# Maureen's Manager Readme

**Director of Engineering at Pluralsight**

# Why this document

The goal of this document is to create clarity for the people that I work with. This should help you better understand who I am, what I care about and what works well for me. Hopefully this allows us to jumpstart our relationship.

This is a living document that I will update as I gain a better understand of myself and of my role.

# My role

**tldr; My job is to create experiences that motivate our customers to become engaged learners in our platform.**

**What that means in practice is that I am responsible for:**

- **Building and maintaining responsible autonomous teams. **  
- **Co-creating outcomes and strategic objectives for our group and giving teams the tools and information that they need to determine how they can help to accomplish that outcome.**  
- **Communicating the work of the teams upwards and laterally and the needs of the business and other stakeholders directly to the teams.**
- **Fostering a culture of continuous improvement, trust and physiological safety that allow for my team members to do the best work of their careers.**  

I measure success for our group by:

- Looking at the experiments we are doing - both are we doing experiments to improve and what is the impact of those experiments.
- Learner feedback - both qualitative feedback from customers about the features we ship and quantitative feedback including active usage and experience specific metrics.

# My vision as a leader

I see myself as a leader that inspires trust in my teams and enables them to be powerful leaders. I create clear vision of success and an environment that fosters collaboration. I lead with connections, empowering my team members to learn and teach each other. My team members do not fear failure because they know that it is an opportunity to learn. I see feedback as crucial to our work and readily give both praise and criticism with compassion and directness. I actively seek clarity and am ultimately accountable for my teams success.

# What do I value most?

Taking ownership - As a member of a team, you are responsible not just for the code you write or the projects you touch, but for everything that your team owns and works on. Knowledge silos are damaging to the health of the team. The most successful team members quickly notice when knowledge silos are forming on their team and proactively take steps to revolve them.

**Team level autonomy - Decisions should be made by the people who are closest to the problem. In order to allow my teams to be able to make responsible decisions in this** environment **, I provide transparency and context. I value team members actively ****  seeking the context they need to be to be effective.**

**Direct communication - I am a blunt person. You can count on me telling you what is on my mind. I appreciate if you would do the same. I want to know what is going on with the team, good or bad. I am happy to jump in and help or let you handle it. I will be more effective and helpful if you loop me in to what is going on.**

**Delivering value - The goal is not to write perfect code. The goal is to deliver value for our customers and for the business. I want to talk about what value you have delivered. I want to see metrics and the work in process. I want to talk about what outcomes we expect and what actually happens when we test solutions.**

# My Norms

## Communication

My desk is rarely the best place to find me, though you are welcome to try. The best way to reach me is on Slack. I can commit to responding to every message within 3 working hours. I don't always have an answer to your question, but I can let you know when I will be able to give you a full response by. I expect the same from you - a response within a reasonable time frame when I reach out, or at least an acknowledgement of receipt and a commitment to respond.

## Schedules, PTO and working hours

I work a pretty standard 8-5ish type of schedule. Feel free to message me outside of that time, and you may get a response, though likely a little slower than during the work day. 

I value your work life balance. I try to not send you messages outside of work hours, but if I screw up and do, know that I don't expect you to respond until you are back at work, with the exception of production outages and significant emergencies.

I care far less about the specific hours that you work than about the collaboration time you spend with your team. If you chose to work a schedule that is different than standard, it must be a team level decision and the entire team must commit to working that schedule.

I will put my PTO and travel on the team calendar and ask that you do the same. If you are considering taking a week or more off at a time, I would like to have a conversation with you about that to discuss what that looks like in the bigger context and what impact that might have on the team. If it is less than a week, throw it on the calendar and let your team know.

## 1:1s

1:1s are your time. These are your opportunities to let me know how you're doing, what you need, what you wish could be different, how you feel about our team and your teammates, what your career goals are and so on. I might have things to talk about but your needs take precedent during this time.

By default, I will schedule 1:1s for us every other week for 30 minutes. If you are not getting what you need with that amount of time, let me know and I will either increase the frequency or the duration.

## Career development

Your career is yours. You know best how you’d like to grow and in what areas. I can provide feedback and an outside perspective as well as guidance and tools.

Loop me in. Let me know what interests you and where you want to go. I’ll do my best to provide growth and learning opportunities, it’ll be up to you to seize them. 

## Feedback

Two way feedback is crucial for this relationship to work. I am committed to telling you what is going well and what you can do to be more effective. I want you to do the same for me. You don't always have to agree with the things I say. Disagreement is a form of feedback. Where our opinions differ, let's have great conversation that challenges our assumptions and see what happens.

# Personality quirks

**I am biased toward action. Ideating and** speculating ** are fun, but for me, if we aren't driving towards action - an experiment or a test- it quickly becomes boring. I would rather try something out then discuss the impacts of it as a hypothetical. For the most part, this desire to jump in with both feet has served me well, but occasionally I need a reminder to take a step back and think through the consequences.**

**I hate public praise. I am working on getting better about this, but public praise makes me so uncomfortable.**

**I am transparent to a fault. I am an open book. Ask me anything and you will get an all too honest answer. I do however take your confidentiality seriously, so if you tell me something in confidence, it will stay between us unless I have your permission to share.**

**I thrive on change. I like experimenting with my own life and the world around me. I make small changes** regularly ** to figure out the impact and probably have some experiment in most aspects of my job. I love the uncertainty that comes with change and see it as an opportunity to create the experience that I want.**

# Myers Briggs

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/managerreadme/images/Screen Shot 2019-09-06 at 1.59.53 PM.png)

# StrengthsFinder

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/managerreadme/images/Screen Shot 2019-09-06 at 3.45.29 PM.png)

# Things I have done that might show you more about me

[https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/that-conference-2019-session-21/table-of-contents](https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/that-conference-2019-session-21/table-of-contents)

[https://app.pluralsight.com/course-player?course=ps-live-2018-get-your-geek-on-level-up-your-leadership&author=pluralsight-live&name=c5fe6066-3b3a-4c6e-bd62-7285022b677a&clip=0&mode=live](https://app.pluralsight.com/course-player?course=ps-live-2018-get-your-geek-on-level-up-your-leadership&author=pluralsight-live&name=c5fe6066-3b3a-4c6e-bd62-7285022b677a&clip=0&mode=live)

[https://www.pluralsight.com/tech-blog/managing-for-autonomy/](https://www.pluralsight.com/tech-blog/managing-for-autonomy/)

# Books, blogs and podcasts that shape my style

[https://www.radicalcandor.com/](https://www.radicalcandor.com/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Advantage-Organizational-Everything-Business-Lencioni-ebook/dp/B006ORWT3Y](https://www.amazon.com/Advantage-Organizational-Everything-Business-Lencioni-ebook/dp/B006ORWT3Y)

[https://m.signalvnoise.com/](https://m.signalvnoise.com/)

[https://softskills.audio/](https://softskills.audio/)