The below is my Readme as a manager at iZettle. While imperfect of course, I subscribe to the management approach of Radical Candor as described in Kim Scott’s canonical book. 

Hi I’m Ian.

This document is a quick way to understand who I am, answer some likely questions and set expectations for what you can depend on as your manager.

The following is a user guide for me and how I work. It covers why I joined iZ, my typical week, working principles, feedback, performance and my personal quirks at the end (including weaknesses you can help me with). My intent is to accelerate our working relationship by sharing this.

Why iZ?

Company missions have always been an important part of my decision process in looking at new opportunities. I joined iZettle to help small businesses like my wife’s who struggle to string together solutions which enable them to succeed. As they grow, so do their problems and often their choices are hiring developers to solve problems or working in a very inefficient way (or both). In the meantime, some of the world’s largest brands are competing for the same customers and have the resources to raise the bar on consumer expectations. I wanted to be a part of levelling the playing field and help small businesses thrive in this environment. 

Average Week

We’ll have a 30min 1:1 every week. This is your meeting so please set it up and invite me. Suggest you also create a private slack channel for these 1:1s where we will keep topics and actions. Make sure you find the habit to note down topics for our meetings so we have some structure to base our 1:1s around. Please try to refrain from making these update meetings. Sometimes that just can’t be avoided but if it becomes habit - we’re both wasting our time. See your 1:1s as personal time, bouncing thoughts/ideas, and discussions that bring clarity of purpose to what you are doing.

My schedule is often full but if you need to talk with me, I can always find time. Slacking me is usually the best way and I will get back to you. Because I have a family, I often work some odd hours ending work early to take kids to activities (1 or 2 days a week) and dropping off most mornings. So if you get an email or Slack from me at 22:00, unless it says it’s an emergency, feel free to ignore until the next working day. And btw, my wife and kids names are Ellen, Elsa (8) and Noah (5).

Outside of my direct reports, the team I work with on a daily basis is my tech and design counterparts leading the POS Alliance. We together work on aligning the continuous changes and improvements needed to take us all forward - unblocking your teams and lighting the path forward. Alignment is a very important part of the iZettle TPD culture. It gives our teams strength, enables people to feel heard and the process is key to smart decisions. Alignment for me does not mean we make all decisions by committee, voting, etc. Rather it means getting input, aiming for consensus but often when you don’t have that - solving any concerns preventing consent. As a newbie you should ask when it’s not clear whose decision in a given situation it is to make. Tech, Product and Design have different responsibilities depending on the context.

7 Working Principles

(1) I tend to have a bias toward action and think you should too. That doesn’t mean rushing off to build things. It means taking responsibility to push things forward. It means learning and collecting data to help us make smarter decisions before things get “expensive”. We can debate things endlessly. A bias to action prevents paralysis and helps settle disagreements.

(2) Collaborate. You need to work really well with your colleagues. We are one team. Don’t worry what your manager thinks - worry what your colleagues think. If you feel collaboration isn’t happening as it should, that’s when you ask for feedback. And btw, good collaboration includes debating. Healthy debate often saves us time in the end by ruling out hypotheses that we can reason will never work.

(3) Write complicated things down. I’m not a big documentation person but I’ve learned that to get alignment on complicated concepts you should write them down. It helps you reflect and you’ll find people will understand you better.

(4) Focus on impact (period). There’s not a lot of free lunches in a mature company. All of us should be familiar with the basic impact vs. effort matrix. It’s a lot of hard work to make an impact but it doesn’t mean endless releases. Break things down and have your eye on climbing the mountain. The compounding effect of fixing small things applies here.

(5) Do what you say. If you’ve committed to doing something, see it through. Priorities can shift of course and change your focus. But I really value people who follow through on their promises. And if you’re not making clear commitments - that’s not good either.

(6) Servant leadership is the only way. I am here for you, not the other way around. I believe PMs should have this mindset with their teams as well. “If your actions inspire people to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” - John Quincy Adams

(7) Be humble. Speaks for itself.

Feedback

I value your feedback. It’s key to building trust in teams. It is how I get better as a leader, manager and co-worker. Without it, improvements happen too slowly or not at all. 

Without consistent feedback, it can be difficult to maintain trust in teams. So you should also do so with your colleagues regularly. For teams there’s often good frameworks like this. 

It’s definitely fine to share your feedback with me on others but I trust that you do so also directly with them. I will only share feedback with them that I have observed. I try to refrain from giving secondhand feedback. 

1:1s are a weekly chance to share feedback in my team (both ways). If you don’t feel you are getting enough feedback, please let me know.

Your Performance

We do compensation reviews twice per year as a company (salary - June, bonus - January). I’ve been asked if I can manage expectations up-front on how well someone’s performance is. The way to think about this is how would your peers rate you (across all x-functional roles in your team and those you collaborate with for example)? If they rate you highly, chances are your manager does as well. The best things you can do to positively affect your performance are:

(i) Score highly on “one team” behaviours across the board, inside and outside your team.

(ii) Score highly on impacting the product itself (secondarily: people, process and culture).

(iii) Achieve relatively ambitious goals (performance and personal) that are clear to your manager.

It’s a good idea that you make time for 1:1 discussion with me on the above on how you see things are going, share your own career goals, etc.. I will share any relevant feedback I have and can coach you regarding blindspots and/or how to reach your goals. Remember that anonymous surveys are a great tool to surface things we can work on. We all have our blindspots (completely normal). Doing the above and improving where you need to will mean there shouldn’t be any surprises in compensation reviews.

My Quirks

I try to be observant but I’m not a mind reader. Feel free to be direct with me. I can be quite direct as well.

I’m not really a meeting person. Please don’t schedule me in any boring meetings. But my schedule is transparent so you can see for yourself what meetings I attend.

I bring my whole self to work. I find that iZettle is this type of workplace and I like that.

I can be passionate and opinionated. This can rub people the wrong way and I’m sorry up front. You can remind me that it’s statistically impossible to be right 100% of the time.

Based on the above, I sometimes don’t actively listen (e.g. truly understand you). If you feel like we are talking past one another - tell me.

Blaming others can be a trigger for me.

While I really appreciate logical structures and processes for ways of working, I fail to be great at this myself. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time in the chaos of the start-up world. As a weakness, I appreciate both help and feedback here.

I sometimes try and multi-task at the beginning of meetings. My goal is to put an end to this and be fully present or not join until I can.

I’m a big tennis fan and try to play regularly.

Jag kan svenska ganska bra och du är välkomna att hjälpa mig öva om du vill.

Footnote:

The inspiration for this document and its structure is from Rands a.k.a. Michael Lopp