This is a living document and
stillalways a work in progress. I got this idea from a co-worker, who adapted it from other various resources. If you are a Manager of others, or act as a technical lead on projects, I highly recommend setting out a similar document to help set expecatations with your team.
A few reasons this exists:
- I'm a believer in documentation. It helps your team, it helps the client, it's just helpful, plain and simple.
- This documentation will help you understand my expectations better and help us work more effectively together.
- Creating this document has helped, and will continue to help to identify and refine my own thoughts and values.
With COVID-19 keeping us all in a WFH capacity, and many of us dealing with children of various ages, I have some basic information/changes to my normal daily schedule.
- My wife, Michelle and I both WFH and are juggling our 2.5 year old, Lincoln.
- I take the morning shift with him so it is very hard for me to take calls prior to 11a.m. Eastern.
- I have recently been basically working West Coast hours with a break for dinner, and back to it in the evening in order to meet my obligations.
- This means my "working hours" fluctuate between 6am to 10pm (or later) Eastern.
- This means my primary "taking calls hours" are from ~11am Eastern to ~5pm Eastern.
- Scheduling calls with me inside this window is ideal.
- If something has to be outside this window, I will do my best to coordinate with the wife, or I may have a little one in tow.
I am here to make sure our team is successful, happy, and working on the things that are most important to help our customers, improve our products, and improve our business. More granularly:
- I am here to make sure you are both successful and happy: I want you to improve your technical skills, grow your career, enjoy your work, and believe in both our team's and our company's mission.
- I am here to make sure our team is successful and pointed in the same direction.
- I am here to make sure our team is getting what we need. I'm also here to help make sure we are working on the right things, which is not necessarily everything we're asked to do.
- Sometimes I write code for the project(s) at hand!
These are in approximate order of importance. If you are not successful and happy, our team is not successful (or happy). If our team is struggling, writing code will most likely not be my top priority.
Additionally: My job is not to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it. It is also not to be the "official decision maker" for our team. However, I am accountable for the decisions the team makes, even if I’m not the one making them most of the time.
I'm not here to manage you. I'm here to provide you with management. - J Still
- I am here to make sure you are both successful and happy: I want you to improve your technical skills, grow your career, enjoy your work, and believe in both our team's and our company's mission.
- I am here to support you when you need to vent over a particularly frustrating piece of code, a difficult client, or even frustration with a co-worker or company policy. After you've had an opportunity to vent, I should be able to help provide context and perspective if possible, and sometimes, vent right there with you.
- I'm here to help you develop, refine and execute a Professional Development plan that will help you gain perspective on your own goals, and lay out a clear plan of action we can refer to and set appropriate and achievable goals.
You’re good at your job. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. If it feels like I’m questioning you it’s because I’m either: a) Trying to gather context. Or b) Trying to be a sounding board and rubber duck.
I may not be good at your job. You might understand something better than I. I’ll work to provide necessary context and ask questions to help you vet your ideas but I won’t override you.
You’ll let me know if you can’t do your job. One of my main responsibilities is ensuring that you’re set up for success. Occasionally things slip through the cracks and I won’t know I’m letting you down.
You feel safe debating with me. I find that ideas improve by being examined from all angles. If it sounds like I’m disagreeing I’m most likely just playing devil’s advocate. This does rely on us being able to have a safe debate.
Do amazing work. This is the expectation. Let me know if there is something preventing you from accomplishing this.
Disagree with me. The best solutions comes from a healthy level of debate. We need to be able to separate our ideas from our egos . I’ll challenge your ideas with the goal of coming to the best possible solution, I hope you’ll challenge mine.
Tell me when I screw up. This is very important. I screw up and sometimes don’t notice. I need to know or I’ll likely do it again.
Communicate. One of my jobs is to provide context. Are you missing some? Let me know and I’ll fill you in or go find out.
Be Responsible. As a developer, you are responsible for your code and tasks on a daily basis, but more importantly you are responsible in part for the success of your team. If your team is failing, or you feel you are failing your team, I am here to help.
Ownership. You are a professional, and have been asked to complete a task. It is up to you to own that task from start to finish, and enable others involved in a task pipeline to succeed. That could be accurate documentation for testing your work, automated testing, or simply following up to ensure it was completed as expected.
Critical Thinking. Please don't approach me saying I found an issue with X. What do I do?! Part of your job is being asked to take leaps of judgement, and at the bare minimum come to me with a problem, followed by multiple possible solutions that we can discuss or debate.
- Expect a slow response via email.
- Expect a quick(er) response via Slack.
- If we have a 1:1 scheduled you will not attend, please let me know as soon as you know so I can prioritze other work.
- If we have a call on the calendar, and you plan to attend, hit the accept button.
I try to work a 9am - 5pm schedule Eastern time. However, my responsibilities to various projects can lead me to work hours well outside that schedule, and you may find yourself being mentioned/pinged in Slack at all hours and even on the weekend.
I do not expect a response from you outside of your working hours.
Do not hesitate to message me at any point, day or night. I will respond when I am available. You never know, I may just be up at 10:30 at night burning some pre-midnight oil and be ready to respond! Otherwise, I'll get back to you as soon as I can during my standard working hours.
I follow a Green / Orange / Red performance assessment and communication model. My goal is for you to always know where you’re at. If you ever feel you don’t know, just ask me.
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
 |
There might be things to improve, or there might not. If nothing ever changed, it’s all good. |
 |
There are one or more behaviors that, if left unchecked in the long term, will not be sustainable. Something needs to change. |
 |
There is a significant problem, with a timebox, and we have explicitly talked about both the problem and the timebox. |
A status of orange sounds terrifying. It shouldn’t be. It is easily recoverable! Even a red status is recoverable. Recovering from orange (or red) builds a lot of trust. You’ve proven that you accept feedback, acknowledge your role in the situation, and are willing and capable of changing, growing, and improving. That is HUGE.
If I've asked you to review this document, please take a few moments to respond to the following questions so I can best accomodate your goals and expectations.
- What are your preferred working hours?
- What are you good at?
- What are you bad at?
- How do you want to receive feedback?
- Anything else I should know for working with you?