3 Daughters, 3 Lessons: What Parenting Taught Me About Leading Engineering Teams

Over eight years ago, I wrote about the parallels between raising three young daughters and running an engineering team. My girls were 9, 6, and 2 years old then, and the lessons were about patience, motivation, and staying organized enough to get through the day.

This year, back to school looks different. My daughters are 17, 15, and 11, and for the first time one of them left the house for college. Time flies.

Past lessons and principles still apply, but as the family and the Dashlane Engineering team grow, new lessons appear: How we handle change as people grow, how we keep learning, and how much ownership we’re willing to hand over.

All three lessons matter for children as much as they matter for teams, and this is true now more than ever because of AI.

In 2021, we moved the family from France to the U.S. Three kids at three different ages lost their school, their friends, and their day-to-day language, all at once.

We could’ve chosen a bilingual school. Instead, my wife and I decided to go all in: We placed the kids in public American schools despite them knowing almost no English. The ability to adapt to change and react positively to an environment you don’t control is a skill you can build and train for.

Even if the school and language were different, we kept a few things constant at home, like their furniture, clothes, books, toys, family traditions, and bedtime routine.

We were a bit extreme with our family move, but at Dashlane, big moves happen all the time, so it’s critical to build adaptability into the engineering team as well. In tech, everything moves fast. Therefore, we keep challenging ourselves and revisiting how we work and organize.

When we sunset our desktop apps a few years ago, we asked customers and engineers to give up something they had built years of habit around. The decision itself was not the hard part. The hard part was managing the change and explaining why it mattered. We had to show why the browser extension and mobile apps were where the product needed to go and give people a vision of what was to come.

Adding an enterprise offering on top of our consumer business was a different kind of change. Same core product, but suddenly two audiences with different requirements pulling on the same roadmap. Going upmarket after that changed the requirements again: SSO, provisioning, uptime guarantees, security certifications. None of that was optional once we decided to sell to larger enterprises, and it reshaped how we prioritized and organized the team.

These changes weren’t easy. They worked because we gave people context and vision and paced how much changed at once. That’s true whether it’s three kids adjusting to a new country or two hundred engineers adjusting to a new market.

My daughters don’t learn the same way. One is analytical; she likes science and learns in a very structured way, like by writing flash cards. Another needs the social piece; she learns better with the right teacher in the room, working together rather than alone with a textbook.

Living between two school systems made the difference in learning methods even more visible. The French system emphasizes academic rigor. It’s a lot of material, high expectations, and no hand holding. The American system emphasizes positive encouragement and choice. There’s more room to find what motivates a kid and more focus on social skills.

Neither is perfect. My wife and I have spent years trying to take the best of both. What’s common is the importance of learning all the time and making an investment into our learning journey. Everything is an opportunity to discover and learn. For kids, that’s why it matters so much to complement parent education and school teaching with other ways of learning. This includes music and arts, sports, volunteering, Girl Scouts, and traveling.

No matter how and what you learn, learning is what makes all of us go forward. And figuring out how to learn fast is a skill to develop for the professional world. At Dashlane, we’ve always fostered a culture of continuous learning.

AI raises the stakes on that. The pace of change has accelerated, opening up more versatility for engineers. People can now move faster across stacks, prototype in a day what used to take a week, or pick up unfamiliar parts of the codebase without months of ramp up. That versatility is worth encouraging.

It doesn’t replace the need for a core competency though, which is the expertise and judgment to maintain critical thinking and evaluate the quality of an AI-generated output, whether it’s code, text, or design. It’s way harder to validate output you don’t understand at a fundamental level.

At home and in engineering, the skill that matters is not what you already know, but how fast you can learn what you don’t.

One cultural difference surprised me when we moved to the U.S. In France, it’s normal for a first grader—six or seven years old—to walk to school and back home alone. In New York, our elementary school wouldn’t let a kid self-dismiss before fourth grade when they’re nine or ten.

With autonomy comes ownership. I come from a family of six siblings. My parents gave us quite a lot of autonomy but would also expect ownership from us, like contributing to house chores without being asked to do so and learning how to cook your own lunch. It’s a trait I’ve tried to teach my own children.

The France-U.S. difference reflects different assumptions about risk, trust, and autonomy. What matters is that autonomy has to be built. Nobody hands a seventeen year old the ability to run her own schedule, make her own mistakes, and recover from them without years of smaller decisions leading up to it. For example, we introduced chores at six years old, homework without reminders at eleven, and handed over bigger responsibilities at fifteen.

My 17-year-old daughter didn’t arrive at college ready to own her life because we told her to be ready. She got there because she learned pieces of it every year, and we let her be accountable when she got something wrong. She progressively took more responsibility and ownership.

This is also a core value at Dashlane. Ownership is what separates an engineer who waits for a ticket from one who sees something broken and fixes it, whether or not it sits in their part of the codebase. It requires learning and autonomy, then it shapes how we work as a team and a company.

My daughters will build careers on tools that don’t exist yet. Engineering teams are living a compressed version of the same thing right now. How we write code, review it, and learn a new system is being reshaped by AI while people are still using the old version.

Adaptability, ownership, and fast learning are key for the future because nobody can hand engineers or teenagers a syllabus for what AI means for their specific job and role. We’ve written about how we’re approaching that change inside Dashlane, from how we govern AI coding across the team to how we decided to secure our coding AI tools.

The same story plays out at home and at work: The organizations and the people who treat this as something to own, rather than something that happens to them, are the ones who will come out ahead.