A crash course on what to expect if I'm your tech lead or engineering manager.

• Help you understand me so we can work together more effectively
• Helps me identify and refine my thoughts and values

I'm born and raised in the DC area. I grew up in Bethesda, MD and currently live in DC. I studied Systems Engineering and minored in Economics and Engineering Business at UVA.

My passion is building things! I'm a maker at heart. I enjoy creating analytics capabilities with my strong blend of technical and business skills. The majority of my experience focuses on technology product development, big data/graph analytics, solution architecture, enterprise architecture, and machine learning.

Outside work I enjoy hanging with friends / family, sports / exercise, travel, cooking/eating, reading, listening to podcasts, and learning new things!

A few other tidbits about me:

• My primary business chemistry is driver
• I'm a visual learner. You can explain things to me much more effectively with pictures vs words.

To learn more about me and my experience, see my website.

• Develop empowered and driven teams. I want to be able to take off a month and it shouldn't make a difference (seriously).
• Build impactful and sustainable data-driven capabilities

I've worn a lot of hats over the years, but the roles I focus on these days to help build analytics capabilities are 1) solution engineer, 2) engineering manager, and 3) mentor / leader. Below are some example dimensions of each.

• Solution engineer (i.e., developing new technical capabilities)
  • Solution architecture design
  • Technology research and evaluation
  • Prototyping and proof-of-concept development
• Engineering manager
  • Strategic planning
  • Risk and quality management
  • Incident response and issue resolution
  • Cross-team and cross-project coordination
  • Resource planning and allocation
• Mentor and leader
  • Provide you feedback
  • Setting clear goals and objectives
  • Enabling team autonomy and growth
  • Sharing organizational context and insights
  • Attracting, retaining, and developing talent
  • Cultivating a culture of passion, innovation, and collaboration

• Start with why - understand the purpose behind your work
• Set clear goals and priorities

• Embrace a growth mindset
• Iterate quickly and learn from failures
• Prioritize application over theory

• Use visuals to communicate effectively
• Foster open and honest communication
• Respect, trust, and integrity

• Data-driven decision making
• Seek quick feedback loops
• Right challenge-to-skill balance

• Bias toward action over excessive analysis
• Maximize impact and value creation

• Impactful - we get stuff done that has value
• Open - open lines of communication, honesty
• Always learning and improving - learn and fail fast...a lot. Don't be afraid to fail. Be honest when something is a failure.
• Fun

TLDR; Very few things are more important than talking to you if you want to talk to me. If you need to talk, let’s talk.

• Communication: I strategically limit how much I check communications to allow time to focus. As such, please do not expect a response from me immediately. If you need to reach me, I respond to communications generally in this order or priority: in-person > call > txt > teams > email
• Work hours:
  • I like to start work on the earlier side and leave on the earlier side so I can walk my dog, go to the gym, or hang out with friends. I’ll generally do some light work or technical coding in the evening.
  • I prefer not to have meetings before 9am so I can have some focused time to organize my day.
  • I work a bit on the weekends. This is my choice. I do not expect that you are going to work on the weekend. I might message or email you things, but unless the thing says URGENT, it can always wait until work begins for you on Monday.
  • I try and stay unplugged when on PTO, with the exception of organizing email. Don’t expect a response from me though. If it’s urgent, call me.

• Provide context and clarity
• Give you feedback (see below)
• Provide another perspective
• Be your cheerleader
• Provide opportunities to grow
• Firefight
• Something else? Please let me know how else I can help.

• Bring forward potential solutions, not just problems
• Seek clarification when expectations are ambiguous
• Communicate proactively if you cannot meet a commitment

• Be open about your workload, stress levels, or conflicts
• Challenge ideas respectfully through healthy debate
• Provide candid feedback if I fall short

• Your career is yours. You know best how you’d like to grow and in what areas. I can provide feedback and an outside perspective.
• I’ll do my best to provide growth and learning opportunities, it’ll be up to you to seize them. Let’s work together on this.
• At the end of the day, it is your career. You set your goals. You set your priorities. Let me know how I can help you achieve them.
• I will sometimes put you in situations where you feel uncomfortable from a skill/experience-fit perspective. I do this on purpose because it helps you learn faster.
• Three dimensions are required for people to continue to give you feedback. Let me know if I don't do well on any of these three dimensions.
  • Safety should be high (no fear of retaliation)
  • Effort should be low (no rebuttals)
  • Benefit should be high (positive results)

• There’s a lot of variety in frequency, length and format of one on ones with my 1-1's. From thirty minutes bi-weekly to an hour per week. Coffee, lunch, private meeting room, head out for a walk, let me know what works best.
• Length, frequency, format and content is up to you.
• The best 1:1s I’ve had have focused beyond the moment: Your career development, team strategy and opportunity, the greater firm, etc. Feel free to come with a topic you’d like to discuss. I’d love it if you spent a few minutes beforehand preparing so that we can get the most of our time.

• Socratic questions. At times I'll ask you open-ended questions to get your input instead of directing you to do something. Sometimes it will feel awkwark and frustruation. I do it to help you learn.
• Meetings. I try to limit the amount of people in meetings to make them more productive and to maximize people’s focused time. If I didn’t invite you to a meeting, I was probably trying to let you focus on your work. It was not anything personal. If you feel you should be in a meeting that you’re not, just ask.

• The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
• Pyramid and the Plum Tree
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
• The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
• The Lean Startup
• Agile Manifesto
• The Phoenix Project

This blog post and the associated links.