# Jonathan Kempf's Manager Readme

**Director at Startups**

# Motivation for this document

I am excited to be working together. Here are a few things to know about me upfront so we can work together more effectively.

**I am here to support you and to make sure you are making the best possible impact on the business. But even more than that, I want to make sure you are able to make the best possible impact on your career!**

# My role

**My major priorities are focused on three major areas:**

- Delivering business value in a transparent and predictable way by managing the engineering processes & outcomes.
- Ensuring that my direct reports are happy, productive and doing their best work.
- Empowering my team to make change and own the technical domain. 

# What do I value most?

**My principles include:**

- **Curiosity. I believe in following ideas until the very end until I am satisfied.**
- **Improvement. Doing better is always possible, and having to dig deep to really improve is where the most interesting improvements come from.**
- **Recycle. Take what you have learned and use it to improve other things.**

**How can you help?**

I appreciate those who help me by managing up with their needs. If you know that I have mentioned something a few times and haven't gotten around to it, **remind me**! Nobody is perfect, especially me, and I want to help you.

Be honest, I value someone who can tell me when they are having problems so I can help resolve them.

Communicate with me. I can't help you if you don't tell me what's going on. I dislike having to ask the statuses of things over and over again when a simple message from an engineer in slack will do that job for me. 

# My Expectations

**Communication:**

I believe in asynchronous communication! If you have something to say, whether it be an issue, a mistake, or a general chat, don't feel awkward about putting in in the group chat. I try not to use DMs as much as possible so that everyone on the team is on the same page. I won't @you after hours unless it is an emergency and someone is blocked.

**Code:**

I think that the pull request is the artifact which all engineers should use for communication around code. Show, don't tell other engineers what you are thinking by putting up a PR and starting a discussion around it. If during a PR discussion you encounter other bugs or opportunities for improving the codebase, that's great! I think that leaving code better than you found it (Boyscout rule) is a good plan, and provided that you are still able to deliver in a reasonable time-frame, there is no need to discuss scope. If there are larger opportunites, or critical bugs which impact delivery, open a ticket and talk with me so we can figure out what the next steps should be.

**Refinement:**

If you don't have enough information to start on a task, then that task is not ready for a PR and cannot be started. Reach out to me so we can get it in the proper _Definition of Ready_ for your work to start. I trust  **you** to be the arbiter of what is ready and what is not ready.

**Releases:**

When your work has been discussed and is ready to go out, you should own that delivery, and the stakeholders of the task or story should own the acceptance. That also means that good communication around releases is paramount so that we can rally people around new functionality and get the right level of QA.

# 1:1s

I treat 1:1s as the single most important meeting of my week, outside of 3rd party calls. I expect you to bring something to discuss, whether it be an update on goals, your struggles at work, or your weekend plans. I will use the 1:1 time to create action items as necessary and will use those as milestones for your career growth. Overall, these meetings are for you, so that you can help me understand what you are missing to achieve your career growth goals.

# Other facts about me:

- I am a father of two young boys (Blake & Makai) and husband to a lovely wife (Suzanne) of over 10 years.
- My hobbies are varied and often conflicting. On any weekend you are just as likely to find me painting a landscape in oil as soldering and programming a new software defined radio onto a raspberry pi.
- I am an avid hiker and terrible chess player.
- Volunteerism is important to me. I am a volunteer youth football coach, grounds crew for the Niagara Celtic Society, and school board chair.  
- I used to be a graphic designer, and I am a certified permaculturist.