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Camille Fournier

Author & Tech Executive

Various (formerly Two Sigma, Rent the Runway, Goldman Sachs)

👥 Team & Culture (1)🎯 Product Strategy (1)⚡ Execution (1)

Key Takeaways

  • 1.PMs annoy engineers most by hoarding credit, ignoring technical details, playing 'telephone' between stakeholders, and hoarding ideation.
  • 2.When PMs hoard product ideation, engineers often seek creative outlets by over-engineering the technical stack.
  • 3.Rewrites are usually a trap; the complexity lies in the data migration and hidden legacy logic, not the new code construction.
  • 4.If a legacy system is stable and doesn't require new features, it is almost never worth the cost of a rewrite.
  • 5.Effective Platform Engineering requires a product mindset; if a platform team lacks a PM, the consumer (you) must product manage them.
  • 6.Engineering leaders should not move into management until technical mastery is 'in their bones' (often ~10 years of practice).
  • 7.Reduce meeting bloat by stopping 'maintenance' one-on-ones with stakeholders; rely on project-based collaboration instead.
  • 8.Platform teams should only be formed once an organization hits 50+ engineers and faces scaling inefficiencies.

Methodologies(3)

👥 Team & Culture

A behavioral framework for PMs to build trust with engineering teams by distributing ownership and removing communication bottlenecks. It posits that engineers who feel heard on product strategy are less likely to overcomplicate technical decisions.

Core Principles

  • 1.Share the Glory: Step back during presentations and let engineers present the work they built; do not be the sole face of the initiative.
  • 2.Involve Engineers in Ideation: Allow engineers to contribute to product problem-solving. If you block their creative input on product, they will use code architecture as their creative outlet (leading to over-engineering).
  • 3.Stop Playing Telephone: If you cannot answer a technical question, do not mediate the answer. Connect the stakeholder directly to the engineer to avoid translation errors.
  • +1 more...

"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."

#anti-friction#engineering#partnership
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The Rewrite Viability Audit

by Camille Fournier

🎯 Product Strategy

A decision-making heuristic to evaluate if a system rewrite is necessary. It shifts the focus from 'how hard is it to build the new thing' to 'how hard is it to migrate the old thing.'

Core Principles

  • 1.The Migration Multiplier: Recognize that migrating users/data from the old system takes significantly longer than building the new system.
  • 2.The 'Do Nothing' Test: Ask, 'If we didn't touch this system for a year, would it harm the business?' If the answer is no, do not rewrite it, even if the code is ugly.
  • 3.The Hidden Logic Assessment: Acknowledge that legacy systems contain undocumented business rules and data formatting logic that will be lost or broken in a rewrite.
  • +1 more...

"Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system."

#rewrite#viability#audit
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⚡ Execution

A framework for structuring and interacting with internal platform teams. It treats internal infrastructure as a product that requires customer discovery, adoption metrics, and stakeholder management.

Core Principles

  • 1.Staff for Software, Not Just Ops: Platform teams must include software engineers to build scalable tools, not just SREs or SysAdmins.
  • 2.Mandatory Product Management: Internal platforms need PMs to define the 'what' and 'why.' If a platform team lacks a PM, the consuming team must step in to 'product manage' them.
  • 3.Harvest, Don't Invent: The best platform features often start as solutions built by individual application teams. The platform team should 'harvest' these proven solutions and scale them, rather than inventing from zero.
  • +1 more...

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

#platform-as-product#operating#execution
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