Sunrise over Scottsdale, AZ from the top of Camelback Mountain.

My Leadership Operating Manual

Disclaimer

This document only applies to myself and not other managers in the organization. Every leader has their own style and personal quirks. This doc attempts to fill you in on some of mine.

What Is This

We need to get to know each other to work effectively together. This document will help “prime the pump” and get that relationship going. It captures how I think about my role, what I value in leaders, and what you can expect from me. It should make the most important expectations clear early on, setting you up for success.

My Leadership Philosophy

I believe that my job is to create the conditions for you and your teams to do the best work of your careers. I think about this as servant leadership at the organizational level: I exist to remove friction, provide strategic clarity, and make sure resources are pointed at the right problems. I want you to grow as a leader, I want your teams to grow in their capabilities and responsibilities, and I want the company to grow because our organization delivers outsized impact.

That said, servant leadership does not mean passive leadership. I will make hard calls when the situation demands it, set clear expectations, and hold the bar high. I see my role as creating space for you to lead, not as avoiding the exercise of judgment and authority when it matters.

My Job

In order of decreasing importance:

  1. Organizational Strategy & Direction
    I am responsible for our engineering organization. I set the strategic direction, ensure our investments are aligned with business priorities, and represent our group’s capabilities and needs at the senior leadership level. I have a strong voice in determining what our goals should be as a member of the company’s senior leadership team.
  2. Building and Developing Leaders
    You are my most critical investment. I hire, develop, and retain strong leaders across engineering management, product management, program management, and senior individual contributor roles. I look for people who can operate independently and drive impact in their domains. I spend significant time understanding each person’s strengths, growth areas, and career trajectory so I can match the right challenges to the right people. A healthy leadership bench is what makes everything else possible.
  3. Organizational Health & Talent
    Great organizations don’t happen by accident. I monitor the health of our teams across retention, engagement, skill distribution, and succession risk. I intervene early when something is off. I work hard to make this an organization where talented people want to stay and grow.
  4. Cross-Functional Partnership & Influence
    A significant portion of my time is spent working across the company with product, finance, security, and other engineering groups to ensure our priorities are aligned, our dependencies are managed, and our technical investments are understood at the business level. I also coordinate to ensure that our needs are represented when other teams set their priorities.
  5. Technical Strategy & Judgment
    I don’t write production code, but I maintain strong technical judgment so I can evaluate architectural decisions, assess technical risk, and ask the right questions. I lean on you and your teams for deep technical expertise. My role is to ensure that our technical direction serves the business and that we are making sound long-term bets.

Empowerment

I work hard not to micromanage, and I’ll extend that same principle to you with your teams. I want to provide a work environment where you can lead with confidence, make decisions in your domain, and develop your own people.

  • I practice servant leadership. My job is to make your job possible, not to do your job for you.
  • Your role is to drive excellent outcomes in your domain, whether that means leading engineering teams, shaping product direction, driving program execution, or setting technical standards across the organization.
  • My role is to make sure you have the strategic context, the resources, and the organizational support to do that well.
  • I’m also here to invest in your professional growth, including trajectories that may eventually lead beyond this company. I take this seriously.

Default to High Autonomy

My default mode is to give you significant latitude to own your domain and make decisions.

  • We brought you into a leadership role because you have strong judgment. I trust you to know your limits and ask for support when you need it.
  • I will share my perspective and sometimes push back, but I’ll rarely override your decisions in your domain. When I do, I will explain why.
  • You own your area of responsibility and the outcomes that come with it. I will trust your judgment.
  • Everyone has different needs for guidance and input. Some leaders want a thought partner on nearly everything; others want to check in occasionally. Tell me what works for you, and I’ll calibrate. I will also get better at this as we work together, so please give me feedback early and often.

What Do I Value Most?

  • Customer, Company, Team, Self
    We should care deeply about how our internal customers use our software and what they need from us to be successful. We should always keep our end users in mind as well, even though our impact is often indirect through other engineering teams. When priorities conflict, this is the order I use to break ties.
  • Ownership
    You take your responsibilities seriously. You see a problem, you drive toward resolution, and you hold those around you to the same standard. Ownership at the leadership level means accountability for outcomes, not just effort.
  • High Standards
    We should be delivering top-quality software and well-run organizations. We will occasionally take on technical debt to move faster, but we do it intentionally and with a plan to address it. At no point do we lower the bar on quality because it is convenient.
  • Developing Others
    One of the most important things you can do is elevate the people around you. That could mean developing the next generation of leaders within your teams, raising the technical bar across the organization, or mentoring colleagues in your discipline. I will evaluate your success partly on the growth and impact of those you influence.

What Will Disappoint Me?

This is the inverse of the points above:

  • Not caring about our customers or how our work impacts the business.
  • Not being invested in the growth of the people around you or the health of the organization.
  • Delivering substandard work or tolerating low standards without a clear plan to address it.
  • Hoarding context, avoiding hard conversations, or letting problems fester because they are uncomfortable to address.

Transparency

  • I bias toward transparency and candor. You can ask me anything. Most of the time, I’ll answer. On the rare occasions I cannot, I will tell you why. I am committed to never lying to you.
  • I will be as open as possible about what is happening across our organization and the company. I don’t hide bad news. I would rather discuss it directly and figure out our response together.
  • My calendar is public, and very few events are marked private.
  • Occasionally this company may ask me to hold information until a certain date. This has only happened a few times in my career, usually for major reorganizations or other material events like an IPO. The company cannot require me to lie to you, and I have never been asked to. If I were, I would refuse.

How I Operate

  • I think in systems, not just situations. When a problem surfaces, my instinct is to understand the root cause and fix the system that allowed it, not just address the immediate symptom. I will push you to think this way too. If the same kind of issue keeps recurring across your teams, I want us to understand why and design it out.
  • I pressure test ideas. I will often play devil’s advocate, not because I disagree, but because I want us to stress-test our reasoning before committing resources. If I’m pushing back, it usually means I want you to sharpen the argument, not abandon it. With that said, I am aware that sometimes I push a point because I believe I am right, not because I objectively am. Call me on it directly and I’ll genuinely reconsider.
  • I give strategic feedback, and I am working to pair it with specifics. My natural mode is to focus on the big picture: patterns, themes, trajectory. I’ve been developing the habit of grounding that feedback with specific examples using the situation/behavior/impact framework. If you need more specificity from me, tell me. I would rather adjust than leave you guessing.
  • I can get stretched thin. Like most senior leaders, there are periods where I am managing a lot of competing demands. If I seem distracted or short in a conversation, call me out privately and I’ll recalibrate. I would always rather hear it directly than have it erode our working relationship.

How We Work Together

My direct reports include engineering directors, senior managers, principal engineers, product managers, and program managers. Your roles are different, but the principles I hold for our working relationship are the same:

  • You own your domain. Whether you are running engineering teams, setting technical direction, driving product strategy, or coordinating cross-org programs, I expect you to operate with full ownership. I trust you to set the right standards and make sound decisions. If I see something that concerns me, I’ll raise it with you directly.
  • Hold a high bar. For people managers, this means performance management, career development, and accountability across your teams. For individual leaders, this means the quality of your technical judgment, your influence on the people around you, and the rigor of your work. The standard is the same regardless of role: excellence is not optional.
  • Escalate early, not late. I don’t need to be involved in every decision, but I do need to know about emerging risks (retention concerns, delivery blockers, cross-team conflicts, strategic misalignment) before they become crises. A five-minute heads-up can save weeks of recovery.
  • Protect focus. If you lead teams, part of your job is shielding your people from organizational noise so they can do their best work. If you are an individual leader, part of your job is protecting your own capacity for the deep work that creates the most impact. I will do the same for you.

Communication

  • Slack/Chat: Direct messages during work hours should be responded to within a few hours. I will extend the same courtesy to you.
  • Email: I expect you to be on top of email at least once per day during the work week.
  • Phone/Page: Reserved for urgent situations. If I call or page you outside business hours, something requires immediate attention. This should be very rare.
  • Any message I send outside of work hours can wait until the next business day unless I explicitly note otherwise. Feel free to reach me at any time through any channel. If you need a fast response, let me know it is urgent.

Growth, Development, and Coaching

Investing in your development is one of the most important parts of my job, even if your trajectory eventually leads beyond this company. I take this seriously, and we will spend meaningful time on it.

We will have a dedicated career conversation at least once per quarter, and I’ll raise future-focused questions in our regular one-on-ones. These conversations are most productive when you have done some introspection about where you want to be in one, two, or five years. I can only help when I understand how to help.

Feedback

I believe in a strong feedback culture, and that applies equally to both of us.

Three dimensions determine whether feedback actually works:

  1. Safety: the likelihood of being punished for giving it. This should be zero.
  2. Effort: how much resistance you encounter when delivering it. This should be low.
  3. Benefit: how likely it is that your feedback will actually change behavior. This should be high.

Let me know if I fall short on any of these. I will do the same for you.

I care about kindness, but I’ll optimize for effectiveness and be as kind as I can within that. My job is to ensure you hear, understand, and can act on the feedback I provide. If I need to be more direct, tell me. I would rather over-correct toward clarity than leave something important unsaid.

Want to Talk? Let’s Talk

  • I never want you to wonder where you stand with me. If there is a concern, let’s discuss it directly.
  • Quick question? Send me a message.
  • Need a longer conversation? Let’s get on a call or meet in person. I can almost always rearrange my calendar. Very few of my meetings are more important than talking with you when you need to discuss something.
  • Feel free to put time directly on my calendar. Any open slot is yours.

Weekly 1:1s

  • This is your time. I will bring topics and questions, but you should steer the conversation toward whatever is most important to you.
  • These meetings are for leadership challenges, strategy, people issues, your development, and organizational health. They are not for sprint-level status updates.
  • Urgent matters should never wait for a 1:1.
  • We will meet weekly. Depending on what we need to cover, these can run 30, 45, or 60 minutes. The length is largely up to you.

The Road Ahead

This is a lot of information to take in at once. Even with the flood of context, I have high confidence in your ability to get up to speed and thrive. There will be bumps along the way: ambiguous priorities, organizational friction, and the occasional misstep from me. When those happen, we will work through them together and learn from them.

If you are new to a leadership role or stepping into a bigger scope, some degree of imposter syndrome is expected. Let me know when it shows up and we can talk about it. It is a normal part of growth, not a sign that something is wrong.

A Few Things About Me

  • I’ve been an avid cyclist since I was a teenager. Long road rides, short mountain rides. I have been a decent runner since 2007, though speed is not my strength.
  • I am a private pilot and fly small planes on weekends. If you are ever in Santa Barbara, I’m happy to take you up for a flight around the coast.
  • I am getting into SCUBA diving. The Channel Islands are a remarkable place to explore underwater.
  • I still do embedded programming on weekends. I run a LoRa radio network at my house for landscape lighting and sensor data.
  • My communication can get meme-heavy. Funny cats are always welcome.
  • GIF is pronounced with a hard G. The creator disagrees, and he is wrong.
  • Spaces, always. Tabs are chaos.