# Umberto Di Fabrizio's Manager Readme **Head of Backend at Musement** # Motivation for this document This is my Manager README, an (incomplete and living) document that helps introduce you to my management style, philosophy, and expectations. The intended audience is primarily anyone who reports to me, though anyone is free to read it and 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.** You'll find overlaps between this document and [My work principles](https://www.notion.so/umbertodifabrizio/My-work-principles-481cc26f1cf94188bc9320ea3915db3b), which I encourage you to read as well. # My role My purpose is to contribute to the success of the company by **driving the success of the team**. A successful team is one where engineers are empowered and excited to ship a great product. I will **p**** rovide context.** Most of my day is spent collecting, filtering and sharing context/information from across other projects, domains, and product lines. I’ll try to push information to you as much as I can but feel free to ask about anything else. **I will guide you to evolve in your career** by continuously improving. That's why you can expect constant 1:1 to discuss challenges, goals, and priorities.  # What do I value most? You can refer to [My work principles](https://www.notion.so/umbertodifabrizio/My-work-principles-481cc26f1cf94188bc9320ea3915db3b). # My Expectations My main expectation is that **people hold themselves accountable**. We have goals as individuals, as teams and as a company.  Set your goals and communicate with me. If you are not sure about what your goals are, that's a great topic for our 1:1!. I deeply care about **the team as a whole** , there's no one-man-show allowed. My favorite opening line is "_I could use a hand with..._" and my second favorite is "_I screwed up: ..._". A mistake, if shared, becomes a challenge; if hidden, becomes a failure. # 1:1s One-on-ones are _your time_. I will probably have some things to discuss with you, but 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... etc. - There will be a document to keep track of our conversations, shared between me and you. - Weekly cadence, but can adjust depending on what you prefer. - Hopefully we talk about [things you wouldn’t otherwise bring up](https://medium.com/@mrabkin/the-art-of-the-awkward-1-1-f4e1dcbd1c5c) in a group setting. I want our 1:1 to be a safe place; if this isn’t the case please tell my boss. - We will go through your agenda first and if time permits I will always have some questions. First and foremost these meetings are for you. - Urgent matters should not wait for a 1:1. - 1:1s are not for status updates unless you want to update status # Skip level 1:1s What is a skip-level 1:1? ["It’s a meeting between someone of a given depth m and another of depth m+2"](https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/managing-managers/skip-level-meetings/) Why? Because "They build trust and break down barriers" The truth? I just like to know the people I work with, after all we're all working together and I think we should have the time to know who we are. I think ideas are precious (or silly) regardless of one position in the org chart and it's extremely inefficient to ignore those coming from the people closest to the day to day activities. What should we talk about? Whatever. What are you working on? What am I working on? What's in plan for the future? # Quarterly personal goals In my opinion, if we don't set goals, we are less likely to do them. Similar to how we do company OKR's, I like to do quarterly personal goals with you. These are typically geared towards career growth or ways to become more effective in your role. Sometimes they map to OKRs set by the team and sometimes they are focused on sharpening a skill that demonstrates the next level requirement. I try to make the goals a little stretching, aiming for 70% completion, so that we use it as a strategy for stretching ourselves rather than just a checklist to complete.