# Stas Wishnevetsky's Manager Readme

**Engineering Manager at Wix **

# Motivation for this document

Writing, in general, has the side effect of putting your thoughts and intuitions into order for easy access later.  
**Writing this readme is an internal process I am doing with myself to better define my leadership approach. **

As part of my leadership philosophy, I am a true believer in the importance of trust, collaboration, and candid communication in order to maintain strong working relationships.

I wrote this document to share my expectations on what would make it most effective to work together, and so that you can hold me accountable for it. Use this document as an intro to my mind and how I like to operate

# My role - What is engineering management?

I try to keep definitions short, so here it is in 10 words.

**Building teams that collaborate on delivering excellent products on time.**

That's what it all comes down to.  
From this one-liner, we can deduce the importance of:

- Open communication relationships, transparency, team building, and having fun.
- Quality, customer-centric, well-defined deliverables, and data-driven objectives.
- Dev velocity, short feedback loop, and focus.

Engineering management is built from **5 blocks** ([Link](https://blog.asana.com/2022/05/introducing-em-building-blocks/)):

- People - Grows & coaches others
- Product - Influences the roadmap for business impact
- Technology - Identifies technical opportunities, coaches on technical design & execution, and solves hard technical problems
- Brand - Builds company or employer reputation and acts as a talent magnet for hiring.
- Execution - Enables teams to deliver value reliably, effectively, and efficiently.

At every point in time, I might be optimizing other dimensions of my role and it mainly depends on the answer to the following question: **What should I focus on today to make the biggest impact on driving my team to success?**

# What is leadership?

"Leadership is about getting what can't be taken, and deserving what is freely given" (The meaning revolution)

# What do I value most?

- Focus - **The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.**  
I am a strong believer in prioritization. it's a lesson I have learned many times when experiencing extreme burnout and when I missed goals due to time spent at topics besides the point.
- **Employee Satisfaction** , which I believe to be rooted in the following 4 aspects:
  - Working only alongside high performers 
  - A clear purpose
  - Well defined deliverables 
  - Having fun

- **build - measure - learn**  
As first introduced in "The Lean Startup".  
I believe that every iteration in engineering, business, or anything else is built as iterations of:  
Collecting data -\> making observations -\> generating hypotheses -\> run experiments  -\> Collecting data.
- **Short feedback loop.**  
It means developing the smallest valuable deliverable and keep iterating the next phases  
It means experimenting with technical design  
It means having a fast release cycle to test   
It means developing a fast unit test to drive your code to its best design faster than an E2E test (TDD).
- **Make the world a better place**  - as coders, we have a superpower that can generate disruption and stimulate progression by engineering software.  
We all should use this superpower for the good of mankind instead of fuelling violence or financial inequality.  

# My Expectations

- I expect **open communication** and continuous candid feedback, feel free to set up a meeting, grab me for a coffee, or just DM me saying "Hi, can we talk?"
- I expect you to be a team player and work in **collaboration** with all team members.   
The smallest atom in an organization is a team and I expect open collaboration with all team members.
- I expect you to maintain a **work-life balance** of working hours and personal time, just as I will maintain my balance I will actively protect your balance also.
- I expect you to be **passionate** about your purpose and vision, not 100% of the time but in general.
- I expect you to **improve** your professional skills over time.
- I expect you to maintain a **blameless culture** , it's crucial for experimentation and fast recovery.

# 1:1s

I will be having weekly 1:1 meetings with direct reports and a monthly 1:1 with skip level reports.

I believe the 1:1 purpose can be and should be a personal time to:

- **Listen** , truly listen.
- Personal communication for building our **relationship** and friendship.
- https://managerreadme.com/edit-readme#Build **trust**
- Deliver and accept **feedback** in a safe environment 
- Build and execute our personal **growth**.

I will protect our time to have a 1:1 meeting, the scheduling might change during the week but the meeting won’t be canceled as I hold this time as very important.

I don't have a 1:1 recipe and the format of the talk will change with every person, **I will optimize the format to keep the 1:1 purpose** while making it personal and adjusted for each person.

# Personality quirks

Well... :)

- I have a very weird tendency to try to arrive first at any event and to leave last. I believe it's powered by a strong sense of **FOMO**.
- I have a tendency to want to be involved in a lot of initiatives and topics. again powered by FOMO but also my **passion for impact.**
- I am sarcastic and my **sense of humor** is still improving, but I try to add some humor and fun into every activity and situation.
- I think food is a means of nourishment, choosing a place to eat is beside the point, **I really don't mind where we go out to eat as long as we go and eat togethe** r, preferably dine out instead of ordering in.
- I try to maintain a ["People Positive mindset"](https://www.bravenewwork.com/), I assume the best intentions from people, also I believe that everyone is at least as capable as myself so I will not centralize authority, information, or decisions.
- [https://nohello.net/en/](https://nohello.net/en/)