“person who says the thing everyone was thinking but was unsure how to say”
Your friendly neighborhood
I'm a software engineering manager who helps fellow leaders cut through cloudy thinking in order to find, articulate, and then express to others the actionable root of a variety of challenges.
No one is born automatically knowing how to be an effective manager. I had to learn and practice (and still practice!) these skills.
You can do this, too! I’m deeply committed to creating a working relationship that offers you the psychological safety required for profound learning and fresh insight.
The foundational principles that guide my work:
You can get more done via rapport than with brute force. Communicating effectively is key to building rapport!
Your first priority as a manager is to get things done, with an eye towards building for the future. A win today doesn’t count if you’ve burned everyone out or alienated them for tomorrow.
Authenticity is non-negotiable. If the substance of a thing is inherently harmful, there’s no way to decorate it with words to make it not-harmful. If this needs to be pointed out, I’ll do it kindly!, but please know I’m in the business of uncovering and discovering, not covering up.
We aren’t aiming for brutal honesty here, we’re striving for insightful honesty, collaborative honesty, motivational honesty.
If the work of becoming a better manager doesn’t change you individually as a person, you’re probably doing it wrong.
My Qualifications
For almost a decade, I’ve been an engineering manager with increasing responsibility across several early- to mid-stage start-ups, including New Relic, HashiCorp, and Stripe.
I’ve managed multiple teams simultaneously, mentored and managed many other managers, and built entirely new teams and roadmaps from scratch.
I’ve frequently been the go-to manager for projects and even entire product turnarounds, and my teams are typically among the most productive while also being among the happiest.
I contend that the secret sauce to this double win is in the quality of communication: not just that between myself and my team, but also coaching my team members to be effective communicators themselves.
My work in action
Whenever I hear people repeating a phrase that’s bugging me, there’s usually a reason why. I developed an SREcon talk based on my grumpiness at people saying “we can’t hire junior engineers on this team”, by digging into: when people say they can’t hire junior engineers, what are they actually saying underneath the surface?
This is the shorter version of the talk, which was so well-received I was invited to give a longer form of it as the closing keynote at SREcon Europe later that same year.
This dedicated pursuit of “what’s actually being said here?” is the type of collaborative exploration you can expect in our work together!
Let’s work together.
Interested in working together? Fill out this form and I will be in touch to schedule a call.