I’ve read a dozen of these “user manuals” over the years and always found them a little self-congratulatory – a tidy list of quirks dressed up as candor. but I’m at a point with the company where I’m the thing most often standing between an idea and the version of it that ships, and writing that down honestly felt more useful than pretending otherwise. so this is less a brag sheet and more a map of where I help and where I get in the way.

I communicate in short bursts. “yup,” “kk,” “do it” – those are real answers, not me being curt. if I’ve gone quiet I’m almost always head-down in the code or out with my kids, not ignoring you. the cost of that brevity is that I assume shared context that isn’t always there. so if something I said feels underspecified, it probably is; push me for the why and I’ll happily unspool it, I just forget to offer it unprompted. and please disagree with me out loud. “I think you’re wrong about X” is one of my favorite sentences to receive. I’m hard to offend and I’d rather be corrected early than be polite-ly wrong for a week.

the way I make decisions is incremental and reversible. my instinct is to build the smallest individual piece that actually works before I’ll entertain the grand coordinating system on top of it. I resist net-new scope and big-bang rewrites, and I’m cost-conscious to a fault – if something quietly burns money or compute I’ll feel it before I can explain it. when I have the context I decide fast and commit. the place I’m slow, and I want to be honest about this, is the stuff outside my lane: go-to-market, brand, the founder video that has been on “tomorrow’s list” for a suspicious number of tomorrows. those decisions pile up on me precisely because they’re the ones I’m least sure of.

which brings me to the real reason for writing this. I become the bottleneck. too much routes through me, and the work that slips is almost always the outward-facing kind. my failure mode isn’t dropping things – it’s absorbing them. I’ll just fix the bug, write the copy, run the migration myself, and it feels productive right up until it’s the reason five other things are stuck. if you work with me, the most valuable thing you can do is take a surface completely – own the decisions, not just the tasks – and tell me plainly when I’m the blocker. “three things are stuck on you” is the most useful message you can send me, and I’d genuinely thank you for it.

I work in bursts, not in a 9-to-5 shape. I have young kids and I’m not cagey about it; you’ll see “kid time” and “sick kid stuff” and “now I’m at school” show up mid-thread. I’ll flex hard when something truly matters, but I protect family time and I want the people around me to protect theirs – I once told a teammate to not make up the hours he’d missed, and I meant it for everyone.

I’m best when I’m deep in the things that are genuinely hard to hand off: the data, the domain, the product itself. I’m worst when I’ve quietly appointed myself the approver of everything else. the working relationship I want is simple – I’ll give you the truth quickly, trust you to run, and stay out of your lane; in return, take real ownership, argue with me, and keep me honest about being the thing in the way.

I still close my eyes and see the whole thing in whimsical detail. the execution is where I’m wabi sabi. that gap is exactly where I need other people, and it’s not a flaw I’m trying to hide – it’s the job description for working well with me.