From Engineer to Manager
Camille Fournier’s path into management began when she moved from a large company to the startup Rent the Runway in 2011. She expected to gain leadership experience, but instead stepped into a series of roles that kept changing as the company grew. Over four years, she went from leading a very small group to becoming CTO. There was no clear handbook for the journey, and much of the learning came from making mistakes, adjusting, and trying again.
That experience shows why engineering management is its own craft. It is not just regular management with technical words added on top. Leading engineers requires enough technical understanding to make sound decisions, earn trust, and recognize when a team is heading toward trouble. A leader does not need to be the best coder in the room, but they do need to understand the work well enough to guide it.
The path usually unfolds in stages. It often starts with mentoring, then moves into technical leadership, people management, team leadership, and eventually organizational leadership. Each step changes the job in a real way. Trying to master all of them at once only creates confusion, so it helps to focus on the challenges of the stage you are in now.
As the role expands, success depends less on personal output and more on helping others do great work. That shift can feel uncomfortable at first, especially for engineers who are used to being rewarded for solving hard technical problems themselves. But leadership in engineering grows from the same basic habit as good engineering: paying attention, learning fast, and improving systems over time.
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