Lenny Distilled

The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand

September 15, 2024

Featuring: Camille Fournier (Author of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway)

8 quotes · 7 insights

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Platform thinking unlocks exponential growth

Platforms are products, ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create coherent offerings that make this company more productive?
Camille FournierAuthor of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway 59:49

AI implementation takes way longer than the hype suggests

Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system and that causes a lot of problems.
Camille FournierAuthor of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway 00:16:24

Developer audiences demand authenticity and reliability

Camille Fournier, former CTO at Rent the Runway, is discussing common misconceptions about engineering motivations with podcast host Lenny Rachitsky.

A lot of people assume that engineers just write code and don't underestimate the ability for your engineers to want to understand the business problem, want to understand the customer problem.
Camille FournierAuthor of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway 00:00:40

Skills beat knowledge - practice until it's in your bones

Don't stop being a hands-on technical until you feel like it's in your bones. You feel like you've got mastery that you could... if I was to pick it up, it would be rusty, but I would get there pretty quickly.
Camille FournierAuthor of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway 00:21:18

Meetings multiply until they consume all available time

I think there is this... 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... You cannot expect to maintain a one-on-one approach to kind of organizational relationship building and awareness passed a fairly small team/company.
Camille FournierAuthor of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway 41:35
Overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place.
Camille FournierAuthor of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway 00:45:51

Rewrites are almost always the wrong choice

Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system and that causes a lot of problems.
Camille FournierAuthor of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway 00:16:24

Engineers build better when they're in the room

When you take the people that are part of the project team out of the creative loop entirely, they're going to find that creative outlet somewhere else and it's actually kind of bad for the product.
Camille FournierAuthor of The Manager's Path, former CTO of Rent The Runway 00:08:30

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