I'm a management and leadership coach and consultant. Previously VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, and Engineering Director at Etsy.
I champion management as a practice within the tech industry, and celebrating career achievements with donuts.
Blog Posts
Topics: management, giving presentations, inclusion
Popular posts: First 1:1 questions, Desk moves, Running working groups, Team leader Venn diagram
Meetup Architecture Principles
Our Goal: Empower Meetup engineers to build coherent, lasting architecture solutions. (read more)
Onsite Interview Loop Template
This post originally appeared on Making Meetup (read more)
Team Leader Venn Diagram
A tool for gaining a shared understanding of responsibilities (read more)
Manager Energy Drain
One of the most frequent questions I hear as I coach managers is, “How do I handle how tired I am as a manager?” (read more)
Dealing with your wage gap
“serious question: say you’re in HR and a woman comes to you with, my (male) coworker with same title/years of experience/performance rating is making 47k more than me. what are you supposed to do? what can you do?” - @amyngyn (read more)
When your manager isn't supporting you, build a Voltron
In my years of coaching managers and individual contributors, I’ve routinely heard the following complaints about their bosses: (read more)
Dealing with surprising human emotions: desk moves
Dealing with surprising human emotions is one of the most challenging aspects of being a manager. Generally, when someone appears triggered, or angry, or some other strong emotion that’s surprising, it’s likely that their amygdala has been hijacked, which I’ve written about before. Our amygdalas are in charge of our emotional reactions, and they’re critical to our “fight or flight” decisionmaking process. When our core needs feel threatened, our amygdala kicks into high gear. (read more)
Etsy's Charter of Mindful Communication
While I worked at Etsy, the company’s Culture & Engagement team rolled out the following “Charter of Mindful Communication”. I’m not sure if it’s been updated since, but I’ve found this language incredibly useful throughout my work ever since, and even brought it over to Kickstarter. I hope it’s valuable to you! (read more)
Tracking compensation and promotion inequity
Plenty of tech companies are attempting to make their pipeline of candidates more diverse. But an organization won’t find much success recruiting a more diverse group of employees unless its leaders are aware of their existing internal inclusion and equity issues. Unless leadership has already started to tackle these issues, it’s likely that these new hires will enter into an environment that they won’t want to stick around in for long. (read more)
Manager handoffs
Y’all know how crucial I think one-on-one’s are for managers to get to know their direct reports: what they need from their manager, how they like feedback, what makes them grumpy, and so much more! But what happens when a person switches managers? (read more)
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