Jiazhen's Manager Readme

Motivation for this document

This is my Manager README, it is a document that helps introduce you to my management style. The intended audience is primarily anyone who reports in to me, though anyone is free to read it or even provide feedback on it! Please treat it as a reference and promise on how I will conduct myself as a manager, and what I expect from you.

I urge you to hold me accountable to my promises, and to call out anything that might be missing from this document. Without your guidance, I will not be able to improve as a manager.

This is a living document and will be kept on GitHub so there is a history of how I have evolved as a manager.

About me

I joined Bento in August 2021 as a lead engineer/Associate Engineering Manager. Prior to my time at Gousto I have worked at severval different tech companies, most recently RVU where I was also a team lead.

Outside of work I write lots of little side projects, and enjoy reading. I love playing video games.

My role as a team lead

TL;DR: I am here to make sure our team is successful, happy, and working on the things that are most important to help our customers, improve our product, and improve 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 team's and our company's mission.
I am here to make sure our team is successful and pointed in the right direction.
I'm also here to help make sure we are working on the right things, which is not necessarily everything we're asked to do.
I write some code too!

These are in approximate order of importance. If you are not successful and happy, our team is not successful (or happy). If our team is struggling, writing code will most likely not be my top priority.

Additionally: My job is not to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it. It is also not to be the "official decision maker" for our team.

I might have thoughts on your code, and I expect you to have thoughts on mine. In the end, you own your code and if you have a good reason for doing something, you should do it; "use good judgment" is a key part of the RVU culture, and it applies to code as much as everything else.

1:1s

A weekly 1:1 (unless you specifically prefer a different cadence) where we’ll work on challenges, goals, and priorities to support you and your growth as an engineer.

I promise to give you feedback in a timely manner. If it’s not clear, and you have a nagging feeling, let me know so I can fix it! It’s not intentional. I’ll also reply promptly to you, or let you know when you can expect a reply, if you reach out.

Your one to one is a safe space where we can talk confidentially about anything you want to share. I might take notes but these never leave my computer and are not shared with others without your express permission.

Giving me feedback

I welcome all feedback as I find it is really important to help me grow as a manager. It could be something you liked and would like to see more of, something you thought I could do better, something you thought I totally screwed up, or something that doesn't fit in any of these categories. Even if you think it might not be the case, I do want to hear it. And if you think I don't want to hear it, I'd love feedback on why you feel that way.

My preference is to receive feedback person however if you're only comfortable kicking off a discussion with an email or a Slack message, I would rather you do that than not bring it up at all.

If you're not comfortable giving me this feedback yourself, I'd love for you to give it to someone above me in the management chain so they can anonymously relay it to me and I can work on it.

Personality quirks

I have biases like everyone however I do my best to keep them in check and think about things from different perspectives. If you think I am being biased about a particular topic however I am happy to be called out and to be shown a different perspective on things.
I am partially deaf which often leads me to talk loudly, sometimes I even get mistaken for shouting when really im just passionate about something and am not controlling my volume properly. It makes me uncomforatable this being pointed out publically however I am happy for you to quietly say something.
When you ask “do you have 5 minutes?” in Slack or email, please add the topic you’d like to discuss, otherwise, I’ll get a bit anxious and worry that something is seriously wrong or that your about to quit.

Credits

I based this document off of many great managers own readme's including

Molly White
https://managerreadme.com/