Building a practice of greatness

I think measuring my success as a leader is simple: everyone on my team should experience the high of feeling really good at what they do.

If this is the case, we'll deliver what the business needs us to deliver. Our employees will grow, develop domain expertise, and have clarity on what matters most. To help everyone to be great, my job is to set them up for success.

Getting there requires setting the right expectations and making my approach clear. To that end, I thought I'd share the "hello world" message I sent to the team.

Hi Engineering! I'm honored to be stepping in as VP of Engineering, bringing our teams together as one org.

I aim to start with learning. A lot is going really well, and I want to keep that flywheel spinning. Team structures stay largely the same. Over time, as I come up to speed about the teams, our tech, and we figure out how to best work together, we'll take steps toward operating as a more unified org.

I want Phaidra to be a transformative chapter of your career: solving the most interesting problems alongside the most creative and supportive people you've worked with. It’s a high bar, and I’m super confident we can reach it if we nurture this team together.

Some key themes we all need to cultivate:

• Clear ownership and authority. Everyone knows what they own, why it matters, and has the authority to make the call on it. When leaders delegate, they delegate both.
• Customer focus, end to end. From the first design decision through verifying that what we shipped is actually proving useful. Customer input and feedback is critical to building great products.
• Customer Success are our customers. In many ways the CS team is the engine of our product. Treat them as first class citizens and provide tools that give them superpowers, not toil.
• All of us vs. the problem, not us vs. them. That goes double for Design, Product, Data Science, Infrastructure, and Security. They don’t want to be blockers so let’s instead make them partners. We all play a part in building great products.
• Good-enough decisions, made quickly. Decision-by-committee is a tax we don't need to pay. I’d rather us make wrong decisions we can reverse than get stuck in indecision.
• Lean hard on AI and share what works. No one's behind, we're all figuring this out, but the leverage these tools provide is too big to leave on the table. Experiment loudly; pull each other forward.
• Communicate generously. Escalation is normal. Ask questions. Talk to each other. Have lots of huddles. Learn in the open, default to channels over DMs, and share what was decided in meetings.
• Outcomes over tasks. Start from what's different if you succeed and work backwards from there. The finish line isn’t merged code, it’s solving problems for customers.
• We’re all responsible for success. Own what you ship, from development to delivery to maintaining in production. Call out friction; don't quietly absorb it. If you don’t understand the direction, ask tough questions.
• Look for how we get to yes. Most things don't work. Our job is figuring out which paths are worth crossing and how to cross them. When you raise a problem, bring your best thinking on what a better outcome could look like.
• Engineering culture is us. This team is what we make it. Hold each other accountable, work hard, and take care of yourselves and each other. We need to do these all at the same time.

I’m truly excited to lead this team and grow it into something great. To do that, I’ll need your help. Reach out with questions, tell me what you’d like me to focus on. Provide feedback about what’s going well and what’s burdensome. You all see more than I see and I’ll lean on all of your unique perspectives.

There you go, that's the bar I'm setting. Now I have to live up to it.