Working with Me

What I Do Well

Organization

When I was a kid, I had more fun organizing my Pokémon cards than playing with them.

In my current role1, I find legitimate joy in creating org charts, capacity planning, and working on release schedules.

Attention to Detail

In high school, I did technical theater, where small details like a dead microphone battery or a misplaced prop can sabotage months of preparation.

Now in my career, I’ve been endearingly described as “paranoid”2 when it comes to the details of shipping features.

What I Do Poorly (working on it!)

Facing Conflict

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and have a case of Midwestern Nice.

Avoiding conflict is good for short-term social cohesion - but it inhibits growth and poisons long-term relationships. I’m working on leaning more into conflict and being more direct.

Premature Optimization

I love creating structure and optimizing things — but this causes me to spend time perfecting processes that should be removed or shouldn’t be created in the first place.3

When I catch myself making a process better, I’m working on asking “why does this process exist in the first place?” before improving it.

Standing up for my Values

I feel a strong sense of stewardship to uphold the company’s values - even when they conflict with my own. In the moment, it’s easy for me to rationalize compromise or stay quiet to keep things smooth.

I’m working on trusting and advocating for my judgment, even when it contradicts the room.

My Values

This is not an exhaustive list; I care deeply about honesty, authenticity, integrity, empathy, kindness, and self-awareness. Here are a few values where I’m most likely to run into disagreement.

Be Optimistic

Building anything ambitious means staring at constant reasons why it might fail. Optimism is what keeps you searching for the path where it will succeed.

And if mindset didn’t matter, I’d still rather delusionally believe things can be better than correctly believe they can’t.

Process makes organizations move faster

Working at Microsoft, I thought process was grinding the organization to a halt. I grew frustrated that I couldn’t ship a new modal without a 1.5 hour meeting with a security committee about where the data would be stored.

When I moved to working at startups, I realized creativity was being used to do basic things. Process carves out a happy path for people to follow so they can focus on what they need to ship.

Don’t scar at the first cut

When something goes wrong, there’s a reflexive temptation to implement process to prevent it from happening again. This builds organizational scar tissue that slows down future work.

Sometimes, “nothing” is the easiest and most correct thing to do.

Footnotes

  1. I manage Product Engineering at Motion. We’re hiring! ↩

  2. I chose to take this as a compliment. ↩

  3. Elon Musk’s algorithm says to question every requirement (step 1) and delete unnecessary parts (step 2) before you optimize (step 3). I tend to skip straight to step 3 because it excites me the most. ↩