# Paul Hallett's Manager Readme

**Technical Lead at Sharesies**

#  What is this about?

This document is an attempt to clearly lay out my methods of working as a Technical Lead - what I aim to do with the role, what I expect from you as a team member, and what you should expect from me as a Technical Lead.

This is a living document and will mostly definitely change through my career - your feedback is especially useful for making me a better Technical Lead.

# My Role

I have two main focuses in my role: **the business** , and **the team**.

## The Business

- Making sure our team is aligned to the business goals.
- Understanding the business priorities and how it affects our team.
- Representing the team to other parts of the business.
- Helping non-technical people understand technical requirements, requests, and issues.
- Hiring great people.
- Owning and making difficult team-wide decisions after considering all the factors.

## The Team

- Supporting you in your professional development.
- Helping you understand the wider context of our team's goal within the business.
- Providing honest, constructive feedback to help you improve.
- Creating a positive space in the team for you to find happiness in your role.
- Being a human you can talk to on a human level.

# My Values

- **Transparency**. I will always be open and transparent. This refers to both feedback, but also about our team's priorities and goals. I will always share information that affects our team and you directly. I will try to do this as quickly as I learn information myself. Transparency requires high communication - and I encourage you to talk to me anytime you need more insight.
- **Honesty**. I will always provide honest feedback. This will always be constructive and useful, and will be focused on how we can move forward, be that negative or positive feedback.
- **Trust / Ownership**. I give 100% trust to my team members. I will always try to find opportunities for you to grow, learn new skills, or take on new responsibilities. When I trust you to anchor a feature or a goal; I trust you to not only deliver it, but to also understand why we are delivering it and how it will impact the team or business. When you succeed; I will make sure people know you achieved something great. When you fail; I expect us both to learn from that failure and grow from it.
- **Human.** I assume in any situation you will do the best you can given your knowledge and tools available to you. **I also know everyone is human** and we make mistakes. I don't anticipate to ever work with anyone who is perfect, so we shouldn't be hard on ourselves when we fail.
- **Value**. I know that a developer's ultimate value is the code they produce. I will teach you to understand a pragmatic approach to software development that emphasizes our value, without sacrificing the things we care about, such as engineering quality and efficiency. 

# My Expectations

- I expect you to deliver on time and to uphold our team's standards. I expect you to communicate to me early if you think you are not going to achieve this, and I will help make sure you do. I hope that when problems happen, you'll be honest with me about it and we'll both learn to prevent it next time. Problems are much easier to avoid if we know about them sooner. I will never assign you a task that cannot be realistically achieved.
- I expect you to be comfortable to talk to me at any point when you have a concern or a question. I will always make time to listen and provide feedback. If I say I will do something to help, I will keep you informed of my progress. I am successful when you are successful, so let me know as soon as you have a concern or an issue and I will prioritize unblocking you.
- Productivity is more important than being "seen" at work. I am flexible with working hours so long as you deliver on your commitments.
- I expect you to keep learning, either actively through new challenges at work, or in-between busy periods by studying new tools, methods, and practices. I want you to be actively learning so you can improve yourself, but also to bring new ideas to our team and help us improve together. Talk to me if you are not learning anything useful and we can find out what to work on together.
- I expect you to constructively challenge me if you think I am wrong. I am only the accumulation of my past experiences, and what I have learned works isn't always correct.

# My Quirks

- I am British, and I can sometimes sound cynical. I am actively learning to say what I really mean when I sound cynical - which is explaining out what I think is needed to make positive change. Please let me know if I sound like I am ranting.
- I am a white male. I know I am not representative of a diverse team, but I do wholeheartedly believe in  diverse representations within our team; be that gender, technical skill, sexuality, socioeconomic background, or other diverse group. I also know that due to my inherent privilege I do not always see how I am blocking efforts to improve our diversity for others. I am ready to accept any feedback that can help me be a better ally. I promise to listen and learn from you.
- I am very pragmatic, almost to a fault. I will always start with the solution that works best for all parties involved. Sometimes that isn't useful and it is better to actually pick a decision that greatly improves one party, whilst negatively affects another party. Please challenge my pragmatism if you think it is wrong for the situation we are in.
- I will sometimes acknowledge long messages with a single word like "okay". Please don't take this as me being terse - I am doing it to acknowledge that I have read what you have said, and I am formulating a longer response.
- Sometimes when I am deep in a problem I can be "scatter-brained" and provide many ideas and solutions all at once. When this happens I am openly speaking my thoughts in order to facilitate discussions and ideas from other people present. If I am being confusing and unfocused please let me know and I can narrow my focus appropriately.