My API

This is continuously evolving document. It is never done.  I strive to continuously improve the ways I work with my teams plus customers input. I wanted to give a bit of context as to how I work and pave the way for mutual understanding and partnership with individuals and teams I work with. 

1. Time: No matter which timezone I am located at, I try to make that difference inconspicuous to my teams so that teams can meet me as the need arises. This way I am able to maximise my overlap time with folks in HQ and charge for next day.  I clarify my response time for most requests with my team early on.

2. How to reach me:  For urgent issues, I ask teams to slack me because email is sometimes hard to track. If it is super urgent or P0, feel free to ping me any time. If some decisions really need to be made quickly, don't wait. Just call for a meeting. If opportunity presents, it will be great to frame that early. If I owe you a response, please resend or ping me and I won’t be offended. For core teams, I generally prefer to have a weekly sync to bubble risks, make decisions, and at times ensure we have a good temperature on the operational mechanics in motion and discover any lurking issues.

   • If you need anything from me, and for some reason you think I didn't get the sense of urgency, raise it again, and we can discuss expectations or triggers around when you get alarmed. Why? They will be leading indicators for me to know, that way I never let them go so bad that you have to solve them or get worried or message me multiple times. And if they do, you have every right to intervene or escalate. Speaking of which, I like to institute a well known escalation procedure for the team to raise “red flags”.

   • I also avoid general status type meetings, for what is better written.

3. 1:1s: It is important we are all on the same page. I use 1:1s to track our goals, updates, metrics, or just broach on problems my teams face with important tasks at hand. More importantly, it is a place for me to partner with you so that you can deliver on your commitments. Frequency of 1:1s. Let's schedule meetings depending upon your comfort level and rapidity of changes in the program. Depending upon programs volatility, the meetings provide sync point to raise issues, early. Once in a week or two weeks is generally recommended. Also, my approach to most conversations is no BS - staightforward + frank. 

4. Do I get anxious? It is only human, yes I do get anxious. When? If something is due by some mutually agreed timeframe and indicators of things going bad are paging, or the task is in the dark for too long, I get anxious and request for more information to understand the situation and assist as needed.  I look for each of you to take responsibility for work you commit to and deliver on the results, and my role in this is to partner with you in the work. Please allow for us to discuss leading indicators of when things go bad, so that my asking for additional information is permission-based and I respect your space.

5. How I operate? I believe you can't in the role of a TPM go wrong with over communication. For many initiatives I run or manage, I love to produce weekly update,  leading/lagging dashboards that highlight progress, bubble-up dependencies, risks, What decisions are holding us from making progress, are we red, yellow, green, where we need help.  Data, organization of this data, and producing insights with actionable next steps is something I focus on. That said, I do believe  in "intuition" especially in time-constrained situations that has served me well. 

6. How I measure impact? My focus is on customers, specifically their problems. who they are? what is the hardest problem we are solving for them? How the code we push to prod our most valuable asset will add value to these customers. Let us be ruthless on priorities while we are so resource-constrained. By this I mean, continuously asking what are the big impact issues, which items have the maximum leverage. In addition, the big picture is very important for me. I at times get muddled up, if I don't see how a+b fits in the bigger picture. That vision is crucial. Then only  I focus on the decomposition principle.

7. Process: Shhh! Yet another process: Don't worry, I generally tend to stay away from process overload, but just enough to get the max impact. If there are processes, I really push for value-stream to detect bottlenecks to maximize value for customers and cut down waste (reduce wait states). I tend to do things manually first before jumping on tools. Having been at startups, I have learnt  it is important at times to do things that don't scale first. After a few attempts, if a particular way of doing something starts producing positive results, I also tend to focus on "first line principles" of why things work they way they do. At times, if a particular process really works well to get a job done, I standardize on it and not waste too much time trying to optimizing it. Tools or processes if we build or institute, have to be non-intrusive and not add more friction points. The goal is software delivery that produces customer value, not the process.

8. Introspection: I constantly reflect on how i can become better. So, I am very happy if you tell me I goofed up on something, or how I can do something better. Overall, I care a lot about people, teams, and always working to ensure we can unleash the hidden potential in  them. My hope is to cut boundaries that create differences between individuals & teams. Three things help in my relationship building:

   • Transparency

   • Responsibility (Deliver on your commitments, if things go bad, let me know early, let me work with you to overcome the challenge)

   • Trust 

I go extra length to be fair, think of the person coming after me, and focus on co-operative endeavourship – for only in that there is a shared vision, and total transformation.