How I Work

Most teams figure out how to work with each other the slow way: months of misaligned expectations, learned friction, the gradual archaeology of discovering what a person actually needs versus what they said they needed in the interview. It doesn't have to work that way. Marshall Goldsmith, in What Got You Here Won't Get You There, makes a simple argument: tell people who you are and how you operate, early and directly, before they have to learn it the hard way. I think he’s dead on with that idea. So here's mine.

What gets the best out of me

Tell me the mission, not just the task. I operate at a different level when I understand what winning looks like for the organization, not just the project. Connect my work to something that matters and I'll bring more than you asked for. Hollow or purely transactional dynamics will produce a competent version of me. Give me a mission I believe in and you'll get something harder to find.

Give me context up front, then feel free to stand back. I look before I leap, I will read the room, study the stakeholders, and build a mental model before I move. That ramp-up period is not low engagement – it's simply the work before the work. Trust it.

Treat me as a thinking partner, not an executor. I don't just want to carry out decisions. I want to understand them, pressure-test them, and try to improve them. Bring me into the why, not just the what. The best version of this I ever experienced came from a manager early in my career who said: I don't need to approve your decisions – I've already approved of you. That's the standard I hold myself to with my own teams. It's also what I respond to most strongly as a direct report.

How I communicate

I think with and through language. Writing is not just how I share thoughts – it's how I structure them. If you want my sharpest thinking, you'll get it in writing. As a result, asynchronous communication is ideal when applicable, not because I can't work live, but because the space to structure my thinking produces better answers than the pressure to produce them in real time.

I will tell you bad news. Not dramatically, not with excessive hedging – but I won't hide a problem once I see it. If I flag something as an issue, take it seriously. I don't cry wolf.

I interrupt sometimes. Not because I don't care – because I do. My brain moves fast and I don't want a thought to vanish before it gets said. If I jump in, it's excitement, not disrespect.

What to watch for

I can over-invest in framing and under-invest in shipping. If something is getting refined past the point of diminishing returns, push me to call it done. The prompt that works best: what's the one thing we can ship today?

When the mission feels hollow or priorities go fuzzy, I may disengage unintentionally instead of calling it out. I won't make a scene – I'll just gradually stop generating. A direct "what can I help you move forward?" surfaces it faster than waiting for me to raise it myself.

I'm a systems thinker, which means I'll sometimes keep zooming out to reframe the problem instead of solving it at ground level. If I'm stuck in orbit when the room needs a ground-level answer, pull me back down.

What makes me stay

A mission I genuinely believe in. A manager who extends trust before I've had to prove it. Problems worth solving, not just tasks to execute. Room to grow – not just upward, but deeper into craft. The feeling of belonging to something, not just working somewhere.

I don't need everything to be perfect. I need it to be aligned. Give me that, and I'll do more than you hired me for.

The way my brain works

I have ADHD. I'm not disclosing this as a liability to manage – I'm claiming it as the thing that makes me useful.

Here's what ADHD means for me: my brain does not stay in its lane. It is constantly sending out feelers, pulling in information from whatever is adjacent, unexpected, or only loosely related to the problem at hand – and then, without warning, finding out how it connects to something I learned years ago, in a completely different context. That collision, the moment two unrelated things suddenly illuminate each other, is where my best thinking lives.

Look at this book. The epigraph is Tennyson. The BlizzCon essay is structured after Proust.. None of that happens without a brain that is perpetually cross-referencing everything it has ever encountered, looking for the seam where one idea rhymes with another. That lateral connectivity is not incidental to the work. It is the work. In a creative organization – one that builds worlds, tells stories, and asks its people to find meaning in the things they make – that kind of mind has genuine value.

The practical corollaries are worth knowing. My focus, when something earns it, is deep and durable. Interruptions in that state are expensive – not because I'm difficult, but because the thread I'm holding is long and getting back to the same place takes time. I forget things that don't get captured immediately, not from carelessness but from the same open-buffer architecture that enables the lateral thinking. Help me capture what matters and I'll return the favor many times over.