My user manual

What is a user manual—how does it apply to people? Well, it can be many things but to me, it’s a transparent way to communicate things that often take time to understand and are not always that obvious.

Now user manuals are nothing new, but I’ve found them an invaluable tool to better understand your colleagues.

Let’s all be a little more transparent. Below is my manual.

What I’m like

• I’m a morning person so I do my best-focused work in the morning.
• I plan my day and leave specific time to check emails/slack etc, so if I don’t respond right away I’m not ignoring you on purpose—much 😉
• Related to ☝️ sending me emails titled “Urgent” are completely useless. Email is not a good delivery mechanism for real urgent actions. Doing this tells me that it really isn’t urgent—if my house was on fire I wouldn’t email the fire brigade.
• I can get easily distracted, so work to keep distractions at a minimum.
• I hate being invited to meetings with just a meeting name and no agenda. What is the objective? Meetings with no clear agenda or objectives are a waste of time.

How I work

• I’m a visual person so like to draw or map things out.
• I apply ruthless prioritisation to everything! There are only so many hours in the day if it doesn’t make the top of the list I forget & ignore it. I truly believe if it’s important enough it will come back around.
• When I’m given a large task/piece of work I like to discuss the broad scope and the underlying ‘chunks’ of work. I get lost in big tasks without breaking them down.
• Related to ☝️ I’m great at starting and ending projects/work but can get lost or lose focus in the middle if the goals aren’t clear.
• I get excited by new ideas, but need to ask enough questions to understand the core goal(s) - don’t mistake this for being negative, I just need to understand how things work and how it contributes to the wider company goals.
• I like to do things quickly, ship it, get feedback and then iterate. People have different views on what is ‘perfect’ but we don’t know until we implement it. So ship it—as long as we’re measuring the impact.
• If I’ve got headphones on I’m trying to stay focused on a task. I am happy to be disturbed if important, however, please be considerate.

My leadership style

• I’m a servant leader. My job is to make my team successful, I lead through others.
• I focus on outcomes 🎯, not outputs.
• If you ask my opinion I’ll happily give it but will also give a 1-5 rating. 1. Have no strong opinions to 5. I’m highly opinionated about this.
• I trust by default.
• Strong opinions, weakly held —> Probabilistic opinions, objectively held, decisively executed, diligently evaluated. I have opinions about a lot of things but I’m always up for a constructive debate and am happy to change my opinions provided with new data. Credit Shreyas Doshi

How to get the most out of me

• Articulate the customer value in the task at hand, who is it for and why do they need it?
• Give me some context and the specific objective(s). I almost always want to know why we’re doing it, who is it for and how is it benefiting our customers.
• Be competitor aware but customer focused. Don’t show we what a competitor is doing and say we need to do this. Show me the customer data that informs our own signals.
• I have an “open-door” policy, but please check my calendar before scheduling a meeting and respect my focus time.
• Short meetings or calls can save a lot of back-and-forths.

Communication channels

Consider the channel you use to message me, the below is a guide to how I treat each with my personal SLAs:

• WhatApp: Urgent P0 level needs [ Response time: ~minutes ]
• Slack: Important short-form communication [ Response time: ~hours ]
• Email: Non urgent long-form communication [ Response time: ~weeks ]

How I communicate

• I prefer direct communication.
• I don’t shy away from difficult conversations.
• I ask lots of questions and like to understand the root cause or the why.
• Lots of context-switching kills me and its impossible to get into flow. Carving out times for deep-work is important to me.
• If I’m particularly deep in work I mute all notifications so I’m unlikely to respond to Slack or emails until I’m done.

• I try as best as possible to prefix messages to support asynchronous communication:

  Prefix	Description
  [ACTION]	There is an important action required in the message
  [MUST-READ]	A must read important message
  [HELP]	A request for help or question
  [FYI]	Sharing information for visibility (non-urgent)

How I give feedback

• I give feedback (privately) as soon as possible while the context is still fresh in our minds.
• By default, I look for how things can improve. This can sometimes come across as overly critical, so let me know how it feels for you. However, I’ll always suggest we ship something and learn i.e. progress over perfection.

How I handle feedback

• I prefer critique over compliments as I like to know how to do it better. I’m very self-critical, however, the occasional praise for a job well done is appreciated.
• I will ask for feedback often as I value continuous improvement and personal growth.