How I work

If we end up working together, on my team, as a client, as a partner, or over a coffee where you want an opinion, you will work out my habits eventually. This is an attempt to save you the six months.

I have spent 17 years arguing that enterprise software should not be clunky, confusing, and designed by someone who clearly never has to use it. It seemed only fair to hold the way I work to the same standard. So: the manual. It is a bit dry in places. So am I.

A version of this has existed inside Octfolio for a while, and most of the team have since written their own. Reading someone else’s is genuinely one of the fastest ways to work out how to work with them, so I would encourage you to write one too.

The short version

• I will back the person before I back the process. When the two are in conflict, the process is where I start looking.
• The simplest thing that actually works beats the clever thing. Actually works is doing a lot of the lifting in that sentence.
• Bring me a problem and what you think we should do about it. I will almost always ask you first anyway.
• If it goes well, it was the team. If it goes badly, it was me.
• I have run remote teams since 2016. Distributed is the default here, not a concession.
• Family time is sacred. Mine, and yours.
• The measure I actually care about is whether the team enjoys Monday mornings.

Your time with me

We will have a one-to-one once a month for half an hour, and more often than that if you need the support. It is not a status update. I can get status from somewhere else.

It is your time. There is a structure sitting underneath it, but the agenda only comes out if you have not brought anything of your own, and it is a fallback rather than a plan. Personal, professional, something that has been bothering you for a fortnight — your call, and you get my full attention for it.

At least ten minutes of it belongs to your career rather than your job. Tell me where you want to be in five years and I will do what I can, including using my network, to help you get there. That holds whether the destination is inside Octfolio or somewhere else entirely. Life is too short to hate what you do.

I will be honest: I have not always been good at these. They have been hit and miss over the years. I would like you to look forward to them, and if you do not, that is worth telling me.

Feedback, in both directions

I would like at least one piece of constructive feedback from you a month. Not praise — the useful kind. You will not hurt my feelings, and tough feedback improves a working relationship rather than damaging it. That is a promise, and it is the part of this document I would most like you to hold me to.

Going the other way, I am less consistent than I should be. I know I do not always deliver constructive feedback as promptly or as clearly as I could. So please ask me for it directly rather than waiting for it to arrive on its own. If you ask, you will get a straight answer.

Be direct with each other, too. If you have a problem with someone, say it to them. If it is still a problem after that, come to me.

Decisions, and disagreeing with me

When you bring me a problem, bring a recommendation with it. It does not have to be right. Even in the rare cases where I think I already know the answer, I am still going to ask you what you think we should do — so we may as well start there. It saves time and it is how people grow.

Please challenge me. I am quick to offer solutions, quicker than is always useful, and we will not be a good team if you simply take them. It may be that I am wrong, or that the right answer is a variant of what I suggested. I have a lot of respect for people who speak their mind and follow their gut, particularly when they hold the minority view in the room. That is usually the opinion worth hearing.

Expect me to ask what happens if we do less. It is not a trick and it is not a budget conversation, it is genuinely the question I find most useful. Half the time the answer is that we cannot, and we have lost ten minutes. The other half, we have avoided building something nobody needed.

People over process

Great teams build great products, not the other way around.

When a process and a person are in conflict, my first assumption is that the process is wrong. I am not always right about that. It is still the right place to start looking.

None of which makes me anti-process. I sell process for a living. Octfolio is compliance software for councils, schools, utilities and mining companies, which is to say it is process wearing a login screen. That is exactly why I am careful with it. I have seen what a process looks like when it is designed by someone who never has to live inside it, and I would rather not do that to my own team.

So if something we do internally is making your week worse and it is not protecting anyone, say so. That is not a complaint. That is a bug report.

The same instinct is why I will offer to take something off you when you are underwater or cannot work out where to start. That is an offer, not a takeover, and you are free to decline it. Mostly what I am trying to do is give people tools that make the job easier, or move them toward the work they actually enjoy where that is possible. It is the same thing I spend my working life arguing for in software, pointed inward.

Elegant solutions

The best answer is usually the simplest one that actually works.

Seven years at Theta taught me that even the most complex business problems can have elegant solutions. It also taught me that the simplest solution which does not work is just a quicker way to be wrong, which is why the second half of that sentence is the half that matters.

I came to this sideways. A Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment majoring in animation and special effects, then game QA, then running a photo centre, and then, somehow, solutions architecture. None of it was a plan. What it left me with is a very low tolerance for software that needs a training course before anyone can use it, and a habit of asking who has to hold this thing at six in the morning in the rain.

It is also why we do not hire quickly. Our team is small on purpose, and people tend to stay. I am not trying to run anyone into the ground — workload pressure is its own failure — but every extra person adds coordination and management, and that is time nobody spends doing the actual work. So the bar for adding one is genuinely high.

Remote-first

Talent is everywhere, so why limit yourself to one postcode?

We have been remote since 2016, well before it was fashionable and a good while before the tooling was any good. So I have no romance about it. Remote is not free, it just moves the cost. The friction you would have burned off in a corridor has to be paid for deliberately somewhere else.

Concretely, that means: meetings start with an agenda, or failing that with someone saying “this meeting will be successful if…”. They end with action items, a named person for each, and dates. Anything longer than a couple of paragraphs gets a TL;DR at the top. Being concise is not bluntness, it is respect for the reader’s time, and the discipline of writing the summary is usually what forces you to work out what you actually think.

I am contactable from about half past eight. I am thin on the ground between seven and nine in the morning and again between seven and eight at night, because I am doing drop-off and putting my kids to bed. That does not always mean I am not working. It means that if you need me, I am around.

I check messages often. If something is urgent, text me — and if you are not sure whether it is urgent, text me anyway and we will work it out together. On Slack I am more responsive to direct messages than to channels, purely because of how my notifications are set, so if you need me in a channel, mention me properly.

I also try to be transparent about when I am working and what I am actually doing, rather than just marking myself busy. If you can see what I am in the middle of, you can make your own call about whether to interrupt it. That is usually a better decision than mine.

When it goes wrong

We are all on this bus together, and nobody gets thrown under it. Be quick to admit mistakes, because everyone makes them, and hiding one is far more expensive than having made it. Failures are worth talking about openly; that is how they turn into something the rest of us learn from.

My side of that bargain is simple. When something the team does goes well, it was the team, and I will say so. When something goes wrong, I own it. Not as a gesture — taking ownership of the problem and standing in front of the people who did the work is the job, and it is most of what being the manager of a group actually means.

There is no formal on-call rota here. In practice it is me. On the rare occasions someone needs an answer out of hours, I am happy to be the one who picks up the phone, and I would rather absorb that than distribute it across the team.

Family time is sacred

No one remembers how late you worked, except your family.

I have built an app whose entire purpose is to stop my kids asking whether we are there yet, which should tell you roughly how my weekends go.

The value cuts both ways, and the second direction is the one that counts. Block that time out in your calendar the way I block out mine, and if I ever ask you to compromise it, tell me. Almost nothing genuinely cannot wait a day. A team quietly burning its evenings is not a high-performing team, it is a team with a bill that has not arrived yet.

Where I am less good

Being present is a work in progress, and I would rather say so than have you work it out. If you have been on the end of a meeting where I was clearly doing five other things, I am sorry — that is disrespectful and it is on me to fix.

When I am running low the tells are fairly consistent: I stop asking follow-up questions, and I get a bit short. It is not about you, and I would ask you not to take it personally. We all have to be a bit more considerate of other people’s realities, and mine is that this is something I am still working at.

I am also not naturally good at holding dates in my head, so I have stopped trying. Anything that matters goes into Linear (my current tool of choice) with a reminder on it. If we agree something important in a conversation and it never gets written down, assume I have lost it — and tell me.

Where my interests lie

I run AsbestosList, an independent directory of licensed asbestos professionals across Australia and New Zealand. One of its categories is asbestos management software, which happens to be exactly what Octfolio sells. Competitors are listed too, which is rather the point of calling it independent, and the disclosure sits on the page rather than in a footer where nobody reads it.

The same applies to anything I tell you. If I have a stake in the advice, you will hear it from me before you have to ask.

One last thing

I review this every few months and change it when it stops being true. If something fundamental changes that affects how we work together, I will tell you rather than quietly editing the page.

And if you have worked with me and think I have described someone else here, that is genuinely useful information. I would like to hear it.