Whether we're just meeting, or getting to know each other better, I'm looking forward to working together. This document outlines some things about me including my values, priorities, and way of working. I hope this helps set the expectations of how we'll work together.
I like the word leader instead of manager. Manager makes me think of Office Space and you'll notice I purposefully never carry around my coffee mug. If it ever feels like I'm asking you to write TPS reports (do busy work), let me know right away. I'm either not sharing enough context or didn't think deeply enough.
TLDR; I see my job as making your daily work easier, happier, and more productive. I am here to remove impediments to you so we can deliver the best experience to our users possible.
I joined Audible in 2011 from the financial industry specifically to work on something my friends and family use and love (in addition to millions of other customers) and a good day for me is when I feel tangibly connected to our users. I transfered to Amazon knowing the obsession with our customers would still be there. When I joined Forecasting, it was to gain experience working on exciting technology with the best and brightest in the fields of engineering and science. That means you!
In short, my job is to make our team successful.
Specifically this is how
- I promise to help you grow your career through the development of skills. These will be a mix of technical and personal skills. We hire exceptionally strong people with a great knowledge of technology and leadership skills, so the bar is high which can sometimes feel difficult to meet. I will push you to always stretch because it's the only way I believe skills can be grown at such a high bar. Everyone needs a mix of both type of skills so you're going to need both. The best principle engineers have great people skills and the best senior managers still know their technology.
- I promise to help make our team successful and focused on the right areas. Improving technical excellence and experimentation are areas I love to focus on because they both help ensure we can deliver valuable experiences to our users faster, but there are many others.
- I promise to make sure our team gets what we need from other teams, has the right resources, and that we are providing what other teams need from us.
- I promise to still write some code even if it's for my personal use on weekends so that I never become a non-technical manager. I love playing with AWS tech to stay up to date, but this isn't the only way.
These are in the best order I could think of. Your individual happiness most often comes from growth, and this is the most important area. If you aren't happy, our team won't be, and we won't be making our users happy. All of that would make me unhappy. 😃
My job is NOT to be the decider. I will occasionally make a decision on design approaches or architecture when I need to, namely if the team cannot agree to a single option. Similarly, I don't believe in dictating or telling you exactly what to do. I prefer to communicate my vision, the context, and goals, and let you come up with the solution. You will always always know our code and systems better than me, so I trust you to have good reasons for the decisions you make. Sometimes though, I may have more context (from spending almost my entire waking life in meetings) which may weigh on a decision which I will do my best to share early. Additionally, while I am not the decider, I am accountable for the decisions the team makes, even if I'm not the one making them most of the time.
In order for me to do my job succesfully and help you, I need your feedback. This can be direct feedback like if you liked something I did and want to see more of it, or didn't like it. It could also be something you thought I or the team could do better, something I royally forked up, or that you noticed I rely to heavily on commas in my writing like I'm a Victorian era sailor writing a letter home. Even if you don't think so, I promise I do actually want to hear this feedback.
I prefer in-person feedback, but that's not always possible. I like to give and receive feedback as close to the time the behavior occurred as possible. I'm much happier to receive feedback over email or Slack instead of in-person if it means getting that feedback earlier. I'll extend the same courtesy to you unless you tell me otherwise.
If you aren't comfortable with any of these approaches, you can leave me anonymous feedback by providing it to my manager. If that seems to heavy handed, I'm happy to help set up a Slack webhook with an anonymous name anyone can send a curl request to to send me feedback directly.
I am usually logged on after dropping my kids off at 8:30 and drop off around 5:15. Some days, currently Tuesday and Thursdays, I sign off earlier for my kids' after school activities. On Mondays and Fridays or when I'm not training for a marathon or half-marathon, I tend to be on earlier, usually by 7:30. I don't expect any sane person to be online this early. Mornings tend to be the best time to grab me, though I also like to use this time to get ahead of the day's todos. I've been enjoying the lack of a commute for the last couple years, and don't intend to ever go back to that lifestyle fully. I usually check email and IMs from home both in the morning and once I get my boys to bed, usually around 7:30. If you have an emergency or need an urgent reply, text or call me as I'm more likely to see and respond to this than an email or Slack.
For your schedule, do what works for you. I start with a default posture of trust and it's up to you to contrinue to earn that trust. Don't break it. I find most people are more productive if they are online between 10 and 5 since the majority of others are also around, but it's not a requirement. It's really difficult to maintain personal connections when everyone is remote, but making the extra effort will help you feel connected. You'll also be more productive and probably happier. I will judge you on productive work, not hours worked. If you want to avoid waking up before the sun, have to drop kids off at daycare, have a specific dog walking time, need a walk after lunch to stay awake, or anything else, do what works for you.
If you need to be offline or unavailable, please consider your fellow team-members and send an email or group Slack that you'll be out and when you'll be available so they (and I) can get in touch. If you'll be out, please do the same.
When working from home, I do actually expect you to be working though. If you won't be available to work, please let me and the team know. Things happen, it's fine. Just don't set the expectation that you'll be available only to be unreachable when an issue comes up. If you are working from home, you will be expected to join meetings over the phone or video. Even if everyone is home due to snowmageddon, plague of locusts, or undercooked team lunch, everyone else will be called into meetings, so you should be too.
If you need to reschedule a 1:1 with me for any reason, never hesitate to let me know. Flexibility and support are the two most important aspects of our working relationship, especially in the age of COVID.
I will set up periodic one on ones on your calendar. I prefer doing these weekly, but they tend to be once every two weeks (or maybe even less frequent while I manage multiple teams) because of scheduling. If this is too infrequent, or if you have urgent topics to discuss, let me know and I’ll adjust it.
One-on-ones are your meeting. This is your time to have a meeting where you get to set the agenda. I will probably have questions for you, but this is your chance to let me know how you are doing, what things you need, what you wish were different, how you are feeling about the team, and your career goals and growth. I prefer these to focus on longer-term strategic thinking and career development as we don’t tend to get other time for that. I prefer to get status updates in realtime during standup, Slack, or email. You should always feel free to Slack me to give updates at any time.
I’d prefer if you update our shared document with agenda items you’d like to discuss ahead of the actual one-on-one. I tend to fill the existing time with other things if I can’t think of topics, but this isn’t always the best use of time. If you don’t know what topics you should want to discuss in a one-on-one, let me know as we can spend our first one-on-one discussing this topic!
There are some great posts out there on making one-on-ones effective that you might want to check out. I don’t fully agree with all the points, but they are good for inspiration. 1, 2. If you’re looking for more inspiration, I’m happy to dig up some others I’ve read. If you have thoughts on these articles, that might be a good topic to discuss too.
I have strong feelings about work life balance. I left a previous company when I was told I was one of the more productive members of the team but worked fewer hours than others, so couldn’t receive a positive annual review. Work-life balance can mean a lot of things, so lets figure out exactly what it means to you together. If you need to sign on late because you’re zombie, leave early to pick up kids from daycare, make special arrangements for certain days because of religion, take time for your health, or anything else, just let me know. I expect you to be truthful and honest about your needs and as long as you earn that trust I am very flexible.
I don’t want anyone to burn out or be frustrated by long hours or working at the expense of family, health, beliefs, or otherwise. There are plenty of other things to worry about.
IF YOU ARE UNHAPPY, LET ME KNOW. Seriously. About anything. I never want to lose someone because they didn’t bring up their frustrations when they could be addressed.
In order to do my job, I will give you feedback on your performance. I expect the same of you to me. I prefer to do this in person as close to the situation as possible, but recognize this can’t always happen. Verbal feedback on performance will be given in one-on-ones as well as written feedback annually during the review cycles.
I know my calendar looks like a game of Tetris that’s gone horribly awry. I promise I do my best to keep it in control though it may not always seem that way. If you need to chat but can’t grab a spot, you have a few options.
- Slack me or email me. I have notification message OCD, so I’ll usually respond pretty quickly. Even if you just want to talk, message me and I’ll set up some time.
- Grab a spot on my calendar. If I’ve got an interview (very likely) or something else I can’t move, I’ll work with you to reschedule. Often though, I’ve got other meetings that can move around, so I can find a spot.
I may occasionally reach out on nights or weekends. Unless I include the word urgent in my request, it can wait until the next business day. I just tend to work asynchronously sometimes and don't want to forget.
I created this document in an attempt to document some of my thoughts on how my team should work and how we should work together. Those views may evolve and hopefully get more defined over time, so this document will evolve with them. I purposefully chose Github for this to track those changes over time. You may notice I had to make a ton of recent changes because how we work has changed since COVID began. I'm sure it will continue to evolve.
I’ve never experienced having me as a manager, though I have had a lot of different types of manager, so I need your feedback to help me. If something here is confusing or seems strange, feel free to create a pull request or issue, or bring it up to me in our one-on-one or Slack.
None yet. I just like the word "errata"
You can get a pretty good sense of my experience and who I am from LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-lund-24936918/
I also like to share articles I find interesting there as well as on Twitter https://twitter.com/tylopoda
I joined Audible in 2011 as a web developer when the entire tech team was much smaller (about 80; it was > 300 when I moved to Forecasting). Before that, I worked in the financial industry on backend order management systems in C++. We even rewrote the C++ stl data structures to speed them up by a few microseconds. I also did a variety of test automation and framework creation, Python, Java, and C# coding, and owned the communication layer between services (they weren’t called micro services then) and the language bindings for client teams there.
At Audible, I worked on the web team mostly around ordering, library, and the cloud player (I think finally all the terrible JS I wrote is gone now). I started managing in 2014. In 2016 I moved to services & apis and in 2018 began managing a multi-surface development team owning iOS, Android, Web, and Services for Audible's player experience. In 2019 I decided to take a new opportunity at Amazon managing a development team responsible for forecasting in Supply Chain Optimization Technology. This was the Cube Forecasting team, responsible for supporting decisions for huge much capacity was needed for the Fulfilment network. In Fall 2020, after returning from my second parental leave for our third child (twin math is fun), I moved to the Demand Forecasting organization.
At home, I like to spend time with my family comprised of my wife, dog (a 55 pound beagle mix rescue), twin boys (in kindergarten this year), and our youngest, a fiery toddler who is about to turn two. I like to run most mornings and do a fair amount of half marathon and full marathon running. I also brew my own beer which varies wildly in drinkability. I also like to write and do so regularly for my personal blog about parenting, technology, and running.
I’m a huge fan of Netflix’s technology organization and read their tech blog religiously. I am happy to share some of my favorite posts with you.
This is my absolute favorite. I’m a huge fan of Chaos Engineering and have given a few tech talks on it. Netflix deserves huge props for pioneering this and marketing the philosophy. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/chap-chaos-automation-platform-53e6d528371f
This is a good overview of the numerous things they’ve done to improve their technology maturity at scale and invent on behalf of their users. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/neflix-platform-engineering-were-just-getting-started-267f65c4d1a7
This one inspires me to think of ways to automate processes that don’t immediately look automatable. https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/automated-canary-analysis-at-netflix-with-kayenta-3260bc7acc69