# Robin Gupta's Manager Readme

**Associate Vice President at Provar**

# Motivation for this document

The following is a user guide for me and how I work. It captures what you can expect out of the average weekly working with me, how I like to work, my north star principles, and some of my, uh, nuance. My intent is to accelerate our working relationship with this document. My intent with this artifact is not to suggest how you should work.

# Management Principles

Humans first. I believe that happy, informed, and productive humans build a fantastic product. I optimize for humans. I like to lead with context ([Leadership on a Submarine](https://youtu.be/HYXH2XUfhfo)). As an engineer, I remain skeptical of managers, even as a manager. While managers are an essential part of a scaling organization, I don't believe they have a monopoly on Leadership. I work hard to build other constructs and opportunities for any human on the team to be a leader.

I see things as systems. I reduce all complex things (including humans) into systems. I think in flowcharts. I take great joy in attempting to understand how these systems and flowcharts all fit and work together. When I see large or small inefficiencies in these complex systems, I'd like to fix them with your help.I start with an assumption of positive intent for all involved. This has worked out well for me over my career.

It is important to me that humans are treated fairly. I believe that most humans are trying to do the right thing, but unconscious bias leads them astray. I work hard to understand and address my biases because I understand their ability to create inequity. I believe those in power have a disproportionate responsibility to proactively invest in humans who have historically been disadvantaged.

I am heavily biased towards action. Long meetings where we are endlessly debating potential directions are often valuable, but I believe starting is the best way to begin learning and make progress. This is not always the correct strategy. This strategy annoys those who like to debate.

I default to delegation. I believe the delegation of increasingly large, complex, and high-risk projects to my team is the correct way to build trust and grow the team. If you feel a thing I've delegated to you is too large, complex, or risky, you should tell me, and I will help. You should know that I would not make this delegation choice if I did not believe you would be successful.

I believe in the compounding awesomeness of continually fixing small things.

I believe quality assurance is everyone's responsibility, and there are bugs to be fixed everywhere… all the time.

I need you to know that sometimes we are in HIGH ALERT, and things will get strange. There is an exception to many of my practices and principles, and that is when we are in a HIGH ALERT situation. HIGH ALERT conditions usually involve existential threats to our product, team, and/or company. During this time, my usual people, process, and product protocols are secondary to countering this threat. If it is not obvious, I will alert you that I am in this state, along with my best guess when we'll be done. If I am constantly in this state, something is fundamentally broken. You should tell me this. I might be so busy that I need a reminder.

You can Slack me 24 hours a day. It's my preferred communication medium. I like responding quickly.

If I am traveling, I will give you notice of said travel in advance. All our meetings still occur if this is a professional trip, albeit with time zone considerations.

I work a bit on the weekends. This is my choice. I do not expect you to work on the weekend. I might Slack you things, but unless it's URGENT, it can always wait until work begins for you on Monday.

I take vacations. You should, too. Disconnected from work is when I do some of my best work including open source contributions.

# Meeting Protocol

I go to a lot of meetings. If you have a question about a meeting on my calendar, ask me. My definition of a meeting includes an agenda and/or intended purpose, the appropriate amount of productive attendees, and a responsible party running the meeting to a schedule. If I attend a meeting, I'd prefer to start on time. If I run a meeting, I will start that meeting on time. If you send me a presentation deck a reasonable amount of time before a meeting, I will read it before the meeting and will have my questions ready. If I haven't read the deck, I will tell you.

If a meeting completes its intended purpose before it's scheduled to end, let's give the time back to everyone. If it's clear the intended goal won't be achieved in the allotted time, let's stop the meeting before time is up and determine how to effectively finish it.

# Feedback

I had read somewhere that "Feedback is the breakfast of champions", so I would like to give and recieve feedback on an ongoing basis, rather than wait for the annual cycles or formal processes. I see action oriented feedback as a corollary to logging mechanisms in any good software program. 

 

## Nuance and Errata

I am an extrovert and would like to discuss the finicky details sometimes. Most of the time it would be data driven and sometimes, it would be gut-feeling, so please feel free to ask for rhetoric as I would expect data driven logic for most of your decisions as well. 

I am bad at asking for help (which is probably related to my work ethics in the past). When I ask for help, I know that I probably should have asked for help earlier, and I've made the situation direr than needed. Sorry.

When the 1:1 feels over, and there is remaining time I always have a couple of meaty topics to discuss. This is brainstorming, and the issues are usually front-of-mind hard topics that I am processing. It might feel like we're shooting the shit, but we're doing real work.

When I ask you to do something that feels poorly defined you should ask me for clarification and a specific call on importance. I might still be brainstorming. Your clarifications can save a lot of people a lot of time.

I can be hyperbolic but it's almost always because I am excited about the topic. 

I love to start new things but I often lose interest when I can mentally see how the thing will finish, which might be weeks or months before the thing is done. I attempt to solve this by pairing with humans who are strong operators and who are very good at checking things off lists.

Humans stating opinions as facts are a trigger for me. I will often unexpectedly jump into a conversation to clarify opinions and facts when I hear this.  
  
Please reach out and tell me if anything, at all, feels off. It’s so much harder to solve problems when we’re guessing what they are. I’ll never consider proactively speaking up about challenges as a sign of complaining. I really value hearing your honest, transparent thoughts about how we can learn and grow together. Bonus points - Thinking about solutions/approaches to the challenges you bring up (I totally understand this isn’t always possible, and sometimes even what the challenge is is unclear).

In general, please feel free to over-communicate with me. Don’t worry about sending me too many messages or overwhelming me, it’s really valuable, and in our remote context, I’d love to be here for you for what comes up because I can’t see how you’re doing by walking around an office.  
  
This document is likely incomplete as is any human's self-understanding, so lets continue our conversations and see how best we can help each other. 

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