# Ryan Tan's Manager Readme

**Development Manager at Shopify**

# Motivation for this document

This is my Manager README, a document that helps introduce you to my management style, philosophy, and expectations. The intended audience is primarily anyone who reports in to me, though anyone is free to read it - or even provide feedback on it! Please treat it as a reference and promise on how I will conduct myself as a manager, and what I expect from you.

I urge you to hold me accountable to my promises, and to call out anything that might be missing from this document. Without your guidance, I will not be able to improve as a manager.

# My role

" **Teams' success is my success** ” has always been my belief. I believe by giving the right support (purpose, motivation, direction, feedback), building effective relationships and communications could nurture an open and transparent, trust, inclusive and team mindset in individuals and organization. We (not I) as the individuals, team, or organization, collectively will achieve greater impact when marching towards common goals and vision.

I genuinely believe leads or managers are there to ensure individuals’ success. I will give you the best of my abilities by sharing right context, providing right opportunities and recognition, and removing any blockers that come your way. I will work very closely with you and having a good relationship is crucial to me.

Having said that, if I didn’t do a good job in helping you to be successful please let me know. That’s the failure in me and I need to reconsider if I am in the right role.

# What do I value most?

1. **Authenticity -**  being genuine, living and leading in truest form, best self and encourage honest conversations, feedback and progress. Integrity.
2. **Integrity ** - being honest and having strong moral principles. A person with integrity behaves ethically and does the right thing, even behind closed doors.
3. **Trust**  - I default to 100% trust level and full support. I believe the foundation of great team is built with strong trust.
4. **Transparency - ** Transparency implies openness, communication, and accountability. We needs to be open, truthful and communicate what we really mean whether things are good or bad. We need that in order to achieve high alignment (context or the approach) and trust. Transparency might make us vulnerable but that is okay, we shall not and will not be perfect in every area.
5. **Teamwork **
6. **Empathy -  ** Truly listen, understand and being aware of other feelings and thoughts (people, team, users, company). I always put myself into others shoes as to understand or emphatize with their perspective, opinion and point of view. I strongly believe that I shouldn’t treat other the way that I don’t want to be treated, and vice versa.
7. **Ownership & Empowerment**  - I want you to own the problem, decision and solution. I trust you to do the right thing. Taking responsibility for outcomes and being empowered to make the decisions that will lead to those outcomes. That is not throwing you to the problem. Don’t worry and you have my back.
8. **Continuous Learning - ** In Chinese proverb ”活到老学到老“, “Learn no matter how old you grow” or “Live and Learn”. We should continue learning new things and should never content with where we are today. Knowledge is power and knowledge solves problem. Knowledge sharpens our skills like reasoning and problem-solving.

# My Expectations

1. **Act like an owner**
2. **High alignment**
3. **Communicate effectively**
4. **Open to constructive feedback**
5. **Curiosity and growth mindset**
6. **Be self-motivated**
7. **Team collaboration**
8. **Respect each other**
9. **Engineering excellence **
10. **Prioritise context**
11. **Career Development**

# 

# 1:1s

1:1s are extremely important for me, or for us. This is one of the venues for us to have a healthy check in and get to know each other better. What we say in the meeting stay between us and I will always seek for your consent if I need to share the conversation to someone else for good reason.

1:1s are your time. This is your safe place for any topic. I leave it to you to set the agenda. How are you doing? What’s going well? What’s bugging you? How could I help? What I didn’t do enough to support you and the team? Let me know if pre-read is needed.

While I have a preference to meeting for 30 minutes every week, that is not always feasible. By default, I will book us time to meet for 30 minutes every two weeks. As mentioned before, this is not the only time you can reach me - if there is ever something on your mind - please reach out. If I am busy, I will find time for you.

# Personality quirks

I am mindful of alignment and communication. I dislike miscommunication especially those that can be easily avoided. I prefer to understand the context end to end as much as possible in order for me to “connect the dot” and provide the best support and decision.

If I am wasting your time and not talking on the same thing, or you hope to get more context of the topic, please call me out.

Given the nature of my work, I expect asynchronous communication being a norm going forward and it is very impactful if we use it right (slack, email)! The challenge that I had is to get any response or feedback, e.g. I do not know if the receivers have or have not read the message, or how do they take it. A simple acknowledgement to the message is better than no response. Or, "noted on the message, I will get back to you on this 2hrs later" would be a great help to align on the expectation.   
  
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