# Julia Liberski's Manager Readme

**Product Manager at Schüttflix**

# Motivation for this document

I've met an old friend lately. He showed me his manager readme, reading his I already felt like knowing him even better, my trust increased. Imagine you apply for a job, you'd like to know how the team is led, how the people work together and what kind of people you will meet. 

When looking for a new position, I ask myself mainly one question: Do my values fit theirs and will I feel comfortable around these people for the next 2+ years?  Feeling that I fit in is the most important fact that needs to be fulfilled, organization setup, roles and structures are quite fluid nowadays. I'm an open and honest person, I love to give and receive feedback and would not feel well if these traits wouldn't be welcome.

# 

# What do I value most?

I do not like masks, pretending makes live unnecessarily exhaustive. I will respect and like you for the person you are and I expect from you the same. I want to know what you like and what bothers you so that I can support you best.

Transparency, not everybody needs to be ok with every decision but it needs to make sense how we got there. In engineering you often need to balance between new features, architecture upgrades and tech debts. I pick architecture upgrades as they are often neglected: If an architecture does not have an obvious benefit it will be deprioritized, weighing the upgrade against it's opportunity cost, against the value of the feature and the tech debts luring in the backlog will lead us to a decision. The evaluation process needs to be properly communicated during the communication of the decision. Ideally, the decision is taken jointly but sometimes life requires fast decisions.

"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available and the situation at hand." --Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review. I never met a colleague who wanted to do only half of the work, learn nothing new or just did something. I always meet people who fight their inner deamons to get better every day, we can only support each other and grow if we trust. 

# My Expectations

**How to meet me?**

Managers are poor people, although required to work creatively once in a while the whole day looks like a school schedule, except a fun lunch - we mostly don't have that ;-). If you'd like to meet me spontaneously do a favor to both of us and schedule a calendar appointment. If you do it, nobody else can steal the slot and my ears will be 100% listening. If there is a free spot in the calendar, it can happen that I get dragged by a creative rabbit hole or another person takes it. 

**How do I handle mistakes?**

Let's first talk about it. We have to make mistakes to identify them as such and learn from it. By understanding why it happened I can find out if I provided enough information to enable you to meet the expectations, so we can learn from my mistake or we can both learn from your newly gained experience. In my whole career I haven't seen any mistake that has been done that was life threatening, every release can be rolled back, every partner can be calmed any stakeholder will listen to an explanation. As I'm always the first line to respond to the mentioned parties, I expect you to tell me as early as you identify, I feel better if I'm prepared.

**My definition of "done"...**

I'd love to say is when everything is tested and brilliant and so on, but as I said, I'm honest. One of the priciples I violate first when getting stressed. Pareto: 20% of the job will bring 80% of the value. A feature is done if there will be for sure no customer facing bugs or incidents and the value for the company is achieved. A test might be skipped, an acceptance criteria might be forgotten, this is why I do alway plan cleanups between projects. 

**Think big but move fast**

I will very quickly trust you to take architecture decisions and try out new designs or technologies. I'm best in navigating us,  you are the expert. Pick up a project you think is beneficial and motivating and plan it. But please, do not just add a task somewhere and disappear into the rabbit hole. Let's talk about the goals, the first steps and have check ins. As you want to lead, it's also your responsibility to plan these, I will always be there to help, also as a rubber duck.

I've seen and lead various achitecture re-designs and reworks. They all start the same, they all share patterns during their execution and the all end in chaos. But there are really two different kinds: the never ending story and the A-team that is moving like a racing car. Really? No it's perceived speed. 

Once a feature or achitecture or project is decided, the biggest value is generated by smart and small cut scopes. What is the first scope that gives us the answer whether we should continue? What is the smallest first set of services that we need to build upon? And then what's next and next and next?   
In short: Cut down iterations or increments as small as possible, keep dependencies low and flexibility high, communicate to the stakeholders about the big goal and the big values but inform timeline wise only about the next 2-3 iterations/increments. Tada :-D

# 1:1s

**Try to answer these questions: ** When do you usually have 1:1s with your team? Who should lead the 1:1 (you or them)? What should be the main focus during that time?

When I was a teamlead, I had weekly 1:1s with every team member, as a P\* I do not have this luxury. The usual agenda is:

- How are you?
- What's been interesting in the org lately?
- What are you up to? How is your project going?
- Sometimes: Where do you want to go and how can I help. 

If you have a specific goal and we are working towards this, we'll also focus on the progress 

# Personality quirks

My MBTI [Personality Test](https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test) personality is: ISFP-T (Introverted adventurer)

**Crazy dog lady**

Don't talk to me about dogs unless you have free time for the next two hours. As a full grown 40kg problem, my second german shepherd, "Faust", forced me into studying everything you can know about dogs. "Pack leadership" and team leadership are very similar, you need to protect, you need to be trusted to take the right decisions and you need to let everyone grow into their role. I'll stop here, else I'll write a book ;-).  
One more: I host a search dog training every Sunday, our dogs can search for things and people which got lost.

**How did you and didn't you get into coding?**

Horse Games. Did you know that the 3D models of horses in Battlefield and Red Dead Redemption as well as in Assasains Creed were based on live 3D models? Nobody ever bothered to build a proper one for any girls computer games. 

While you can pimp your car in Need 4 Speed to unbelievably crazy design, you just get a black horse when the story says so. And then it will stay black and the name will stay the same for the whole game. 

While you can choose any story in GTA, you need to stick to one career path in a computer game.

One day I was so fed up, I started googling and found out I can change it and then I went trial and error until I had renamed the horses, recoloured the horses and finally merged all career paths into one. Unfortunately my computer crashed once in a while as it wasn't powerful enough but I found out that I can make a change for myself by talking to the computer. 

Anyways, I only wrote little code in professional environments, I always had a team or project to care for that consumed my time. Once in a while I dedicate time to a private project.

**Weird person facts**

I'm from the Ruhrpott area in Germany and I love to rant. This has nothing to do with you, the task at hand or the decision you made. I rant and commit. This can be intimidating and I'm trying to change my behavior.  
Also I become very funny under too much coffeine. 

**Don't mess with my team!**

Once we are a team, we are a unit. I will always stand my ground to protect team members from blame games or any toxic behavior. This means if there are conflicts, I will always support to clarify and achieve a handshake. If there is injustice, I'll speak up until I get listened to.