Tell me about yourself

This is my answer to the classic interview question, “tell me about yourself” as of early 2021.

Let me tell you some brief personal background, then I’ll use some highlights from my career to show how I’ve used intentional relationships to consistently achieve goals across all major management domains.

I grew up in the public school system in Florida where I learned from Band and Boy Scouts the value of intentional practice and building personal relationships. I went to $TOP_CS_COLLEGE because it offered me the most exciting opportunities outside of my immediate classwork; I absolutely got what I wanted, because I practiced with and joined $FUN_CS_EXTRACURRICULAR and built relationships with my students as a teaching assistant for 3 different classes.

This background instilled in me the deep value of intentional relationships. I’ll give 3 brief examples of how I used these intentional relationships to achieve goals in each of the major management domains.

• At the project level.
• At the team level.
• At the organizational level.

A few years into my career, I used intentional relationships at the project level to be the only project at $COMPANY_NAME to ship for a year through intentionally relationships. I deliberately built relationships with every sales engineers in the company so I could discover common pain points affecting our product. I then used deep relationships with engineering leadership to build the consensus required to backport a new feature from a stalled trunk to an otherwise minor release. The net result was that my 3-person team shipped a feature to huge appreciation of sales team and customers months before any other major feature shipped in the company.

I later used intentional relationships at the team level to double my team in size and still stay one of the most engaged teams at $COMPANY_NAME.⊕ There I managed a team of 8 engineers split into two pods.

I built intentional relationships at all levels important to the team: between members of the team by encouraging them to appreciate each other’s diverse perspectives; between my team and other teams with pithy mottos that encouraged my team to “care more” and “share credit”; and between my team and potential candidates with deliberate practice selling candidates in a team meeting. The net result was that my team got a 95/100 on the post-COVID engagement survey, an 11 point improvement over the company and a 30 point improvement over the org.

Most recently, I used intentional relationships at the organizational level to unblock a critical project that had been blocked for 6 months at $COMPANY_NAME.⊕ There I managed a team of 5 very senior engineers; 4 were at the Principal level and above with more than 70 years of work experience between them.

The major challenge for the project was that the previous technical lead had made some regretted technical choices to avoid a long running poor relationship with $THE_NAME_OF_ANOTHER_ORG. I built relationships with many people in that org and coached my Principal engineers to do so as well. I met with 20 different people in that org, ranging from the first Powershell engineer who joined that org to the newly hired Vice President. My Principal engineers created the first technical working group between the two orgs – I helped them identify the correct stakeholders to invite and persuade.. The net result was that we were able to agree on the first joint roadmap ever between the two orgs, that included a shared project to unblock this project the following quarter.

Together, these 3 examples show my progression through the various major management domains (project, team, and organization) and how I used intentional relationships to achieve goals in all 3 of them.