Working with me? Awesome! I built this user manual to share my working style and communication preferences.

For those interested in building their own user manual, here’s the guide that helped me.

🧭 Work

What is your work and life setup?

I start work at 9 AM EST. As a team lead, I have a morning routine that includes focusing my day’s priorities, reviewing PR’s and tickets, moving my personal tickets work forward, reading emails, and following up on requests that I’ve made.

After that, standups, meetings, pairing and mobbing, and working on my personal tickets fill my day. I close out with a similar routine, and I try to make sure I’ve recorded a daily TIL and been publicly visible, even if that just means checking up on folks in chat.

I keep clear boundaries between work and personal time. I strive to deliver enough value at work that I don’t have to justify my off time, and I fight for that on my teams.

Where do you typically work from?

My home office, and occasionally a coffee shop or coworking space. I sometimes take meetings in a parked car when I think I can get away with being AFK.

What work hours do you keep?

9–5 EST, five days a week. Consulting gave me a running mental timecard that I try to log 40-50 hours in. If my work creeps into nights and weekends, I become less effective. I think this is true for most engineers.

đź’¬ Communicate

What are the best ways to communicate with you?

I like to start out most conversations with a bit of smalltalk to break the ice. On fully remote teams, I think this is essential to feeling like a human being. There’s almost always time for it.

Something I do in communication is lay out the stakes. If we’re working on a bug, why does it matter? How did we get here? Who is on the call, or should be on the call? What would success look like? What should we do differently next time? It might seem overly inquisitive, but I’ve solved a lot of problems with these questions.

I always want to crank up the bandwidth. If we exchange 2–3 chats, I’m going to ask for a video call. If you’re describing something you see, I’m going to ask for a screen share.

Please help us save our keystrokes. When possible, let’s prefer team channels to DMs, so everyone can learn learn from and contribute to discussions.

What are the worst ways to communicate with you?

I value clear and direct communication. It helps me help you faster when I understand the problem, context, what you’ve tried, and what you need. If you’re comfortable, please keep your video on during calls; it helps me connect and read the room.

What communication channels do you prefer?

Video call > phone call > public chat > DM. A picture is worth 1K words. A skillfully marked-up, appropriately cropped picture, even more.

🪞 Feedback

How do you like to receive feedback?

Quickly and directly. I hold 1:1 meetings with my boss and each of my direct reports once a week. If I’m not getting feedback, I’ll ask for it. I try to create an environment of radical candor.

đź’ˇ Values

What are your top three professional values?

  • Ownership. A team’s success starts with each person, including the leader, owning their own success and failure.
  • Bias for action. Prioritize getting your idea in front of customers. Everything else is talk. Many of the details that we sweat don’t matter. If you aren’t embarrassed by your MVP, you shipped too late.
  • Continual improvement. Everyone is trying to get better every day. We look for little opportunities to reflect and grow. As engineers, we always dig a little deeper to refine our mental model and grow our expertise.

🏆 Achieve

What is your proudest professional achievement?

Teaching myself to code! Before age 30, I did not identify much with STEM. With the support of family and friends, I made a deliberate, sustained effort to learn to program. It wasn’t easy. I feel kinship with every self-taught programmer.

Conclusion

Lastly, I write and read a lot. Send me your book recommendations, and I’d love to do an impromptu two-person book club! Thanks for reading, and I can’t wait to work together.