My Userguide
Quick primer on myself, my personality, and how to work with me (working patterns and communication preferences). If you have something similar, I’d love to read as well!
Personality Profiles
I think personality tests are more reflective of how someone wants to be perceived rather than how they actually act. But I do think they’re useful and it’s fun to share ☺️
- Ennegream: Type 5 - Investigator (Curious, Independent, Detached)
- Myers-Briggs (MBTI): ENTJ (Extroverted INtuition Thinking Judging)
- Love Lanuages
- Likes: Quality Time > Touch > Words of Affirmation
- Dislikes: Acts of Service < Gifts
- You can see more on my Dimensional.
Values
- Open Mindedness: I make decisions with conviction but I’m always open minded to new ideas or data that suggests a better way. If I receive solid reasoning or data, I’ll change course quickly.
- “Yes, and…”: I love this improv principle for pushing me to keep an open ear to ideas from other, assuming the best intent, and trying to constructively build on top.
- Curiosity and Growth Mindset: I enjoy learning, being exposed to a wide spectrum of disciplines, and I’m in the process of figuring out where I want to get extremely deep in.
- Action and Resourcefulness: I want to learn most from experimenting proactively instead of debating concepts into oblivion. If it doesn’t work, be resourceful and figure out how to improve.
- Sweat the Details: Opendoor’s BPS for breakfast principle pushed us to uncover savings from every inch of a line item and I’m inspired to sweat the details in my life as well.
- Obligation to Dissent: If you disagree with something, you should be obligated to speak your mind, regardless of source or hierarchy, if you think it’ll help.
- Disagree and Commit: Somewhat of a counter-pair with obligation to dissent. There’s a time for deciding and a time for action. Once the decision is made, I’ll try my best to make it work regardless of whether I agreed beforehand.
- Deep and Authentic Friendships: The best part of all my work experiences were friends gained along the way. I want to be empathetic, authentic, and build genuine friendships.
Things I spike on
- Working with data. I love SQL, building dashboards, hacking spreadsheets.
- Structuring ambiguity. I’ve had to assemble order from chaos in a lot of startups. It’s also fun turning experiments into systems and making things repeatable through playbooks.
- Systems thinking. I like figuring out the system equation for whatever I’m working on, building measurable framework for it, then being thoughtful about how each lever or input affects components around it.
- Bias for action over theory. I hate arguing for long about theories and find a lot more joy in launching, getting empirical proof on whether something works, learning, and doing it again.
- Ownership. I like trying new things and taking on new responsibilities. I’ve excelled as a generalist thus far, owning many things, and trying to do what’s best for the team.
Things I’m working on improving
- Sales. I’m super comfortable working on product, operations, and analytics but relatively new at sales. My top goal this year is becoming top 1% at sales, marketing, and social.
- Consistently operating long-term. When I’m in the thick of a project, I can get bogged down by day-to-day fires and not allocate enough space and time to think long-term.
Communication
- I’ve killed push notifications on email, Slack, and Discord but do allocate time to review daily. I’ll only respond if you ask me something directly or I have a question. If you don’t get a response in 12 hours but think I owe you a response, just ping me again.
- I like working on my own schedule, that means I might ping you at random times. That does not mean I expect a response. Unless explicit, just respond the next day.
- I try my best to batch work as much as possible, so my schedule is structured around that. I block time in the morning and after dinner for individual work. Otherwise I try to have all meetings back to back continuously if possible.
- Comments are easy. Answers are expensive. If I comment on your doc, I’m just trying to provide a helpful input but please don’t feel obligated to answer me.
- If it can be a Loom, please send me a Loom instead of a live meeting.
- I love FYI updates - any useful tidbits about things you’re working on, customer anecdotes, interesting or useful articles or data. I don’t get overwhelmed with comms if I’m not obligated to respond to everything so share away!
I do my best work when
- I’m more intrinsically driven when I think the projects I’m working on are impactful for the org and definitively are beneficial for the world. It’s even more meaningful if I feel we’re launching things quickly and effectively. Walk me through the why.
- Possibly my biggest goal as an operator and leader is to encourage teammates to be themselves. As long as you’re not hurting others or impacting your work, I want to support you showing up as you.
- I like getting docs ahead of time so I can think about things on my own and not have to live process everything.
- I hate having to read between the lines and always prefer not make others do that either. I’m a believer that more transparent and plugged-in teams execute more effectively and happily.
- I want visibility into how I’m doing, what’s going well or not well, and ensuring I have actionable steps to get to the next level. I love receiving feedback, especially when it’s honest and constructive. Tell me what I need to know, not what you think I want to hear.
What drains me
- I don’t mind being micro-managed if the asks I’m receiving are logically sound or grounded in solid user research + data since I know I’m learning. I get drained when my teams get asked to work on things impetuously without data or the context on why.
- If something is heading off the rails, tell me before the crash. Failure is great if you learn something valuable from it. Surprises that impact others are not.
- The feeling or actual presence of office politics over merit in decision making.