# Kasia Gogolek's Manager Readme

**Head of DevSecOps at SportPursuit**

# Motivation for this document

We have recently started to work together or we're about to do so. It's important to me to be transparent about how I work and what I expect from my colleagues. We spend so much time at work that having a better understanding of our colleagues and managers can make our work more efficient. I hope that by reading it you will get to know me a bit better, and understand where I come from when talking about issues and prioritising.

# My role

Given the breadth of my responsibilities I need to context switch a lot so i prefer async communication where possible. I am also happy to jump on a call where it might be easier to just discuss things or work together on the problem. If you think the chat might take more than 15 minutes, pop something in the diary for the same or next day as this way I can prepare and think about the problem we will discuss in advance.  

In terms of the team I want everyone on the team to get as much out of the role as possible. While we work together I want to make sure you get an opportunity to develop in the areas you care about we should set the goals together so that you get to develop in the areas that interest you.

# What do I value most?

I value being upfront about the problems you're facing or ideas you have that might improve our process or stack. I expect you to own the tickets that are assigned to you and drive them forward. I appreciate that especially in the first few months, you might have a lot of questions, and I will expect them and will try to dedicate some time to helping you. I like it when the problems that come to me are well described and research with a list of things you have tried already to solve them. Big part of my job is getting people to talk to each other, if you can start those conversations then that will free up some of my time :)

For any problems that we're trying to solve I like to see a graph that shows the issue, and then a graph that shows the issue subsiding after we fix it. If we can also add an alert to let us know that there is an issue in the future, then that's even better.

# My Expectations

We are all working core hours between 10-4pm. I appreciate that sometimes you might have to be away for appointments in that time, if that's the case, give me a heads up. It's important that my team is not stressed and rested. If you need to work late make sure you take time to recover the next day.

If you make a mistake let me know straight away. We all made them in our career and it's a useful learning experience. Ideally come with ideas on how to prevent this from happening in the future, as that will be one of my first questions :)

The definition of done should be in the ticket. Sometimes the tickets can sprawl and it's easier to split them into multiple tickets that can be picked up next sprint. If that's the case let me know, and create the remaining tickets.

# 1:1s

We will have a 1:1 every 2 weeks. I will prepare some topics I want us to discuss especially when it comes to setting goals, but I also encourage you to bring some things that you might want to discuss. It's your time so if you want to chat about a specific issue with our infrastructure or ticket that's ok but let's not make it a habit and try and focus on your development as well.

# Personality quirks

Despite living in UK for almost 20 years, I am still quintessentially Polish and prefer direct feedback. I try to be precise with the language but sometimes it might come across as dry. I love a graph and prefer working early in the day.

# Where to focus on your first 90 days?

In the first 30 days we will focus on some specific parts of our infrastructure that will expose you to some specific problem we're trying to solve but also show you how we deploy, monitor and build applications. You will also start taking part in on-call meetings as an observer. During the first 3 months you will get tasks that will give you an idea about our infrastructure. Once your probation is over we will agree on goals that can help you continue develop and you will join the on-call rota with myself as the shadowing engineer.