# Ofir Sharony's Manager Readme

**R&D Manager + Backend Platform Lead at MyHeritage**

# Motivation for this document

Initially, I thought this document will be a great asset for onboarding developers or colleagues who want to get to know me better. After writing the below, I feel it was an excellent exercise for clarifying my thoughts, as it helped me understand what I value most, and how I want to grow as a leader.

# My role

As BackEnd Infrastructure team lead at MyHeritage, I'm lucky to be able to coach and mentor a top-level team of 5 senior BE developers. My team's main goal is to provide an excellent developer experience for over 100 MyHeritage engineers.

As I see it, my role surpasses way beyond my team, by impacting people and processes across the R&D and the entire organization. I desire to help everyone around me to grow, either personally or technically. I believe the most rewarding achievement a leader could wish for comes from helping to develop another leader.

As an Apache Kafka enthusiastic, writer, and speaker, I wanted to give a bit back to the community. I decided the best way to do that is by managing [ApacheKafkaIL meetup group](https://www.meetup.com/apachekafkail/), the largest Kafka community in the world with over 2000 members. In this role I'm always seeking inspiring content for the community, helping new speakers build their presentations and dry-running it with them, along with arranging and leading the meetups themselves.

Feel free to check out my [Link-in-bio](https://linktr.ee/ofirsharony), some of [my writings](https://medium.com/@ofirsharony), or watch one of my talks, either in Hebrew at [AWS summit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdtPxl-Zw4Q&t=470s) or in English at[ Kafka summit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRvUVVCVIUI).

# What do I value most?

After giving this some thought, I figured you’ll learn the most about my managing style through my decision-making values. These values are general guidelines, not rules, as there are always exceptions. While flexibility in evaluating every situation is important, the below gives a 100,000 feet overview of my leadership approach:

## **General decision making**

- **Strategic over tactic.** I'm looking for long-term solutions, rather than short-term patches which will lead us back to the starting point quickly. This is my approach with bug fixes, managing conflicts, and technology stack evaluations.
- **Big picture first, then the details.** In order to solve challenging problems, we must first understand their roots, the [first principles.](https://jamesclear.com/first-principles) We have to get a grip on why we're doing what we're doing, understand the vision and the basic facts. Only then we can dive into the details.
- **Innovation over safe bets. ** We must be brave and try new things, while taking some calculated bets in order to move fast. New ideas are always welcomed - share your initiatives with me, I promise to give good feedback and help you develop and grow them.
- **Failing over not trying at all**. You'll be making a lot of decisions. It's ok to make mistakes and fail, as long as we learn from them and grow. If we fail, let's fail fast - I view mistakes as opportunities to make better decisions next time.

## **Personal growth**

- **Focus on future personal growth, rather than on past behavior.**  I truly care about your personal growth. Making you a better person/developer/speaker/writer/whatever is something I am deeply concerned about. I’ll push you to your learning zone - as you will decide what you want to focus on, I will NOT tell you how to get there. I will try to guide you by asking the right questions, so you’ll be able to set your own goals, and tell me how I can help you achieve them.
- **Learning over stagnation. ** Do you feel you didn't learn anything new this week? Tell me! I'll always do my best to take you to the next level, either by teaching myself, providing resources, or connecting you with a relevant mentor for a subject of interest. I'll help you find the time to learn and grow, and we'll track your progress until you'll feel we need to start pursuing our next target.
- **Ongoing feedback over episodic feedback**. You’ll get honest feedback from me on a regular basis, as I believe in (almost) immediate feedback. I’ll tell you where you excelled, and tell you privately what we should have done better, and we'll learn from it together. I believe feedback is important for all of us, which leads me to the next dot.
- **I want feedback too. ** Got anything for me? Shoot, by all means, don’t keep it in your stomach! I truly invite you to tell me what you expect from me and let me know if you think I’ve messed up. I promise to fully listen, as your feedback will help me become a better leader.

## **Collaboration & conflict handling**

- **Listen carefully and only then talk.**  I value listening in order to understand the situation from the other person’s frame of reference, and only then replying. As this is true in conflicts, it's similar in meetings too. I believe a leader should speak last, after he fully listened to all opinions in the room.
- **Discussion and consent rather than authority.**  I don't believe in making decisions by authority. We should be able to discuss everything and reach an agreement, persuade one another, or open the discussion to a broader forum and hear new ideas. 
- **Trust over micro-management, people over tasks.**  We are here for the long run, so we must trust one another. I trust my employees to make decisions on their own, and will not ask for status every hour. Of course, I'll always be there for discussion or advice.
- **Sharing knowledge over keeping it to yourself.**  I do my best to share my knowledge with my team and be an open book. This is also something I expect from my employees. I encourage them to do so by allocating time to prepare a presentation or write documentation, helping them grow as writers and speakers.

## **Hands-on**

- **Why over what.**  I will always share why we should do a task before we'll discuss what to do and how to do it. I believe that the vision and purpose are the core; understanding the bigger picture is a crucial aspect for getting our job done successfully.
- **Challenges over solutions. ** I won't give you a solution for a problem you're facing. I'll ask questions, share my experience, and challenge you to reach the best solution on your own.
- **Focusing over multi-tasking. ** Always ask yourself what is the most important thing you can do right now. Be truly focused on it. This may include focus time, without interruptions, of you doing your craft. Need an hour to disconnect and focus? LMK and shutdown all disruptions.
- **Quality even over velocity.**  We'll have to use common sense here, but generally, I truly care about clean and testable code. Leaving a readable and maintainable feature to the next developer is highly important.

# My bookshelf

A quick glimpse at my bookshelf will teach you a lot about my personality.  
Here are my top five books:

1. [Essentialism / Greg Mckeown](https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg-McKeown/dp/0804137382) - A must-read for anyone, with so many gems inside. Start by asking yourself: “What is the one, single most important thing I should work on, right now?”. As our day includes dozens of tasks, interruptions, and good opportunities, this question may be very difficult to answer. Every time you feel you get extremely busy and overwhelmed, stop and think - “What is the essence? What can be the most valuable thing I can do now?”
2. [Designing Data-Intensive Applications / Martin Kleppmann](https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable/dp/1449373321) - I mark it as the best technical book I’ve read, beautifully explaining various concepts in distributed systems. I get back to my hard copy of it every time I want to revisit nuances in schema evolution, CAP theorem, distributed transactions, and much more.
3. [Atomic Habits / James Clear](https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299) - It's amazing how tiny changes, when accumulated, can produce amazing results. I love how the author simplifies habit-building & maintaining. The top phrases I think of every day are "master the art of showing up" even on your bad days, and focusing on habits that strengthen the type of person I wish to become, or in James' words, "Identity-based habits".
4. [Creativity / John Cleese](https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Short-Cheerful-John-Cleese/dp/0385348274) - Unlike what we may think, creativity is definitely a skill everyone is capable of learning, rather than a genetic characteristic. It’s simply a matter of shutting down all interruptions, be they internal or external, clearing your mind and letting new ideas develop slowly. Creativity may be observed as a game, played between your unconscious mind and your rational one, trading ideas, continuously diverging and converging your thoughts.
5. [The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People / Stephen R. Covey](https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-Powerful/dp/0743269519) - So much was written on this classic. I'll mention the top ideas I’m taking with me every day: “emotional bank account”, “seek first to understand and then to be understood” and the incredibly inspiring [“green and clean” story](https://resources.franklincovey.com/mkt-7hv1/green-and-clean), which is a must-watch for every manager or parent.
6. [The 5 Levels of Leadership / John C Maxwell](https://www.amazon.com/Levels-Leadership-Proven-Maximize-Potential/dp/1599953633) - As leaders, we always have the potential for increasing our influence. This book is excellent reading material for any leader who wants to have a bigger impact, on his team, group, organization, or even industry.  

# My expectations from you

I'll finish with a few expectations I have from my employees, as we build up our trust:

- **Be a people person. ** This one comes first, even above hands-on work, especially in an infrastructure team. Help others, cover for your teammates, listen first, and share your knowledge. Placing all ego aside is crucial for creating an excellent team atmosphere. Communicate the good and bad things you encounter, and tell us how to improve.
- **Deliver in high quality.**  This bullet is quite obvious, but has to be mentioned - I expect you to produce great work, and will help you to continuously improve to the next level. As mentioned earlier, I'll give you the freedom and won't micro-manage, as long as you show you deserve it. Keep me in the loop with the tradeoffs and bottlenecks you face, and we'll figure them out together. 
- **Understand the big picture. ** Don't just do your daily tasks, make sure you understand why they are important. Ping me when you feel you lost track of how your work serves our vision or team goals.
- **Work-life balance is important. ** I'll respect your time off and do my best to cover for you. Use it for rest, not work. I'll contact you off-work hours only when there's something highly important for which I need your guidance or assistance.  
- **Innovate and don't be afraid of mistakes**. Be proactive, try new things, take chances. I'll be the first to promote your initiatives, and help you improve in case we have chosen a wrong path.