This document is constantly evolving. This is the result of my experience working so far and I’m sure it will continue to change/evolve through my own personal experience and feedback.

How I make decisions

I cannot be transparent with every decision I make (performance, firing, etc). That being said, you need to have trust I’m making decisions from first principles. I wrote down my general guidelines below.

• Relationship matters: Trust is the foundation of how I operate. I build trust through transparency and caring about people. (If you are getting the impression I don’t care, let’s talk)
  • There are two types of trust: trust of character and trust of execution. Consistency is key when it comes to building trust. If you display different behaviors in different situations, people may not be able to trust you. Similarly, if you make a commitment to complete a task by a certain deadline, it's important to follow through on that promise.
• [SCARF](https://childcareta.acf.hhs.gov/systemsbuilding/systems-guides/leadership/leading-ourselves/scarf-model#:~:text=The SCARF model involves five,sense of control over events.) Model: If someone is not happy, I think about how they are feeling in these dimensions: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, or fairness.
• People over process: “With the right people, any process works. With the wrong people, no process works.”
• Lead from the front: I won’t ask you to do something I won’t do or haven’t done in the past.
• **Recognize “[learned helplessness](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325355#:~:text=Learned helplessness is a state,opportunities for change become available.)”**: We are overloaded with things to do and at times we feel helpless. I’ve been in that cycle before and I ask myself “even if I was to give 200% in this situation, are we setup for success? If not, what can we do to change the environment?”.
• Do the hard thing now: When asked or presented to deal with difficult decisions, postponing the decision is never the best solution. Instead of avoiding making the decision, double down on them and tackle them now.
• Company, team, and myself: Do the right thing for the company, do the right thing for the team and the right thing for myself, in that order. I have and will continue to bring more people into our company. I take personal accountability for that. I will always strive to do the right thing for all of us (the company), then for all of the engineers, and then finally myself. I put ‘myself’ as last (as opposed to omitting it) because it’s a reminder to myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and I have to maintain sustainable pace.

How I communicate

• weekend pings: I don’t ping people often on weekends, but when I do, here’s why. I’m a forgetful person. I try my best to write things down and ensure things are not forgotten. What’s more effective for me is that I often have thoughts, and I write them down on Slack and send it to people. 99% of things can wait until the next working day. When I say statements like “We need to sync on this”, unless I explicitly say “this is urgent, can we talk immediately”, assume we can resume our conversation later in the week.

How to reach me

• Phone: I have Slack on my phone and all of my devices. My phone number is on Slack.
• Slack: @sang
• Meetings: Feel free to grab whatever time is available on my calendar.

I’m trying to get better at my sleep routine. I’ll try to go to bed around midnight and wake up around 8AM PT. Feel free to message me any time.

On weekdays (M, T, W, Th, F), I teach jiu jitsu classes from 6:20 PM to 8:20 PM PT. During this time I won’t be available, but if you send me text messages or Slack messages during these times, I’ll respond as soon as I can.

Meetings

• 1:1s: This is our dedicated time to talk about how things are going. Let’s avoid talking about specific projects (as there are funnels dedicated to them: sprints, linear, etc). Let’s leverage this time to talk about feedback, career growth, personal challenges, etc.