Camille Fournier

Platforms are products, ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create coherent offerings that make this company more productive?

Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system and that causes a lot of problems.

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.

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.

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.

Overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place.

Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system and that causes a lot of problems.

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.