Kartikey Rajvaidya - User Guide
Who am I?
Hello, I'm Kartikey Rajvaidya, and I currently reside in Indore. However, I'm constantly on the move, working from various cities.
I was born in Narmada Nagar, a quaint town located on the banks of river Narmada in Madhya Pradesh. When I was 10 years old, my family relocated to Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh. After completing high school, I moved to Pune, Maharashtra, for my engineering studies, and later to Bangalore for work. Finally, after the pandemic, I moved to Indore with my parents.
As I spent my formative years in different cities, I had the opportunity to experience a wide range of languages and cuisines. This exposure allowed me to cultivate a deep respect for diverse cultures.
Professionally, I'm an Engineering Manager at Fyle, where I've been a part of the engineering team for over four years, and before that, I spent a few months as a software engineer trainee at Odessa Technologies.
My interests include taking long walks, running, playing badminton, reading, travelling, and spending quality time with my family.
I am always eager to engage in conversations about various topics, such as fitness, finance, sports, technology, and astronomy.
The underlying purpose of this User Guide
The purpose of the user guide is to provide you with an understanding of my work process and how you can easily adapt to it, eliminating the need for a prolonged learning phase. This will allow us to establish a strong working relationship quickly, leading to more effective collaboration right from the start.
This knowledge also becomes very crucial since you'll be spending a significant portion of your productive waking hours with me.
What is my management Style?
As a manager, my primary responsibility is to enable the success of my reports. I am highly motivated to facilitate their progress, and witnessing their growing accomplishments brings me immense satisfaction.
I place a great emphasis on autonomy, and my management style is centred around presenting my team with constant and challenging tasks.
This approach has been instrumental in my professional development, and it is an effective way to learn. As you progress, I will provide you with increasingly complex challenges, while supporting and enabling you to overcome them independently and achieve success.
Integrity and transparency are fundamental values that I hold in high regard. I prioritise hard work and value honesty in my interactions with others while being sensitive to any form of deception.
What are my preferred work timings?
I am generally around from 10:00 AM to 6 PM, and I only respond to very high-priority issues and requests (P0) outside of these hours. In the event of my absence during work, I will update my status and inform the relevant stakeholders of any scheduled meetings beforehand would appreciate the same from reports as well.
Initially, I would like my reports to have work hours that overlap with mine as it can facilitate addressing any issues that may arise. However, after we have collaborated for some time, they can choose to work at any time that suits them best.
All meetings that I schedule will be during these regular work hours. I rarely work on weekends, and I typically do not respond to Slack messages during weekends even if I am working unless they are related to P0s.
I do not expect my reports to work on weekends or late nights.
What are my Out Of Office schedules like?
I believe that having a life outside of work is essential to achieving a healthy work-life balance and gaining a better perspective on one’s goals.
I will always provide prior communication when taking leaves unless it's due to an emergency or illness. I would appreciate the same from reports as well. As long as leaves are communicated in accordance with the company's leave policy, you are welcome to take them
1-on-1’s
1-on-1 Channel
I create a private 1-on-1 Slack channel with all my reports where we can communicate asynchronously. I use this Slack channel to share any agenda for the 1-on-1 and anything that I would need to communicate to you asynchronously. This channel will also act as a medium for you to do the same. You can share anything you would like to discuss in a 1-on-1 or otherwise on this channel.
The nature of the messages in this channel will be important but not urgent. This channel can be checked once a day.
For anything urgent, I will use DMs and Meetings.
I schedule 30-minute one-on-one meetings with all of my reports on a weekly basis. During these meetings, I enjoy conversing about notable occurrences that may have transpired during the week, while also using the time to better understand each team member.
I also try to touch base on various fronts, such as their overall well-being, any obstacles they may be facing, personal matters, and feedback. Additionally, I use these meetings as an opportunity to explore their career goals, follow up on previous action items, discuss skill development, and provide insights into product direction, design, and vision.
I have found that establishing a well-defined agenda and maintaining concise notes during meetings is immensely beneficial. To ensure that we keep track of all action items discussed during our one-on-one meetings, I will provide a summary of our conversation and share it as notes on our 1-on-1 Slack channel. This way, we can have a concise record of our discussions and avoid overlooking any critical action items.
Communication
Since we work in a remote setup, communication becomes essential, and I believe that a vast majority of issues result from poor or infrequent communication. It’s important we communicate well and often.
Async updates > Sync up calls, I always prefer Async updates instead of calls.
What is the best mode to reach out to me?
Slack public channels > Slack direct messages > Phone calls.
Although Slack public channel tags/notes grab my initial attention, DMs are preferred as a 1-on-1 space for discussing feedback, out-of-office schedules, gentle reminders and general banter.
The best way to schedule work meetings with me - (unless it is an emergency) scheduling calls at least a day prior with an agenda that can help set the context prior.
In addition to talking to me, I encourage my reports to feel comfortable talking with other individuals in our team or company. While asking for help please prefer public channels rather than direct messages, Don't ever hesitate to ask for assistance on public channels but I would appreciate it if you do your research before going to anyone for help. We should always be ready to lend a helping hand to those seeking help.
Updates
At Fyle whenever we work on something we call it an Initiative. At the start of each initiative, a ClickUp is created with all tasks broken down into minute-level details, and a due date is assigned to each task. This is typically a collaborative exercise between the report and me. If the report is a senior engineer at Fyle, we conduct this process through asynchronous communication, otherwise, it will be done via a call
After the click-up is created I prefer daily updates in the initiative channel in the format that covers the following details
Completed Tasks
Ongoing Tasks (with estimated completion date)
Blockers if any
I rely very heavily on async communication and updates. I don’t like to get on calls for small things which can be communicated offline.
Feedbacks
I hold a strong conviction that feedback plays a crucial role in fostering trust within a team.
I tend to provide feedback promptly, as I am of the belief that feedback should be prompt, concise, and actionable to facilitate rapid learning. Disagreement in feedback is fine. If there is a difference in opinion then the sooner we disagree, the sooner we’ll discuss and gain trust and respect each other more The origin of the feedback would be at least one incident and I will point you to those while giving feedback. I will also let you know what is the impact of the incident before giving you the feedback. I will communicate the feedback in 1-on-1 channels, our operational sync-ups and non-operational 1-on-1s.
Effective feedback involves a reciprocal process, regardless of factors such as age or experience, I hold the same expectation for all team members. I welcome any constructive feedback that could assist me in improving my management skills or my interactions with you.
I strongly believe that feedback should not have to be reiterated numerous times. If the feedback is ambiguous, it cannot be considered valid feedback. To ensure the effectiveness of feedback, I will strive to deliver it to you in a concise and transparent manner, and I would appreciate it if you would do the same for me.
Things currently I am Improving about myself
As I am in the process of transitioning from an Individual contributor to an Engineering manager Finding the right balance between technical and managerial responsibilities is an ongoing challenge for me as an engineering manager.
I am currently taking steps to improve my habit of neglecting Slack threads and aim to effectively address all threads in a timely manner My goal is to eliminate this point from the current section in the next version of the document.
Thanks for reading!
This document is living and breathing and likely always incomplete. I update it frequently and would appreciate feedback on this document. If you've been working with me already and wanted to add/change some of it, please do like, share, subscribe and comment.
Lastly, I'm super grateful and happy that you have actually read this doc so far. 🤗