Camille Fournier

Being technical as a senior leader isn't about telling people which library to use. It's about asking good questions, listening carefully, and helping guide people to better decisions without pretending you're the expert in what they're working on.

If you don't feel like you're done, if you're still having fun writing code, don't rush becoming a manager. Writing code is awesome. Have fun, enjoy it.

If you can leave a system alone for a long time without it hurting your business, ask yourself: is it actually worth rewriting at all? Rewrite if you can't add what you need. Don't rewrite because the engineers find it annoying.

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 you're making all the decisions.

GraphQL is kind of trying to promise front-end engineers that they don't have to collaborate with backend engineers. And it just doesn't seem to work out well for anyone who actually does it in practice — unless you're Facebook.

Overwork is how organizations avoid the hard work of figuring out what's actually important. If you never test what happens when you stop, you have no idea where the line is.

Managing stakeholders one-on-one is a trap. If one stakeholder is unhappy, all you can say is 'trust me, everyone else is fine.' But they can't see it for themselves. Group forums let the happy voices actually be heard.

Platform teams that lack product managers end up building whatever their engineers think is right. If you want a good internal platform, someone has to do the product work — and if they won't, the internal customers often have to do it for them.