Having been inspired by various posts on the importance of transparency, communication and openness from the leadership side of engineering, I’ve decided to kick things off here with my own edition of a Manager’s README.
First off, welcome! If you’re reading this, you’ve either come across it by searching or you’ve been linked to it from an on-boarding document. However you got here, I think this will be a valuable first step in us working well together.
This README is an earnest, incomplete (we never stop growing) and concise guide. It sets both my expectations for you and a base-line for your expectations of me. If you like the general thinking behind this document, please create one for yourself. It can go well beyond just the working relationship with your manager and peers and provide a good jumping off point for conversations around self-awareness.
TL;DR: I am here to make sure our team is successful, happy, and working on the things that are most important to improve our product and our business. More granularly:
- I am here to make sure you are both successful and happy: I want you to improve your technical skills, grow your career, enjoy your work, and believe in both our company's and our team's mission.
- I am here to make sure our team is successful and pointed in the right direction. You might hear Dharmesh talking about aligning vectors: I am here to make sure our team is all aligned and pushing in the same direction.1.
- I am here to make sure our team is getting what we need from other teams, and that other teams are getting what they need from us.
- I write some code too 😃
These meetings are designed to give you a dedicated time and place to ask anything and everything.
- Hopefully we talk about things you wouldn’t otherwise bring up in a group setting. I want our 1:1 to be a safe place; if this isn’t the case please tell my boss.
- We will go through your agenda first and if time permits I will always have some questions. First and foremost these meetings are for you.
- Urgent matters should not wait for a 1:1.
- I have strong opinions, weakly held. I love to debate, understand and see an issue from all sides. Question everything I say, we’ll all be better for it.
- I care about my words and endeavor to choose them carefully. I take this too far sometimes, overthinking my words or being overly pedantic.
- I love to brainstorm and often ask for feedback on ideas on my “drawing board”. I may forget to explain this, so always assume I’m brainstorming with you. I default to clarity when giving direction, not when brainstorming. This is especially important when I get crazy ideas.
- According to random personality tests I've taken at random company team building events, I am classified as an INTP personality. While I find bucketing someone into a single identifier is much like a star sign defining you as an individual, I certainly see traits that match my personality. Feel free to read up on that personality type if you want to get some insight into some broad categorization of who I may or may not be.
- Three dimensions are required for people to continue to give you feedback:
- Safety (unlikelihood of being punished for giving feedback; should be high)
- Effort (The amount of work in order to give feedback, also known as "how much do you argue when people give you feedback?"; should be low)
- Benefit (how likely is it that giving you feedback will materially impact your behavior? should be high)
- Let me know if I don't do well on any of these three dimensions. I'll let you know if you don't do well on any of these three dimensions
- I care about kindness, but I'll optimize for effectiveness and within that optimized effectiveness try to be as kind as possible
- Radical Candor makes a lot of sense. I want to provide feedback in which it is plainly obvious that I both care about you and believe it will help you grow.
- Your career is yours.
- I will coach, I will offer feedback.
- I will provide you with outside perspective. You may know where you want to be, but when you’re living it in the moment it can be hard to see if there’s a gap and where.
- I will partner with you to line up the opportunities needed for the growth you are targeting.
- But at the end of the day, it’s your career. You set your goals. You set your priorities. You determine whether you make the time to get there.
- Your first week should be spent settling in. Key things to focus on are:
- Standard on-boarding items like orientation follow-ups; e.g. benefits and compliance items, if applicable.
- Preparing end-user environment and tools: workstation, laptop, etc.
- Join relevant mailing-lists, PagerDuty escalation groups, etc.
- Reading internal developer documentation and familiarize yourself with the toolchain, standards, and code-bases.
- At the month mark, I will ask you to share reflections about our team(s), vision, strategy, and engineering.
- Depending on your role, at the 90 day mark, you should have a number of contributions in the space of engineering management, architecture, and code. These will give us plenty of opportunity for feedback and iteration.