Taking inspiration from https://managerreadme.com/ and believing in collaborating async, I’ve created my user guide to enable people to know me better and especially remove potential assumptions.
Motivation for this document
I intend to introduce you to my management and leadership style and philosophy and set expectations to help guide the engineers I work with to be successful and productive both now and in the future.
This document is primarily intended to be read by anyone who reports to me, though feedback is welcome from anyone who reads it (a report, my manager, a stranger). I appreciate feedback and value the opportunity to implement it.
Please hold me accountable to the concepts and promises herein. This document is a snapshot of October 2023 - the chance that this doc will be updated in the future is relatively high.
My role
As a manager, I enable the people I work with to be the best, most productive, and happy versions of themselves. I do this by:
- Mentoring and coaching engineers on professional, technical, and business matters. I am not an expert on all issues, but I have an extensive library of great subjects and a knack for delivering training sessions. I view coaching as an activity that helps me grow as well.
- Planning work out in the open and ensuring that engineers on the team have direct input. I always want to discuss priorities; nothing is set in stone.
- Fostering healthy, collaborative discussions in team meetings and cross-team planning sessions.
- Reducing and removing blockers. Sometimes inside the team, sometimes outside it.
- Being a technical resource. I am still knowledgeable about AWS, so feel free to ping me if you have questions.
- Encouraging growth and pushing you out of your comfort zone to learn and explore new things. Sometimes, you might feel that I am requesting something very hard/complex/stressful from you - what I can guarantee is that it’s always a conscious decision, never a random / lottery system. Being mindful means that I’m confident more than 70% of it will have a favorable result.
- Provide or seek clarification to remove confusion. Confusion is widespread in our domain - frequent changes and updates concerning our organization, tech stack, and stakeholders add cognitive load. I am actively trying to over-explain things to ensure clarity.
We all have different skills and passions, serving various roles, none inherently better than the other. All of us are trying our best with the tools (knowledge, time, budget, etc.) that we have.
My expectations
- Ask questions of me and the team; do NOT suffer in silence. If you don’t understand why we are doing something in a specific way, ask until you get the answer.
- You will tell me if I am mishandling something or could be doing it better. We’ll have a weekly one-on-one (see below). However, I’m always happy to connect to review additional items - Hit me on Slack to communicate if needed.
- Be the change you want to see (also in the code) - don’t ask others to make changes to the codebase that you can make; if you don’t feel comfortable making them, ask for a hand.
- Engineers should spend 5-10% of their time on knowledge management. This can include documentation, architecture decision records, team demos, etc.
- Engineers should work to expand domain knowledge and sphere of influence. It’s not a popularity contest, but I believe the best solutions come from collaborating with people outside your team.
- Communication is fundamental; speak up if you don’t agree with a decision or if you do.
- Generally, I support you working during the hours you perform best. That being said, there are some group meetings that you are expected to attend. My preferred means of communication is Slack. Let the team and me know when you’re available and when you’re not.
- Mistakes happen. That’s how we grow. My objective is for us to all learn from our mistakes, our own and others. Having a blame culture is not the objective, but I encourage us to share mistakes to become stronger together.
My values
These values are general guidelines, not rules, as there are always exceptions. I was inspired and learned from others, so I try to do that myself. While flexibility in evaluating every situation is essential, the below gives a birds-eye view of my leadership approach:
General decision making
- Strategic over tactic. I’m looking for long-term solutions rather than short-term patches that will quickly lead us back to the starting point. This is my approach to bug fixes, managing conflicts, and technology stack evaluations. I understand that sometimes tactics are needed, but we must always ensure we understand the risks and benefits well.
- Big picture first, then the details. To solve challenging problems, we must first understand their roots and principles. We must realize what box we are in and what are its restrictions. Afterward, we can think about changing it, and of course, if we want to jump outside. After this trip-planning exercise, we can discuss how to get there.
- Innovation over safe bets. We must be brave and try new things while taking calculated bets to move fast. New ideas are always welcomed - share your initiatives with me; I promise to give feedback and help you develop and grow them.
- Failing over not trying at all. You’ll be making a lot of decisions. It’s okay to make mistakes and fail as long as we learn from them and grow. If we fail, let’s fail fast - I view mistakes as opportunities to make better decisions next time. Don’t forget that we can reverse decisions, too.
Personal growth
- Focus on future personal growth rather than on past behavior. I genuinely care about your personal development. I am deeply concerned about making you a better person/developer/speaker/writer/whatever. I’ll push you to your learning zone - as you decide what you want to focus on, I will NOT tell you how to get there. I will try to guide you by asking the right questions so you can set your own goals and tell me how I can help you achieve them.
- Learning over stagnation. Do you feel you didn’t learn anything new this week? Tell me! I’ll always do my best to take you to the next level by teaching myself, providing resources, or connecting you with a relevant mentor for a subject of interest. I’ll help you find the time to learn and grow, and we’ll track your progress until you feel we need to start pursuing our next target.
- I want feedback, too. Have you got anything for me? Shoot, by all means, don’t keep it in your stomach! I truly invite you to tell me what you expect from me and let me know if you think I’ve messed up. I promise to fully listen, as your feedback will help me become a better person.
Collaboration & conflict handling
- I listen carefully and only then talk. I value listening to understand the situation from the other person’s frame of reference and only replying. As this is true in conflicts, it’s similar in meetings. A leader should speak last after thoroughly listening to all opinions.
- Discussion and consent rather than authority. I don’t believe in making decisions by power. We should be able to discuss everything and reach an agreement, persuade one another, or open the discussion to a broader forum and hear new ideas.
- Trust over micro-management, people over tasks. We are here for the long run and must trust one another. I trust my team to make decisions independently and will not ask for status every hour. Of course, I’ll always be there for discussion or advice.
- Sharing knowledge over keeping it to yourself. I do my best to share my knowledge and be an open book. This is also something I expect from my employees. I encourage them to do so by allocating time to prepare a presentation or write documentation, helping them grow as writers and speakers.
Hands-on
- Why over what. I will always share why we should do a task before we discuss what to do and how to do it. I believe the vision and purpose are the core; understanding the bigger picture is crucial for completing our job.
- Challenges over solutions. I won’t give you a solution for a problem you’re facing. I’ll ask questions, share my experience, and challenge you to reach the best solution.
- Single-tasking over multi-tasking. Always ask yourself what the most important thing you can do right now is. Be truly focused on it. This may include focus time, without interruptions, of you doing your craft. Need an hour to disconnect and focus? Let me know, and stop all disruptions.
- Quality even over velocity. We’ll have to use common sense here, but generally, I genuinely care about clean and testable code. Leaving a readable and maintainable feature to the next developer is highly important.
One-on-One
- An official one-on-one meeting will be on our calendars once a week. I aim to be laser-focused on you and our time with notifications disabled. This time is yours, and I encourage you to bring an agenda, a list of questions, topics, etc. It will also be a time that I might go over any business/housekeeping updates. This time also serves as an opportunity for addressing any concerns/frustrations/performance reviews/etc, both those that I may have for you and those you might have for me or the company.
- If you are hitting a brick wall or need clarification on work, please do not feel you must wait for our one-on-one meeting. Reach out anytime for answers to questions, clarification, or peer coding to ensure you are on the right track.
- My goal is not to get updates in this meeting. Updates should be done async (Slack / Email / Jira comments with tags).
- An agenda can’t be a memory - it should always be written (in a shared notes document).
My Working style
- My working style has already become a system for a few years. It has some pros and cons that I have accepted. I do want to share some of these with you here:
- I tend to start working around 7 AM local time. Until 10 AM, I have all my notifications disabled. I want to go through async/offline work in this timeslot - like emails, slack messages, and focus tasks.
- Every Sunday evening, I update my calendar for the upcoming week. Not more than that. If you see a calendar invite for the future and need me, feel free to Slack me and ask if I would be joining that event.
- I check my emails twice daily: in the morning, working on them, and in the evening, checking if I need to schedule something.
- I check my Slack messages more frequently, around every 2 hours.
- If you need to contact me for something urgent, feel free to call me directly - you should be able to find my phone in Slack.
- I document many things on the go (notes & screenshots) and try to process them (label and add in mindmaps) every month. These help me remember things and sometimes make better decisions.
- I don’t check notifications/emails / Slack messages during meetings. Whenever I’m tilting my head and looking somewhere other than the screen, I’m trying to process (visualize) or remember (memory palace) information.
- Music affects me a lot. I have many different playlists, each creating a specific mood. Feel free to ask for some 🙂 .
- My task manager lives inside my mail - I have special inboxes representing the four quadrants of the Eisenhower matrix of Urgency/Importance dimensions and following the inbox 0 methodology.
Some things about me
I can now brag about some cool things I did in the past. Some of them might be harder to believe, but I can share stories for each of them:
- I started working in IT at 17, doing C, then sysadmin/networking administration. I have fun stories from both the Linux and Windows worlds.
- I have a black belt in Qwan-Ki-Do.
- I volunteered in a students’ international organization - the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST). I learned a lot there, especially being a VP of Human Resources for 40 motivated students, organizing events, and traveling.
- I like learning and trying stuff - rollerblades, skating, skiing, snowboarding, swimming, snorkeling, parachute jumping, archery, paintball, phreaking, cooking (recently in a nice restaurant), bartending, doing magic tricks (on a cruise ship, in front of 130 guests), perfume making, sound bathing, wine tasting, coffee cupping, cheese making, archery to name “a few.”
- I do love good coffee, tea, and music. Sometimes I like to party.
- I set foot in 31 countries so far. I have gathered a lot of stories with unique encounters.
“I apologize for such a long letter document - I didn’t have time to write a short one.” ― (almost) Mark Twain
