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Huseyin Yurtseven's README

About me

  • I was born in Germany/Bremen but raised in Istanbul, and I live in Berlin currently
  • I’ve been developing software for over 20 years
  • I love learning new things and applying them to my day-to-day life
  • I'm an empathetic person
  • I believe in management by objectives
  • I’m always data-driven
  • I have a Defender personality
  • I’m the happiest if there is a clear structure and expectations
  • I always chase best practices for everything, meeting standards, process management, leadership styles, and so on
  • I read a lot, mainly technical books and leadership books
  • When I see a new problem, I’m always excited to jump in and learn and try to solve it
  • I never hesitate to work at any level, I love coding, and I love leadership at any level
  • I love seeing the long-term vision, and I could be unhappy if there is no plan for one year ahead
  • I value:
    • Positive intent
    • Ownership
    • Decisions are taken by consensus
    • Frugality
    • Creating Impact/Value
  • I love Amazon’s leadership principles

How you can help me

  • I take hard feedback well; deliver feedback as much as possible
    • Most of the time, you might see me asking and chasing feedback from you; be ready for it
  • Please keep me in the information flow instead of preparing reports and regular updates. If you feel I’m missing some important information or decision, ping me with just one sentence on slack. If necessary, I will ask for more information. But before everything, try to keep me in the loop
  • If there is a consensus decision, there is no need to involve me, but if you feel that decision will live with us for at least one year and is an important decision, involve me in the first place
  • I love problems and debates on top of them, don’t forget to invite me to the party. If I feel I don’t live in the problem space, I might be an unhappy person easily
  • I love pair/mob programming, but with a remote work setup, if you don’t invite me, I cannot invite myself, so please remember me
  • Unless specifically mentioned, I don’t expect immediate responses from anyone. I respect others’ time and want you to have the space for a thoughtful response.

My working style

  • I believe in the servant leadership model
  • I’m a fan of situational leadership; therefore, if you see me giving specific instructions or coaching you on a particular topic, it means that I’m trying to apply situational leadership to that specific situation
  • I prefer written decisions with RFCs/ADRs
  • There should be a structure/best practice for everything; it’s always ok to invent something new if there is a structure under it. Some things help me to be structured:
  • OKR framework is the key framework for me to follow the management by objectives approach
  • I respond well to being asked for help ("Can you help with X?"). I don't respond well to being told what to do ("Do X!")
  • I believe in empowered teams.
    • I have always hated being a code monkey, and I don’t want anyone working with me to be one
    • Come with problems to solve, not with solutions to code!
  • I look for small, incremental deliverables and a willingness to work on any task
  • I change a lot by my new learnings; if you see me defending a new idea, that means I learned something new and digested that information and changed myself accordingly
  • I want to earn your trust. I want to allow you the space to take calculated risks, be vulnerable with me, and also tell me when I could be doing something better. Psychological safety is extremely important to me and I promise to never hold a failed project against you if it was based on sound assumptions.
  • I believe in the first-team/second team model
    • I believe that leaders should be a team
  • I do informal performance reviews to be ready for the formal one for all of us every 3 months so that we can clarify expectations as early as possible
  • Effective time management is the key to all above
  • I work mostly on weekends and the evenings for my own development as well as for duties that I cannot fulfill in the day due to my other/main responsibilities. I don't expect the same from you or I don't reward this behavior

Your development

I believe that your career progression is your responsibility, but I’m always here to help:

  • to ask you annoying questions about your progress
  • to be a "study buddy" and grow/learn together
  • to help you find projects that require you to learn in a certain area
  • to broadcast your successes
  • to challenge you

Feedback

I always prefer radically candid feedback. Therefore I always try to deliver timely and continuous feedback, and I expect you to do the same thing to me.

1o1s

This is your meeting and your time: you set the agenda and determine what we talk about. My most effective 1:1s have an agenda that builds up through the week, but I've also had some great free-form ones. Don't feel bad if you don't come with something prepared.

If we don't have anything on the agenda, please expect me to try and get to know you better.

If you're struggling to find some topics, use the Rose/Thorn/Bud framework and come up with them. I like hearing about problems/things that happened during your week because:

  • I always learn something
  • I get data points that help me make global process improvements
  • I get a picture of what things you're great at
  • I begin to understand which things you struggle with

I do also schedule skip level 1o1s quarterly, be ready that I will be reaching out to your team members quarterly basis to have 1o1s with them. Keep in your mind that skip level 1o1s is not for checking the leader’s performance. It’s just for getting to know each other and building rapport, providing an opportunity to have contributions recognized by a senior leader, asking questions, and clarifying their understanding of the company or functional objectives.

Don't save urgent matters for a 1-1

Trust

My default position is to trust everyone, be it work-related or not. I see people as they can share any information with me very openly, and I’m also always open to them.

At work, I will trust that intentions are good by default. I will often provide feedback if I see something that I find is not beneficial to the company, whether that is my job or not. I will give direct feedback to individuals of all ranks if I observe this behavior.

If I feel my sincere feedback is not helpful to improve things despite my repeated attempts (I’m patient enough to provide the same feedback again), I tend to react by withdrawing the trust entirely, and sometimes I cannot build that trust environment again.

For this reason, I ask people working with me to always provide me direct feedback on time and respond to my feedback timely without holding back.

What I expect from a leader

I expect a leader should be powerful in multiple disciplines; therefore, the right leader should be a T-Shaped leader in high-level disciplines as well as inside technical disciplines:

To me, the right leader should be a life-long learner in any topic.

The right leader should be:

Technical

  • Creating tech strategy and vision for the owning domain/service and guiding the team to build this future
  • Ensuring the service/domain has all pillars to be a sellable SaaS!
  • Insisting on the highest standards and not accepting short-term workaround solutions.
  • Always chasing long-term success
  • Insisting/creating operational excellence - monitoring & operation of production services
  • Insisting on working with data and ensuring domain/service has all necessary dashboards
  • Following up on trends for their service metrics and thinking/applying precautions
  • Guiding the team to solve problems with quick actions by calculating/understanding the risks to delivering solutions consistently.
  • Helping team to solve complex problems even with lower resources
  • Working closely with senior engineers to develop the best technical design and approach for new product development
  • Provide technical leadership in driving the design and implementation of distributed, highly scalable systems!
  • Transferring business requirements to technical solutions and helping the team to understand
  • Ensuring service/team has enough documentation.
  • Being a T-Shaped leader and at least knowing different fields like data science, data engineering, quality assurance, frontend, backend, and so on so forth

People

  • Helping every individual’s development
  • Technical representative of the owning domain/service and being customer spokesman for the team
  • Hiring the best talents and helping them to grow
  • Doing regular 1o1s with their direct reports and understanding their differences, and keeping them motivated.
  • Using OKRs as a key framework to manage by objectives
  • Mentorship, coaching
  • Pairing with product managers and helping them from the technical perspective and working with them to plan work
  • Protecting their team and creating space for them to build good quality solutions
  • Creating space for their team to try new things without being controlled by a fear of failure
  • Developing their successors
  • Helping/planning team members’ career steps

Product

  • Understanding the business and product well
  • By being pair of PM and business owners, owning the success together
  • Coming up with new ideas to create value continuously
  • Being customer-obsessed and prioritizing the customer always
  • Not hesitating to simplify solutions to make customers happier
  • Always being ready to action

Process

  • Making work visible enough for everyone
  • Creating/following up a backlog for technical tasks and prioritizing them with PM by thinking about their values/risks etc.
  • Tracking plans and ensuring their delivery
  • Planning the capacity in advance according to plans/features/strategy

What I assume about others

  • I assume that you’re good at your job
  • I assume you don’t hesitate to challenge me and any decision
  • You will ask for help if you need it
  • You have more on your plate than the one thing we're discussing
  • You know the team priorities and how they fit in with your personal priorities
  • You feel safe pushing back
  • We'll tell each other if there's something we could have done better

What I want to earn

  • Your trust
  • Your psychological safety. I want to allow you the space to take risks, be vulnerable with me, and tell me when I could be doing something better.
  • Your partnership. Life is more fun with community, working together to achieve common goals.
  • Respect as a subject matter expert
  • My team looks forward to collaborating with me

Communicating with me

I believe in open communication, and I’m always responsive; you can reach me out in any way, and I do my best to respond as soon as possible.

I can follow your style; if you prefer written communication, I can move forward with the written format. If you prefer verbal communication, we can jump in a call and start talking.

After all, I believe I’m here to help you.

Don’t hesitate to reach out from slack, WhatsApp, email, or call me directly anytime (depending on the urgency of the topic), or don’t hesitate to send a meeting request by checking my calendar (my calendar is always up-to-date)

Cadence

Weekly

  • 1-1s with my direct report /s 25-40 minutes
  • Executive action team meetings / one with tribe leaders, one with my organization, 50 mins each
  • 1o1s with my peers / up to 50 mins
  • 1o1 with my leader / up to 50 mins
  • 1o1 with people partner / up to 50 mins
  • Being interviewer for at least two interviews / 1 hour each
  • Business updates meeting / 1 hour

Biweekly

  • Incident review meeting / 25 mins

Monthly

Quarterly

  • OKR planning meeting / 50 mins
  • OKR retrospective meeting / 50 mins
  • Architecture review meeting / up to 3 hours
  • Allhands meeting / 50 mins
  • Ask me anything meeting / 25 mins
  • Skip level 1o1s / 25 mins for each / up to 6 hours in total
  • Performance reviews (informal ones between formal ones)

Annually

  • Annual planning with tribe leaders / up to 3 hours
  • Annual planning with leaders / up to 2 hours

Other

  • Conferences
  • Other interviews
  • Being an interview candidate for other companies to learn
  • Brainstorming meetings
  • Customer check-in meetings

Favorite Books

  • Radical Candor
  • Drive
  • The manager’s path
  • Team topologies
  • Managing the unmanageable
  • Accelerate
  • Making work visible
  • Sprint
  • Tribal Leadership
  • one minute manager
  • the new one minute manager
  • Dynamic reteaming
  • The five dysfunctions of a team
  • Inspired
  • Empowered
  • Project to Product
  • Effective Executive
  • Measure what matters
  • High output management
  • Objectives and Key results
  • Crucial conversations
  • Situational leadership
  • Agile Testing and The More Agile Testing
  • Don’t make me think
  • Collective Intelligence
  • The Scrum Fieldbook

Bonus

Inspirations

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