# Vinoj M Zacharia's Manager Readme **Director of Engineering at FloQast** # πŸ“ Motivation for this document  I am writing this document because it's better to make those things _implicit_ to me _explicit_ to others. I believe that understanding another person's background and context takes time, but this document can act as a springboard for us to perform as a team faster. # πŸ“Š My role  I am accountable for the following items for the teams under my purview: - Lead Time - From the time an engineer picks up a ticket to the time the ticket is out to a customer is how we define Lead Time. Low lead time has several positive indicators, including making our customers' lives easier. - Predictability - Predictability is defined as delivering software when we say we will.  - Engineer Growth - I care that people are empowered and grow and become tomorrow's leaders. I am responsible for the following items for the teams under my purview: - Staffing/Recruiting - Employee movement across the teams - Allocating new employees to the correct customer problems - Building a place that people want to work - Increasing engineer flow and reducing friction to delivery - Creating a place where engineers get deep focus time so they can help us solve problems - Finding opportunities to make it easier to serve our customers through our software - Domains - What large-scale customer and technical problem sets do these teams work on? - Leadership - Providing context and support to the people I lead # πŸ’š What do I value?  _This list of ever-evolving general themes gives a good snapshot of where I am today._ _ **Presume good intent** _ **.**  I start with the premise that each of us is trying to do the right thing with our available context. When there is a disconnect, I lean heavily into building that context so we can problem-solve together. _The enemy is outside the building._ I believe that regardless of discipline -engineering/sales/product support/product management/marketing/etc - we are all in this together. Until proven otherwise, I will presume we're working together on shared goals. _ **Fail early, fail often**._ Failing and learning from those failures are an opportunity for growth. I value rough-sketch ideas shared early with a group instead of perfect details too late. _ **Agility and quality.** _ Like the above, I will lean on speed and quality as core values to get feedback from customers quickly. The customers may be actual customers of our app; it could be a peer internally or the people I lead. Creating things quickly and with high quality so that I can solicit feedback ensures I'm heading on the right track. Sometimes I lean more on the speed of my work than the quality of my work πŸ˜…-- **I am a work in progress.** _ **Problems to solve, not solutions to implement** _. I generally believe teams should be given problems to solve and not the solutions to implement. In my experience, giving teams context, priority, and problems has consistently produced positive indicators of growth, customer delight, team ownership, and employee retention. _ **Build bridges, not ferries**. _Ferries travel from one part of the river to another. As a manager, I found myself saying, "I'll go talk to them and report back/Wait on my code review/etc." Over time, I became the bottleneck, hindering teams. People were waiting for me, the ferry, to come back so they could get started. Today I lean toward creating bridges between groups that can free-flow information to each other and solve problems while I assist on the overall context and the framework for success. _ **Done \> In Progress.** _ Deeply focusing on a problem together and completing it is worth its weight in gold, from my perspective. Forty items in progress may be useful in JIRA. One item completed is useful to our customers. # πŸ’» General  My calendar is generally up-to-date, and I'm happy to meet with folks whenever they would like. This can be for shared problem-solving or something else.  Everyone makes mistakes. I like to be notified quickly to plan the next steps. Mistakes are inevitable when coupled with speed - quick accountability helps us grow past it. I need to get better at written communication like this document. _As above, I am working on getting better at this._ I love async messages on Slack and Confluence, but let's do a Zoom call if you need to discuss something with urgency. ## πŸŽ™ 1:1s  1:1s are where we can celebrate your wins, challenges, and how you would like to align with me on solving your challenges. I am happy to take on the role of coach, sponsor, partner, or something else so that we make progress together. You drive the 1:1, as it's your time. ## πŸ€“ Personality quirks _A list of things that are neither good/bad - just who I am._ **Humor.**  I take my work seriously, but I try not to take myself too seriously. A good portion of my day is emojis, jokes, and laughing. I think work can be both profoundly effective and fun. I also recognize that not everyone works this way and will modulate towards whatever serves our outcomes. **Lateness.** I start meetings on time. I am glad to end the meeting early if we are done. I see meetings as the means to an end, not the end itself. If I am running late for a meeting with you, I will let you know. If you are running late, let me know. **Cynicism. ** I don't know how to respond to cynicism, which goes against my first value. I think that frustrations and challenges are great to explore so that we're making active progress to improve things, but cynicism is closer to a worldview. My cynicism reaction is similar to how I view defeatism or a lack of humility. I may need to get better at responding/accepting these in others- but for now, I put it out there for transparency. **Order of precedence.** My order of precedence: the customer, the company, the department, the team, and me. I generally expect my direct reports to be the same. **Communication preferences** You may need me to decide, brainstorm with you, or provide a recommendation. Letting me know which of these you need from me up front helps me help you better. _Decisions_ I prefer your recommendation(s), then the context after. I may ask follow-up questions for my understanding. I may ask for time to process it or lean to my bias for action to get us going quickly. _Brainstorm_ Let’s start with the problem, the observations, and what you wish we could do. I’ll help you understand the desired outcomes and how to get there. _Recommendation_ Similar to brainstorming, except after brainstorming with you, I can guide us to an idea based on my perspectives. # 🎧 Where to focus on your first 90 days?  Build context. Ask questions. Understand the why behind the what. See how it maps to our customers.