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Andro’s Readme

Hi, I’m Andro

Welcome to my team. You must be very good at your job, otherwise you wouldn't be here with me :)

This document is intended to fasten up our relationship and set expectation from early stage. Mind you that this is a living document where i'll always try to improve myself based on your feedback.

My Availability

TLDR; Very few things are more important than talking to you if you want to talk to me. If you need to talk, let’s talk.

Heard a rumor? Need clarification on something? Blocked? I’d love to hear as soon as possible. Stop me in the hall, or shoot me a Slack message, we don’t need to wait for our next scheduled 1:1.

Feel free to put something in my calendar, don’t feel like you need to ask first.

Is my calendar full? Send me a message and I’ll very likely be able to move something around.

My Assumptions

You’re very good at your job. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. If it feels like I’m questioning you it’s because I’m either:

  1. Trying to gather context.
  2. Trying to be a sounding board and rubber duck.

I’m not good at your job. You know best. I’ll work to provide necessary context and ask questions to help you vet your ideas but I won’t override you.

You’ll let me know if you can’t do your job. One of my main responsibilities is ensuring that you’re set up for success. Occasionally things slip through the cracks and I won’t know I’m letting you down.

You feel safe debating with me. I find that ideas improve by being examined from all angles. If it sounds like I’m disagreeing I’m most likely just playing devil’s advocate. This does rely on us being able to have a safe debate.

How I Can Help

Provide context. Most of my day is spent collecting, filtering and sharing context/information from across other projects, domains, and product lines. I’ll try to push information to you as much as I can but feel free to ask about anything else.

Provide an outside(ish) perspective. I won’t be working on your project day to day but will be close enough to have informed thoughts.

Firefight. My favourite opening line: "I could use a hand with..." My second favourite is "I screwed up: ...".

Other. Please let me know how else I can help.

How You Can Help Me

Do amazing work. This is the expectation. Let me know if there is something preventing you from accomplishing this.

Disagree with me. The best solutions comes from a healthy level of debate. We need to be able to separate our ideas from our egos . I’ll challenge your ideas with the goal of coming to the best possible solution, I hope you’ll challenge mine.

Tell me when I screw up. This is very important. I screw up and sometimes don’t notice. I need to know or I’ll likely do it again.

Communicate. One of my jobs is to provide context. Are you missing some? Let me know and I’ll fill you in or go find out.

My Guiding Principles

Hoshin Kanri

Planning is done in rounds of communication between managers and their reports. At each round, interrogate whether the plan is feasible and targeted towards the right goals. If you’re a manager, push your reports hard on choosing the right metrics and priorities. The best thing you can do is identify what’s truly important and limit the amount of time wasted in support of unimportant goals.

Plans are worthless, planning is valuable

The plan represents our best guess about what we should do, but it is inherently worthless. Value comes from delivering the right thing, and we may not know what the right thing is at the beginning of the quarter. We are allowed to change anything in the plan whenever it is necessary without feeling guilty. We make changes to our plan obvious and communicate those changes to our stakeholders.

Focus on the craft, not on the mission

I prefer teams of competent professionals focused on their craft over enthusiastic novices focused on any particular mission.

People focused on craft spent a lot of time building skills outside of delivering on a particular mission. Examples include Brown Bags, Hack Nights (skill-focused, not necessarily idea-focused), coding dojos, mob code reviews, etc.

Mission command The lead describes what they want and why they want it, but the choice of how to implement it is on the person who works on it. The bulk of this document should be written by the people who end up having to write the code; tech leads own their tactical plan.

What I Value

Clarity

We should strive to be straightforward and clear. No gray areas, just a short, strong, black and white statements.

Critical thinking. Nothing is sacred and we don’t do anything “because we’ve always done it that way”. No cargo-culting.

Self reflection. Self reflection is an important part of growth. You’ll miss opportunities without it.

Intentionality. We have too much to do for any of it to be random. Intentionality is important to make sure we get the results we want.

Empathy. Connecting with your customer’s emotions is incredible important to building the best product that we can. Having empathy for your co-workers will help us to build strong teams.

Your Development

Your career is yours. You know best how you’d like to grow and in what areas. I can provide feedback and an outside perspective.

I’ll do my best to provide growth and learning opportunities, it’ll be up to you to seize them. Let’s work together on this.

At the end of the day, it is your career. You set your goals. You set your priorities. Let me know how I can help you achieve them.

Feedback

If you’re into reading, please read Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Or, read the article below:

Feedback is critical to both of our successes. Three dimensions are required for people to continue to give you feedback:

  1. Safety - Unlikelihood of being punished for giving feedback. Should be high
  2. Effort - The amount of work in order to give feedback. Should be low
  3. 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.

When/how?

I don’t believe in storing feedback and then scheduling a time to provide it. If I have feedback to give you I’ll work to provide it as soon as possible, in the moment if I can. It’s unlikely it’ll start with “I have some feedback to give you”.

More specific?

If you’d like specific feedback on something let me know! I’m happy to provide an outside perspective.

What should you do with feedback?

Consider it. Acting on it is not required. You’ll receive a lot of feedback at Shopify. Most of it will be good, some of it won’t be. Like everything else, please think about each piece critically and decide whether to act on it or not.

Links that might be useful