Greatly inspired by Ann Yeung and Christine Sandman Stone’s GHC ‘24 session “Ready To Rock: Transitioning From Engineer to Tech Leader” and the wonderful Mike Craig’s own user manual.

What this is

A work in progress!

My Values

  • Continuous improvement
  • Candor
  • High bandwidth communication
  • Collaboration

Communication style

Methods

Style

I love gathering feedback on ideas, and working through problems live. I enjoy getting to know about my coworkers outside of the workplace as well, but generally when starting a work-related call, I focus on getting through the work-related topic before generally socializing.

No Hello!

Seriously, no hello!

Someone: Hi! How was your weekend?

Me: I had a wonderful weekend skipping through daisies. How was your weekend??

Someone: uh, okay. I’m really just reaching out because I want to ask about fooing the bar….

Me: Oh :( let me go find you the docs you need….

I value being quick to respond to people, so I almost always have notifications on, and try to check my messages first thing after I get out of a meeting. If I have a lot of meetings back to back, I’m going to answer messages in order of what is most urgent. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m able, even if the answer is “sorry, don’t know, will try asking “

Collaboration

Got a system design problem you’re working on? Diagrams? I love talking through ambiguous high level ideas!

Thoughts… so many

I tend to think through things from lots of different angles. Teammates not using new tools built for them? Too busy to test them, overwhelmed by the new functionality, or it doesn’t actually do what they need? I’ll knock on doors to try to get a sense of the real problem.

When I have thoughts or ideas that could be controversial or sensitive, I tend to “test the waters” in individual 1:1’s. I don’t generally share those sorts of thoughts or ideas in a group setting unless I feel like I have the support/data to back it up.

If you’re my manager, if you create a space for me to speak my mind, you can expect lots of carefully placed thoughts. If you hear something that “feels off” from me, and you nudge me to elaborate, you will likely get a self-reflective and candid response.

If you’re someone I collaborate with, I’ll check in to see where you’re at, and make sure you have what you need to succeed.

Closing the loop

Got a technical problem that I couldn’t help you figure out? I will want to know how you figured it out!

Progressive Iteration

Direction

Getting it

For ambiguous problems with low direction, I’ll focus on breaking the problems into components and creating high-level plans.

Setting it

I am always looking forward - whether it’s for the next thing to work on, or figuring out the highest impact improvement that can be made.