind of stuff, especially if you're in a management job in that space. You are going to deal with a lot of migrations as well, right? So it is very annoying. Migrations happen even if you don't force them on people, your cloud provider is going to say, oh, you've got to migrate from EKSV19 to 121 or whatever, right? And that may require like changes in code. And then that's a real pain in the butt for all of the application teams. So people who are interested in like how to smooth over the customer and company impact of this underlying change, I think will be very happy in platform teams. If you're not interested in that, you may not enjoy the work as much. There's still a lot of detail-oriented work in platforms. And then, of course, the final.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are two things that we haven't touched on, or maybe three, that are really hard about platform teams and that I think don't get much press, which is like Running platform projects is a little bit different than running agile projects. You can take a lot of the best practices you may have learned from Agile type product delivery, but like you're running longer running, larger scale, more complex builds because a lot of the stuff that you build at the platform level just takes longer. It's a little bit more complicated.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And almost being a really good, like, not necessarily zero to one, but like past one person because actually a lot of the best platform type offerings and companies start an individual like application teams. Like an application team has a problem and they solve it for themselves. And it turns out that that's actually a really good idea for how to solve that problem. And so a good platform team is often like looking around for those and then sort of taking them and then, you know, assimilating them and making them available to more and more people. And so I think, you know, if you want to be in that kind of zero to one, like building the brand new stuff all the time, you may not be as happy in a platform team, but if you're really interested a little bit more of like taking things over, stabilizing, scaling them, you know, making them efficient, making them evolve as a company evolves, I think that's going to, you know, you'll be happier in that circumstance.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to do platforms, if you're an engineer, certainly if you're an engineer or an engineering manager, you've got to remember that half of the work is actually the operational quality operational excellence of these things. Platform engineering is not just writing code and then throwing it over the wall to someone. Being interested and passionate about kind of the operational challenges and scaling bits of systems, I do think is like fairly important if you want to be a great platform engineer from a software engineer perspective. If you're more like a product manager, look, you've got to really care about, I think you gotta really both interested in kind of working with really smart.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's worth investing in making people internally kind of more productive and centralizing certain functions just from a cost and efficiency basis at minimum”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same kind of people having to solve the same kinds of problems. It just seems like, why do I have three people in every team like dealing with this instead of centralizing it and making a little more efficient? It also could be that you hit some core scaling issue that starts to really need a dedicated team to solve. Again, that could be like developer productivity. Like every development team is trying to do it their own way and everybody's just super slow because like, you know, you just can't get code released and it all has to be coordinated across every different team. And it's just like, what is going on? We need to fix that or you actually have a technical challenging area that needs sort of a focused team to fix the scaling. Those are some of the signs that you may want to start thinking about a platform team. But it's really like, generally speaking, I would not jump into it early. It should, you know, this is something for companies that have matured where.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, it tends to be like you have 50 plus engineers. I don't think this is the kind of thing that you start when you are, you know, 10 engineers, right? But when you are have like sort of, so there's a lot of ad hoc coordination that's probably happening amongst your engineering groups right now, where like maybe you just have like one, you know, you have your GitHub and somebody's kind of making sure that like all of that stuff, you know, is sort of working. You have a few, you know, a few cloud databases and you got like, you know, a couple people on each team and they kind of like share notes to figure out like what's going on or whatever. Okay, it's all good. But at some point you hit either a lot of inefficiency where you're seeing like the same people across a bunch of different teams. Each team has”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framework and sort of like support for really for that set of engineering can also be sort of part of a platform offering. I actually kind of believe that there are, there's also sort of what you might call integration platforms or platforms that are kind of in between that infrastructure developer tool-y stuff and product. So like billing platforms, for example, right? If you have a single billing platform for all of the different products in your company, that shares a lot of overlaps in the challenges of like those more dev tools, infrastructure-y platform teams, because you're probably supporting lots of different product lines that are using, you know, using the system that needs to be able to sort of scale with certain efficiencies. You need to still do the product discovery. You probably get a little bit more of a business product focus than like the pure internal tools teams. But that gets.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I guess the high level definition that I have of platform engineering is if you are developing an operating platforms that where they're trying to manage overall system complexity and deliver kind of leverage to your business. So a lot of the teams that people think about nowadays, and when they're talking about platform teams, they're really, they're talking a lot about teams that may have formerly been called like dev tools, for example. So you are CI CD tooling for the company. A lot of the cloud infrastructure provisioning and tooling. If you're at a company with certain technical problems, you may very well be like, you know, building semi-bespoke storage systems, for example, maybe part of your platform teams. I actually think that there are, you know, and then I actually like web frameworks, web, mobile.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I think that's right because I think so much of the work in a platform team is not exactly product work. A lot of it's like scaling or really like deep kind of technical, like I got to figure out how to actually do this technical thing or I've got to do this performance efficiency. And you don't always need like a product spec for that, right? Like it's often just a very engineering heavy task. And so yes, I think the ratios do tend to be a bit different.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not going to get great results if you just leave that to engineers and engineering management. They will do their best and you do occasionally find engineers that have really great product instincts in this space, but the actual details and focus of the product work is just you can't write a bunch of code or and or manage like a big software engineering team and be a product manager at the same time. That's actually just asking, I think, too much of people to do that really well, at least for very long. So I think when it comes to structuring a team, recognize like this is not just SREV2. This is more than that you want software engineers. You want systems engineers. You want product people. And then you, one of the reasons you want product folks is because you want to be thinking about impact-based outcome-based approaches, not just like, well, we built this.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need software engineers. Yes, you need sort of operations systems, SRE specialists as well. And of course, you need product people. I have had product teams on and product managers for all of my platform teams. I've really developed out that practice in the companies that I've worked for doing this because I'm just, I just believe that like”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I really am a very strong believer that platform engineering has to involve software engineering. If you don't have any software engineers on your platform team and you only have like, you know, more like operation systems engineers, DevOps, SRE, whichever is there are some SREs in our software engineers, but they tend to not want to write big software. I think you're kind of missing the picture. Platform engineering is not just like, you know, maintaining cloud infrastructure and doing like small scripts or blueprints or enablement projects for other teams because that doesn't really create a cohesive and coherent platform. It doesn't really create products. Frankly, you need to be platforms are products ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create sort of coherent offerings that make this company more productive.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the clearer you can be about that, particularly when they don't have a product team, oftentimes you can kind of leave them from the side in that way. And so I think that's another approach that I would take when you're in that situation. Find the parts of the team that are working and working, working well with your team and make sure you develop those relationships and try to just get over the like anger and frustration and just be clear about what it is that you need and help them understand what they should really be doing and building.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some tips I would add I would put are like look, find the parts of that team that are good because I'm sure there are some, right? Maybe the databases team is awesome and really make sure you are maintaining a good relationship with that part of the team and you can point to how you are collaborating extremely well with that part of the team. Help give them product feedback. This is annoying but sometimes needs to happen because a lot of companies I actually think product, you need to have a product mindset and you probably need to have product managers to build good platforms, internal platforms. A lot of companies just don't do this. They don't believe that they should waste headcount on product managers for internal teams. So you end up with this like platform team that has a lot of smart engineers, but they don't really know what to build. And so they're just sort of building whatever they think is right. And so sometimes your job is to product manage them, is to tell them, these are the problems that we have. And this is what we need.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The more you can, first of all, like spend the time understanding that the platform team's problems a little bit and trying to collaborate and work with them and be clear about what it is you actually need and how you're willing to work with them, I think the better, right? I think if you just get mad and you just try to avoid them or like, you know, undermine them or whatever that, you know, may work in the long run, but it's just going to make everything worse in the short run. And so I do think that, you know, if you've got a platform team that you're frustrated with.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am very sympathetic to anybody who feels that way because part of the reason that I wrote this book, I co-wrote it with a friend Ian Nolan, is that so many platform teams are guilty of all the things that he's complaining about, that my friend was complaining about, that they don't listen. They're not delivering effectively. They are not explaining their value to the company. And it is infuriating when you're dealing with that. And honestly, I'm very sympathetic. You know, the thing that I would say, though, is”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'll have to figure out your own metrics, but I definitely think testing the limits, it's scary though. I'm going to be honest, like doing that is always scary. It brings up like, you know, I forgot to finish the assignment nightmares of school, you know, especially for the overachievers that often end up in these kinds of, you know, companies and jobs. You know, again, you got to do things that scare you or you're never going to grow.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, like, I can't drink coffee anymore because my stomach got messed up at some point, but I drink tea in the morning. I drink half a needed water also. I have like a diet coke at lunch. So I have like these like sort of rituals of like, you know, my caffeine hits that help me. I have to be in a quiet place. I do find like non music that is like I really like forte, for example, as like music to focus or the new Andre 3000 flute album is. Good for focusing where it's like not quite predictable, no lyrics and not quite predictable for me that helps me focus a lot. Like I can't be listening to any words and focus. My brain will just, you know, cannot like ignore words. So those are some of the things I use to help folks.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good at being focused when I was at work, when I was a hands on programmer, and really writing code for many of the hours of the day. And that meant I was like, not, you know, this was pre heavy social media. I was much less distracted, which I don't know if I would be able to do it in the modern era as easily. But, you know, having that real heavy focus time, because I was like, I don't want to work on the weekend. I don't want to stay here until 9 p.m. every night. Like, I just want to get this done. And it meant that I didn't do quite as many coffees. I didn't like go to lunch and chat with people all, you know, all every day. But I was very, very productive and I learned to get a lot done in a short period of time. And I do think, you know, learning those skills earlier in your career and then continuing to apply them throughout your career is another piece of advice.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think there's different approaches you could take, right? Like one approach you could take is just like every Friday I'm going to stop working at 4 p.m. or something. What's up? And I am not, or I'm not going to let myself work this weekend forcing yourself to log off, forcing yourself to like have, you know, sort of boundaries and saying, and then doing out of like, what did I get done? I think can help, you know, that's scary and people don't like doing that, but I do think that that's one of the best ways to do it is really just saying like, I'm going to log off. I'm going to log off every day this week at 6 p.m. I'm going to, you know, because your brain is probably going to keep thinking. You might still be a little stressed out. You're still thinking about work. You're still worried about it. But there is a difference between thinking about it and doing it. And particularly for those of you who are earlier in your careers, like this was actually, I think one of the reasons that I did get to mastery was because I was extremely”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which actually takes more time initially usually because you have to teach people whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do. Not always. Sometimes they'll surprise you and they're better at it than you are. But maybe not. And so you have to teach them. But then you finally freed yourself up to scale. So I guess I just like I'm just a real believer that working hard and a focused way for over fewer hours I think is a more productive way to approach work. And I think it, you know, and I think I've, you know, I have lived my career that way. I've been, you know, successful in it and I have encouraged it. And people who have worked for me and I think I've seen a lot of success through it. But it's just, it's not a thoughtless exercise. It's an active process of constant reflection to Get to that focus.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the office, I need to whatever to show that I'm like a hard worker and I care. And so I guess I just, I do really think that people should challenge themselves to be focused and get the important stuff done and always be asking themselves, what is important to do. And what's important to do does change over time, but if you're never, if you're not regularly doing an audit of your time and trying to knock things off that list that don't matter, you're probably wasting a lot of time on things that don't matter. And, okay, you don't want to work less. You love working a lot. That's fine. But you could probably just be getting a lot more valuable stuff done if you would do these audits regularly, right? I also think like people don't delegate enough. And, you know, so if you don't delegate, then you get overwhelmed because your team doesn't know how to do anything. Because you haven't bothered to spend the time delegating.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of who you shouldn't, shouldn't buy her. And I will admit, I have mixed feelings about that, although I, you know, I get what you're saying. If you don't regularly reset your expectations of like what you should and shouldn't let slide, do you have any idea where the line of what is actually important to work on is I just think, and the thing about that is like, it's not like firing people where you do it once or twice and you regret it and you learn pretty quickly, unfortunately. I think you actually have to kind of regularly test the circumstances and, you know, challenge yourself to challenge yourself with like, am I really, you know, am I really getting the most out of myself? Am I really producing the best value? Or am I just making, asaging my internal guilt about like, you know, I need to work 60 hour weeks, I need to sleep.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we all understand that if we could just figure out and focus on really the most important things, we would just everything would be better. And it's hard to figure out what the most important things are. But overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place. You know, I listened to one of your podcasts where you talk to someone who said, like, if you've never fired someone and regretted it, you don't know where the line is.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm a really good collaborator in various ways, but I'm really bad at just like getting to know you random one-on-one where we don't have a purpose to the meeting. And that's not to say those are always bad, you know, but I do think that a lot of people, when that's your comfort zone, if that like getting to know you random, you know, relationship building one-on-one is your comfort zone. Like I should probably do more of them. You should probably do fewer of them because you should always be pushing yourself to get out of your comfort zone. And, you know, are you really getting something out of that or are you just being able to tick a checkbox that says, I had eight meetings today, therefore I was productive.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People should respect their own time more. As much as I just said, management, you're kind of at everyone's mercy, and that is true. But also respect your time. You know, don't just load yourself up with meetings because you're a manager and that's your job. You know, are you, do you really have something to talk to a person about? Do you really need to, you know, these are when you have a one-on-one meeting with someone, you are asking for their time. You are you shouldn't just be doing that kind of haphazardly for fun. This is a little bit of my personality. I'm not in great like, I'm not a great like company networker. Like, you know, some people are really good at just like, let's go to get coffee. Let's go to lunch and let's like hang out and build a relationship. And honestly, those people are really successful in many ways that I am not. Like I do sort of envy that skill. I'm really good if you want to, if I work with you. Like if I work with you on something, generally speaking, people really come to respect me because I'm very engaged.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I decided these other one on ones with all these people, and they're saying it's fine. And it just kind of sounds whiny. And so, you know, when you're dealing with a lot of stakeholders, I think trying to just rely on one-on-one management of that is actually not very productive in a lot of ways. In general, I guess I just think like”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There actually may not like it that you're asking them for a one-on-one. Let me show up because it's like, okay, well, I should do this to be a good corporate citizen or whatever, but they're just like, why are we doing this? Like, what is the point of this? I also think that like one-on-one, particularly when you use them for stakeholder management, so when you're meeting with people that's not your team, but like other stakeholders, you know, that you may need to deal with. If you have a lot of stakeholders, so I've been in a lot of positions where I have a lot of internal stakeholders because I build internal platforms is a big part of what my job has been in the last many years. Having all these meetings as one-on-ones with those stakeholders can actually be kind of a weakness because when your stakeholders just tell you in a one-on-one that they're happy or unhappy with things, your unhappy stakeholders kind of aren't hearing that. So you may have like one really unhappy stakeholder and five really happy ones. And all you're saying to your unhappy one is, well, everybody else is happy. And they're not seeing it for themselves. They're just having to say, trust me because I...”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that this is just, it's just not a scalable approach, right? Like linearly scale with the number of relationships you have. And so as your company grows, as the number of things your team support, as the team grows, you just can't scale that way. You cannot expect to maintain a one-on-one approach to kind of organizational relationship building and awareness past a fairly small team slash company. I also think that like people think that one-on-ones will solve all of their problems. And I think the reality is like, you know, you have this one-on-ones with people that don't really want to have a one-on-one with you. If they're not in the mind to invest in your relationship, you know, if they don't really care about what you're doing.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so to be clear, you should have one-on-ones with your direct reports and your manager. And you should hold those sacred. I try and tend to do mine weekly or maybe every other week. So this is not about that set of one-on-ones. If the one-on-ones are the people that you are directly managing and with your own manager. But I think there is this, I think, I don't know if it's the remote work, you know, sort of explosion that's happened or it's big companies or what. But what I've seen and I've heard a lot of friends at many companies, you know, kind of complain about is this idea that like everybody is doing one-on-ones with everyone else. So the manager is doing one-on-ones with their team. They're also doing one-on-ones with all of their peers. They're doing one-on-ones with all of their stakeholders. They're doing one-on-ones with product and design. And”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to do this? They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. Have to say, I have to say, I just like my engineers are such a pig. They are all pre-dattas. I love, I am an engineer, but like PMs are more fun to manage my experience. So actually, you have a point. You have a point.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, do you not think product managers also do this? Because I think product managers also actually suffer from exactly this kind of.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What to do in every single case. Occasionally, yes, a lot more to do trying to convince them of what you think should happen in some ways. You're sort of nudging, you're encouraging, you're directing, you're setting guardrails for processes or behaviors or whatever. But it's just, it's not this glorious, you know, fearless leader. I make all these decisions and everyone looks up to me. And, you know, you know, it's awesome kind of job. It's a much more grueling, much more really just sort of reacting to things in the moment. And it can be very, it's a hard job. I do think like management, particularly management when done well when you're really trying to do it in a thoughtful, kind, but also productive way is a very Hard job”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A huge fan of servant leadership exactly, but management really is a service job. You are serving the team. You are serving the company. Your job is to help make things better. And that usually doesn't mean that you're making all the decisions. It usually doesn't mean that people, that you snap your fingers and people jump, you know, you know, and because if you try that, especially in tech, right, people are just going to revolt. They're not going to listen to you. You know, you don't it's just too hard to have, that's not the culture that we live in. And I don't think that's a good culture, right? I don't think that command and control, I tell you what to do and you do it. It just doesn't create creativity, right?”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things. I do think, assuming that they're actually trying to do it well, I do think there are a lot of people who move into management and then just don't really understand the job at all and aren't even self-aware enough to know that they don't understand it. But for those who are trying to do it, trying to do it well, I think a few things that tend to surprise them are the fact that like you really don't own your time as a manager. Your team and your management and the company owns your time more and more the more senior you become as a manager. You know, I think individual contributors often think that like if they become a manager, they will still have some of the freedom that they have as a senior individual contributor, but then they'll also be able to tell people what to do. And they'll have all this authority. And the reality is, you know, management is much more.”
2024-09-15 · Lenny's Podcast · The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source