# Bryan Hickerson's Manager Readme

**Engineering Manager at BetterUp**

# Motivation for this document

My goal in writing this document is to create the opportunity for you to understand me and how we might work most effectively together.

# My role

My job is to see the mission of BetterUp succeed by using my skills in a way that will have the most impact. More concretely, this means a few things. I recruit, interview, and hire engineers to continue to grow the capabilities of BetterUp products. I help drive and plan delivery of high impact work in the areas of my influence. I support and grow the engineers on my team. I use my context and deep knowledge of the platform to help drive the architectural direction.

# What do I value most?

I value effective self-sufficiency. Problem solving has always been a strength of mine and I very well may be able to come up with an idea to solve a given problem, but I value those that are able to take a problem and impress me with their solution. It typically involves weighing different options given the business context and technical complexity and breaking down the problem in a way that mitigates risk and maximizes value in each iteration. I do not hire people to tell them what to do, I hire them to tell me what we should do.

# My Expectations

Everyone makes mistakes and I expect both you and I to learn from our mistakes. Part of this learning process is being vulnerable and open that a mistake was made and rather than minimize those mistakes, highlight how those mistakes can be avoided in the future.

I work with team members across various time zones and I rely on your working hours in your calendar to ensure that I am scheduling meetings appropriately. By default I allow attendees modify events, so feel free to reschedule if a time does not work for you or something comes up. I will do my best not to message you outside of your working hours, but I may forget or just want to you to be aware of something when you sign on the next day. Creating appropriate boundaries between work and your personal life is important and you may want to consider removing slack from personal devices. If something is truly urgent, I can call you on the phone (but will almost never do so).

My calendar load and time zone differences make it so that it is not always possible to grab time with me the same business day, but my calendar will be your guide in what my availability is and events are visible by default. If there isn't time available and the issue is urgent, reach out and I will see if I can make changes to accommodate you and barring that we can try to resolve over slack. I do not want you to be stuck until our next 1:1 and I can only help you or point you to someone who can help if I am aware that there is an issue.

# 1:1s

As much as possible, I try to have weekly 1:1s with my team and any other team members that I work with closely. While I may have agenda items, this time is intended to be for you to spend how you would like it. Since we are probably attending the same stand up meetings, status is less useful for us to discuss 1:1, especially if it could be just as well served by a slack message.

# Personality quirks

I am an introvert and at the end of the day I may have pretty low social energy and avoid interviews and meetings at the end of my day for this very reason. Sharing disagreements are strongly encouraged, but this is also something that can consume my energy. If something feels unresolved from these disagreements, I can also sometimes get stuck in my head until there is closure.

# Where to focus on your first 90 days?

In the first 90 days, find opportunities to bring your unique perspective to our team, code base and existing practices. Assume that nothing is sacred and set in stone. You are welcome to edit any documentation that is inaccurate or confusing and leave it better for the next team member. You are also in a unique place to improve the product from the perspective of a new user and you should lean into that.