tl;dr:The first major input in any kind of fair evaluation is based on the work the employee needed to accomplish, and the work they did accomplish. Camille breaks this down into "must be achieved, stretch goals, and moonshot goals" elaborating on each. She also discusses identifying management characteristics essential to the role so you can score the candidate against each, while also giving leeway for your own judgement.
tl;dr:(1) Doing all technical design work yourself. (2) Doing all the project management yourself. (3) Neglecting to give feedback on non-technical issues. (4) "Hoarding information" i.e. not providing business context to your team or distilling and communicating it effectively. (5) Focusing too much on your personal output and not the team's output.
tl;dr:23 skills include: (1) How to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution in a reasonable period of time. (2) How to mentor an early-career teammate, a mid-career engineer, a new manager who needs advice. (3) How to listen to other engineers’ ideas without feeling threatened, and more.
tl;dr:When managing managers, it’s tempting to be hands off, but that's not optimal. Camille was managing a complex migration and decided to hold a monthly status update meeting that paid dividends. It allowed her team to "show off" and air grievances. Camille recommends it when there's a critical area that has misalignment between participants, a forcing function to organize a manager or when there's uncertainty around direction.
tl;dr:"Novel technology deserves boring plans." Exciting visions come with unpredictability. Strategy that executes this vision can be stressful if it starts and ends with the vision alone. "Contrast this to the team that turns that vision into boring plans" e.g. start with a small proof of concept so you can learn the process.
tl;dr:To change engineering values as a leader, you need to change what you reward and focus on. This can be slow and has negative consequences e.g. some feel their skill are less relevant. As a platform engineer, you can find tools that bake in and support the values you want to be taken seriously.
tl;dr:Considerations when reviewing a report's performance against established goals, grading against a set of attributes, and using judgement. "The most interesting and useful part of this exercise is comparing what you get from this data against your gut reaction to the rating you think someone should get."
tl;dr:Managers will paint a picture of grand change to fix teams stuck in a rut - new product vision, team re-org, etc... Camille'e experience shows the opposite approach to be true. Managers able to "identify the little things that can be changed," and use these as the starting point for larger change, often succeed.
tl;dr:The role of building products for your own engineering team requires atypical product management. Camille discusses how it's unique, and her approach.