# David Gomez's Manager Readme

**Head of Development at FinanceScout24**

# Nice to e-meet you

I’m David, born and raised in Spain and currently living in Zurich, Switzerland. I’ve been developing software since I was 14. As many of us, I fell in love with the idea of creating something that could solve problems and make things better and easier for you and others. That is for me what software is about. 

As I have progressed in my career that passion of developing software has been extending to developing and leading people. 

After my MBA at INSEAD, I’ve been fortunate to gather experience as manager, leader and coach and discovered how much I enjoy improving the team skills and how they work together to achieve their mission. 

# Motivation for this document

This is a living document. It represents where I am currently in this discovery journey of myself as a manager, leader and coach. It should give you a good introduction to my management style, what you can expect from me and what I expect from you, so we can work together more effectively.  

It is Work In Progress and feedback is highly appreciated. Let’s begin. 

# My role

As a Head of Development at FinanceScout24, I’m here to guide you and the team on how we can work better together. My job is primarily to serve you and the team so that you can do our best work. 

Concretely:

- Explain the mission and vision of the company,  so we can create a vision and mission for the team that aligns with it 
- Show you the way when you get stuck
- Give everyone access to the resources needed to improve their skills and collaboration
- Facilitate conflict resolution 
- Remove obstacles and impediments that prevent the team from fulfilling our mission
- Foster a safe and healthy work environment
- Ensuring there is no form of disrespect 
- Help the team make more informed decisions sharing my knowledge, experience and challenging the options till we are all convinced about the path we should head to
- Roll up my sleeves when the team needs help, doing whatever is necessary
- Ensure new team members feel welcome and understand the culture and the principles under which we operate
- Acquire new talent that makes us stronger
- Challenge the current status quo so we can be better together
- Celebrating success and showing appreciation for your efforts

# What do I value most?

- **Transparency, honesty and trust:** Speak up your mind on the things that we are doing well and the things we need to improve. The latter is even more important as I might have blindspots that you can help me see. Trust that everyone in the team is doing the best they can to help us get better. Being honest about how you feel, your perception of your performance,  what you think you are contributing to the team, what you are learning from it and what you still need help with.

- **Constantly strive to improve things while keeping moving towards our mission:** Teams that are too busy to improve themselves do not evolve. Teams that only discuss how to make things better without doing the work do not progress. I think there should be a good balance between getting work done that adds value to the customer and improving our knowledge and practices to make us better.  

- **Discipline and hard work:** Discipline means following the rules and behaviours that we all agreed together. Hard work is not about how many hours you work but giving your very best to help us achieve our mission

- **Caring about the team and our customers:**
  - Caring about the team means that 
    - you will share your knowledge and help others when you see they need a hand
    - You will not disrespect anyone regardless of their opinions, values and beliefs 
    - You push everyone in the team to deliver their very best

  - Caring about the customers means that
    - You care about the quality of our product and hold it to a very high standard
    - You empathize with the customer problems and work with the team to find solutions
    - You want to know what is not working in the product before our customers do so we can fix it before they even notice

#  My Expectations

- I expect your best when you feel at your best. If you are not feeling at your best I expect you to let me know. Maybe I can help  
- I expect you to think how you can do better so I can help you get there. 
- I expect you to care about the problems our customers  have and how can we better solve those
- I expect you to always respect your colleagues but disagree with them to make us better
- I expect you to reach me out when you have a problem however small  it seems
- I expect you to follow the rules and behaviours that we all agreed to
- I expect you to call out on me when I’m not doing my best or not standing up to your expectations
- I expect you to speak up your mind about the things that I’m not doing well, the things the team needs to improve on and the things we are doing great. If you feel you cannot speak up your mind, I expect you to let me know

# 1:1s

I like to keep a rhythm of 1:1s that feels good for both of us. That could mean every week, every 4 weeks but never longer than 8 weeks.  The frequency is mainly driven by you, so if you need more of my time, I’ll be there. I might suggest that we meet more frequently if i see a need but you need to see it that way too. 

The 1:1s is a safe space for us to discuss anything that is on your mind. How you feel about the team, your job or any other professional/personal aspects I can help with. 

Ideally we identify one or two areas where improvement is needed on any side of the equation and an action plan to get them better. We monitor the evolution of those areas to make sure we make progress. At the same time, we highlight the things that are going in the right direction and have led to significant accomplishments. 

After the 1:1 you should have a good understanding of where you are with your current performance, the things that are going well and the things that could improve. At the same time, it should give me a good understanding of the things we are doing well as a team and the things that need improvement. I’ll be held accountable on my side and do my best to make things better. 

1:1s are scheduled so we have a placeholder for the conversation but if you need me before our next 1:1  I’m here for you. 

# Working together

As a team, we must agree on how we want to work together and establish some rules and behaviours that we will hold on to each other. I will do my best to give you what you need but compromises will need to happen to balance things. The team mission is more important than the individual's goals. 

Here are some of the topics that we will discuss. Balance is the key.

- **Working hours:** Different people perform at their best at different times of the day. It  should be possible to create a flexible working schedule that accommodates most of the time the needs of each team member. The main topics here are:

  - Core working hours: to collaborate more effectively we need to have a good overlap of time together every day. Two to Three hours should be enough in most cases.

  - Schedule: As a team we must support our customers and operations. We cannot have all the team starting at 1 pm and completely unreachable in case of emergency before that time. Clarifying what is really needed and making few compromises inside of the team will help achieve our mission 

- **Working from home:** The basic rule should be do what is best for you with a balance. If you prefer to come to the office every day that is great. If you want to work from home a few days a week or during parts of the day (morning/afternoon) that is also great.   
  
However, I believe that not coming to the office at all incurs in a performance penalty for the team. All things being equal a fully co-located team will outperform a partial one. Therefore, having a physical presence for discussion and collaboration has benefits. If not possible at all, like this time with the pandemic, the team needs to pay special attention to make sure that,  as much as possible, collaboration and communication do not suffer.  

- **Deep work, helping others and constant interruptions**** :** I believe that software and product development require big portions of deep work. Deep work does not mean working alone but working over a long period of time uninterrupted. That can happen alone, with few colleagues or with the whole team. For example: Mob programming for few hours is an example of deep work done in a group. Deep work does not mean spending the whole day with your headphones on coding without talking to anyone and only doing so when you need help. You need to review the code of others and help them, participate in discovery and grooming activities and many other collaboration activities that help the team move forward. As a team we must find ways to maximize deep work together or alone and keep collaborating effectively.  On the other hand, constant interruptions and distractions while completely unavoidable should try to be reduced looking at the root cause and working together to reduce it.  

# Personality quirks

I’m quite passionate about sports and health in general. I wake up every day between 5-6 am to go running or cycling for at least 1 hour. I normally bring my own food to work and have healthy snacks every 2-3 hours. This means that most of the days I dont go out with the team for lunch and if you want to have a lunch meeting you need to tell me at least the day before. 

# Manifesto

As a corollary to the agile manifesto, I created a personal one highlighting some of the principles under which I like to work

**Team mission** over individual goals

**Problem oriented roadmaps** over solution defined roadmaps

**Customer value** over getting work done

**Collaborative learning** over requirements specification

**Expressive solutions** over "cryptic" code

**Managing technical debt** over being buried by it

**Reducing fear** over letting it take over

**Everyone needs to be a leader** over that's not my job