# Adam Ochonicki's Manager Readme

**Director, Platform Engineering at Articulate**

# Intro

We'll get to know each other organically, but if you're new to the team, I hope this is a helpful intro to me, my working style, and what I value.

👋 Welcome to the team! I'm so glad you're here.

I'm Adam Ochonicki_, _people here call me Ocho. I work here as Director of Platform Engineering. 

Prior to working here, I was doing Rails and DevOps for a small online ad agency, and .NET development at a big industrial chemical company before that. When my son was born, I wanted to ditch the 2 hour round-trip commute and be home with my kid as much as I could. I joined Articulate in 2012 as a member of a small Operations team. We handled all sorts of stuff back then like infrastructure, tooling, employee onboarding, hardware purchasing, licensing, employee tech support, and pretty much anything technical that wasn't directly building the product.

Today, we're a team of twelve talented humans around the world, focused on enabling engineering, and the business as a whole, to move fast. We've come a long way over the past five years! I'm fortunate, and humbled, to be a part of this great team.When I'm not working, I love spending lots of time with my two kids, playing guitars and keys, writing, looking at the stars, watching stand-up comedy or anything that makes me laugh, biking or hiking through the woods, planting and growing herbs, fruits, and veggies.

# **My role**

My role here is to attract and hire awesomely talented people—like you!—to join our team and build amazing things. I'm here to help you develop your career, engage you with exciting and challenging work, keep information flowing in all directions, open opportunities where possible, build bridges between teams, and tend to a small garden of processes (I'm allergic to unnecessary process) to enable us to be a highly effective team, loving what we do.

My approach to tech leadership is colored with a programmer's perspective, a life of learning to cultivate empathy, and a deep curiosity for discovering what motivates people to do their best, most fulfilling work. Helping people discover what energizes them, what moves their career forward, and what moves the company forward, is what gets me excited to come to work every day.

I find a lot of satisfaction in applying programming concepts to effective teams. [Human APIs](http://emotionalapi.com/), abstractions, callbacks, overhead, DRY, YAGNI, etc. If approached with a human-first, empathetic mindset, these technical concepts can empower complex humans, building complex systems, to effectively scale teams and communication. Humans are not cogs in a machine and thinking about technical teams strictly in technical terms is recipe for disaster and unhappiness.

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# **What's important to me**

I care about a lot of things but when it comes down to work, most of my strong cares fall into one of three buckets: quality of the work, enjoyment of the work, effective use of time to do the work.

- **I care a lot about the quality of what our team builds. ** And I care that you care about it, too. The kind of work we do doesn't typically lend itself to extensive QA team cycles, so the responsibility is on us to produce highquality work that delights our users. You own the quality of your work.
- **I care a lot that this is one of the best teams you've ever worked with.** We've all worked at jobs where our work didn't fulfill us, where we had to deal with egocentric bosses, and put up with a lot of bullshit in general. I care a lot that this isn't one of those places. I care a great deal about the people I have the privilege of working with on this team. Your time is arguably all you have in this life and you're trusting Articulate with a large chunk of it. Abusing or misusing another person's time offends me on a human level. Let's make things we're proud of together and enjoy ourselves in the process.
- **I care a lot that you use your time effectively.** I don't care very much about the specific hours you work (an exception being things like pre-scheduled commitments), but I care a great deal that you're highly effective in your job. No one owns your calendar except you.

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**My leadership expectations**

I expect everyone on our team to be able to act as a leader when the situation requires, regardless of your role. No one has a monopoly on leadership here. Leadership is about working effectively with a group of humans to do more as a team than they could have done individually. Anyone can have an idea for something, but it takes leadership to articulate a vision into something that others can understand, get excited about, and bring into reality.

That said, my basic expectations of leadership are that you will:

- **Communicate with others clearly and effectively.**  Speak to people in a language they understand. Use only the words necessary to convey your idea and provide situational awareness/context. Don't use jargon, unless the other person is fluent.
- **Invite only the people necessary to make decisions about the problem at hand.**  Not everyone will be involved in every decision. That's OK. Keep the decision group scoped to those who have a stake in the outcome. If that's a large group, figure out who are the key players in the success of the project and work with them.
- **Optimize for solutions that solve problems at a higher level of abstraction. ** Instead of addressing a problem (e.g. log formatting, security policies) locally at the service level, look for ways to expand the reach of influence where it can improve all services globally, at the platform level.

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**Note about "management"**

I'm not here to "manage people". I'm here to manage  **for**  people. I don't manage you, or your work, or your life. You do that. I provide context, information, and force-multiplier connections wherever I can. I manage things _for_ the work, _related_ to the work, _about_ the work, but I do not manage _the work_ (your work) or you.

I manage for team effectiveness, rather than individual effectiveness.

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# **Nowhere near perfect**

I'm flawed like everyone else. Here are some things about me that I want to call out ahead of time to hopefully improve our ability to communicate effectively. I've only been doing this leadership gig for four years and I still have a lot to learn. I strive to get better each day but I'd rather you be aware of my shortcomings than me pretend they're not there.

**Sometimes I can be difficult to read** , _especially_ over short, text-based communication. If you're ever unsure what I'm thinking about something, please ask. I'd always rather be transparent with you than for you to assume I'm something that is not true.

**Sometimes I will ask questions to challenge your assumptions** or lead you toward seeing another perspective. It can be a useful way to help someone reach their own conclusions (or reach my conclusions 😉) without telling them what to think. Not everyone loves the Socratic method, because it can feel like you're being put on the defense. When I use it, I am trying to get us to reach the best possible conclusion together, not to prove that I am right. In fact, I'm very likely wrong. You should feel free to use the same technique on me, or whatever works for you, so that together we can come to the best outcome.

Speaking of being right, sometimes I am, and sometimes I'm not. **I prefer to go into conversations with the assumption that I am wrong** or am missing some important context. This is another time when clarifying questions are really important for me to form a full picture of the situation.

**I am biased toward action.**  Detailed project planning has its place, but I believe starting something is the best way to make incremental progress and learn. Mapping new territory requires us, at times, to be voyagers, pioneers, explorers, scientists. Learn what we need to help us continue to map the territory until the edges become clear. These activities are often very difficult to do in the abstract. 

**I believe that building awesome things comes from incremental improvements over time.**  I find myself bothered by proposals for large changes with broad surface area when there are alternatives to make small, scoped, tactical, changes that can be layered upon each other to reach the same or better outcomes.

**There are very few things I am going to overrule you on.** I'm not interested in throwing around whatever forms of "organizational power" I have. Screw that. If I think what you're doing is dangerous, irresponsible, or wildly misguided, and I'm unable to persuade you otherwise, then I will overrule your decision. I can't think of an example where I've done this.

**I repeat myself.**  People don't always retain things the first time they hear them. I'm no different. I've learned to embrace repeating myself and I hope you forgive me if I say the same thing a few times.  **I repeat myself.**  Paradoxically, I'm also a fan of DRY code, but speaking to a computer in a way that is clear for a human to grok is a different data resolution than speaking primarily with groups of humans to convey information.

**I like puns.**  Some people don't like puns. If you do not _embrace_ puns, I won't _hold it against you_.

**I take what I do very seriously but I don't take who I am very seriously.**  If you think I'm taking myself seriously, it would be a huge help to my development, both as a co-worker and as a human, if you called me out on it.

Oh and last, but not least, literally _so many other things_.  **We'll figure it out together.**

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# **Communication**

Unless there's some emergency taking precedence over all else, I will always make time to talk with you. If something is urgent and you need to talk, don't wait for our next scheduled call. Just ping me and we'll chat right away.

I prefer to talk with everyone reporting to me, one-on-one, at least once every 2 weeks. If either of us start feeling like we should meet more or less frequently, we can figure that out together as needed. 1:1s are not intended to be project status updates. I'd much prefer to talk about other work—and non-work—related things on your mind. That Career development, that thing you're really passionate about, providing context and information, etc.

I'm comfortable with vulnerability, openness, and honesty about my feelings as they relate to my effectiveness at work and I'm open to talk with you about yours. I'm not a therapist, and won't pretend to play that role. But the human side of what we do can't be ignored.

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# **Feedback**

One of my goals is to give constructive feedback where appropriate. I won't tell you how to do your job but I will do my best to set context for the team. If you think I'm telling you how to do your job, please tell me so I can stop or so we can talk through it.

I appreciate feedback. It's the most direct signal to know if things are moving in a healthy direction or not. Whether feedback is suggestion, criticism, or appreciation, I appreciate it all.

We don't do performance reviews here, so real-time feedback is crucial. 

If you ever feel like you're not getting helpful feedback from me or are wondering how you're doing:

    1. I need to improve on giving you better feedback

    2. Let's find time to talk as soon as possible

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# **Work hours and time expectations**

**My work hours are roughly 9-5 (US east coast) M-F.** With two young kids, this works for me. Choose a schedule that works for you.

**I'll do my best not to contact you outside of your working hours unless it's an absolute emergency.**  If I slip, I'm sorry. If my message does not say URGENT, please ignore me, we'll figure it out together when we're both at work (and please remind me, "Hey, you said you weren't going to send me non-urgent messages outside of work hours").  
  
**You are free to contact me at any time.**  If it's urgent, I'll get back to you as soon as I humanly can. If I receive a message from you outside of my working hours and it doesn't appear urgent, I'll follow up with you when I'm back at work.

I'm looking forward to working with you and getting to know each other!

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