A crash course on what to expect if I'm your tech lead or engineering manager.
- Help you understand me so we can work together more effectively
- Helps me identify and refine my thoughts and values
I'm born and raised in the DC area. I grew up in Bethesda, MD and currently live in DC. I studied Systems Engineering and minored in Economics and Engineering Business at UVA.
My passion is building things! I'm a maker at heart. I enjoy creating analytics capabilities with my strong blend of technical and business skills. The majority of my experience focuses on technology product development, big data/graph analytics, solution architecture, enterprise architecture, and machine learning.
Outside work I enjoy hanging with friends / family, sports / exercise, travel, cooking/eating, reading, listening to podcasts, and learning new things!
A few other tidbits about me:
- My primary business chemistry is driver
- I'm a visual learner. You can explain things to me much more effectively with pictures vs words.
To learn more about me and my experience, see my website.
- Develop empowered and driven teams. I want to be able to take off a month and it shouldn't make a difference (seriously).
- Build impactful and sustainable data-driven capabilities
I've worn a lot of hats over the years, but the roles I focus on these days to help build analytics capabilities are 1) solution engineer, 2) engineering manager, and 3) mentor / leader. Below are some example dimensions of each.
- Solution engineer (i.e., developing new technical capabilities)
- Solution architecture design
- Technology research and evaluation
- Prototyping and proof-of-concept development
- Engineering manager
- Strategic planning
- Risk and quality management
- Incident response and issue resolution
- Cross-team and cross-project coordination
- Resource planning and allocation
- Mentor and leader
- Provide you feedback
- Setting clear goals and objectives
- Enabling team autonomy and growth
- Sharing organizational context and insights
- Attracting, retaining, and developing talent
- Cultivating a culture of passion, innovation, and collaboration
- Start with why - understand the purpose behind your work
- Set clear goals and priorities
- Embrace a growth mindset
- Iterate quickly and learn from failures
- Prioritize application over theory
- Use visuals to communicate effectively
- Foster open and honest communication
- Respect, trust, and integrity
- Data-driven decision making
- Seek quick feedback loops
- Right challenge-to-skill balance
- Bias toward action over excessive analysis
- Maximize impact and value creation
- Impactful - we get stuff done that has value
- Open - open lines of communication, honesty
- Always learning and improving - learn and fail fast...a lot. Don't be afraid to fail. Be honest when something is a failure.
- Fun
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.
- Communication: I strategically limit how much I check communications to allow time to focus. As such, please do not expect a response from me immediately. If you need to reach me, I respond to communications generally in this order or priority: in-person > call > txt > teams > email
- Work hours:
- I like to start work on the earlier side and leave on the earlier side so I can walk my dog, go to the gym, or hang out with friends. I’ll generally do some light work or technical coding in the evening.
- I prefer not to have meetings before 9am so I can have some focused time to organize my day.
- I work a bit on the weekends. This is my choice. I do not expect that you are going to work on the weekend. I might message or email you things, but unless the thing says URGENT, it can always wait until work begins for you on Monday.
- I try and stay unplugged when on PTO, with the exception of organizing email. Don’t expect a response from me though. If it’s urgent, call me.
- Provide context and clarity
- Give you feedback (see below)
- Provide another perspective
- Be your cheerleader
- Provide opportunities to grow
- Firefight
- Something else? Please let me know how else I can help.
- Bring forward potential solutions, not just problems
- Seek clarification when expectations are ambiguous
- Communicate proactively if you cannot meet a commitment
- Be open about your workload, stress levels, or conflicts
- Challenge ideas respectfully through healthy debate
- Provide candid feedback if I fall short
- 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.
- I will sometimes put you in situations where you feel uncomfortable from a skill/experience-fit perspective. I do this on purpose because it helps you learn faster.
- Three dimensions are required for people to continue to give you feedback. Let me know if I don't do well on any of these three dimensions.
- Safety should be high (no fear of retaliation)
- Effort should be low (no rebuttals)
- Benefit should be high (positive results)
- There’s a lot of variety in frequency, length and format of one on ones with my 1-1's. From thirty minutes bi-weekly to an hour per week. Coffee, lunch, private meeting room, head out for a walk, let me know what works best.
- Length, frequency, format and content is up to you.
- The best 1:1s I’ve had have focused beyond the moment: Your career development, team strategy and opportunity, the greater firm, etc. Feel free to come with a topic you’d like to discuss. I’d love it if you spent a few minutes beforehand preparing so that we can get the most of our time.
- Socratic questions. At times I'll ask you open-ended questions to get your input instead of directing you to do something. Sometimes it will feel awkwark and frustruation. I do it to help you learn.
- Meetings. I try to limit the amount of people in meetings to make them more productive and to maximize people’s focused time. If I didn’t invite you to a meeting, I was probably trying to let you focus on your work. It was not anything personal. If you feel you should be in a meeting that you’re not, just ask.
- The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
- Pyramid and the Plum Tree
- Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
- The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
- The Lean Startup
- Agile Manifesto
- The Phoenix Project
This blog post and the associated links.