Elided Branches
Camille Fournier — CTO, author of "The Manager's Path"
Camille Fournier on engineering management, architecture, and technical leadership.
elidedbranches.comCamille Fournier — CTO and author of "The Manager's Path" — writes about engineering management, technical leadership, and the messy human side of building software organizations. Her advice is practical and grounded in real experience, not abstract management theory. If you lead engineers or aspire to, this blog is essential reading.
Written by Camille Fournier since 2012.
Infrequent
Publishes sporadically
6
Independent Blog
English
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Revisiting Manager READMEs
Several years ago, I published a critique of manager READMEs that succeeded in stirring up a lot of feelings, pro and con. I’d like to believe it prompted some people to reconsider whether these are actually effective tools.Today, I want to revisit this. Not to encourage you to write a manager README, but to suggest other ways forward that I have learned in the years since writing the first post.The ProblemWhen you become a senior manager or an executive, you face new challenges. Your job involv...
Dude, Where's My Strategy?
I’m working on a talk about rewriting platforms for LDX3 later this month. Spoiler alert: a lot of the talk centers around why rewriting platforms is usually a very bad idea. For more on that you can read the rearchitecting platforms chapter of my latest book.One of the points we make in the book is that, generally speaking, platform teams are not the foci of innovation at companies. Platform innovations often come either by adopting external innovations, or absorbing and expanding platform-like...
10 Years of Engineering Ladders
On March 26, 2015, I posted a short blog post to the Rent the Runway engineering blog, Sharing Our Engineering Ladder, with a quick intro to the RTR engineering career ladder and links to both spreadsheet and long-text versions. This was one of the first public engineering career ladders that came with a clear distinction between management and IC levels, and meaningful details about the requirements and expectations at each level.I published these resources because, at that point, most of...
The Next Larger Context
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” — Eliel SaarinenFrequently we will be given problems to solve by other people. Early in our career, these problems will usually be well-scoped and specific, eg:Add this new data to an interfaceMake an endpoint that returns a certain specific calculation or piece of data.And as we grow as engineers these tasks become bigger but often...
The Product Culture Shift
Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work. Both of these shifts require going from a siloed, process, tech-focused mindset to a portfolio, usability, and customer-focused mindset. This is a hard transformation, and it’s easy for people who have spent their whole car...
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If you're navigating the shift from individual contributor to technical leader — or trying to build a healthier engineering org — Camille's writing is some of the most trusted in the field.