Context on Affonso

My core values at work

Psychological Safety. I highly value and encourage dissent and diversity of thought. The most effective teams are those where people feel comfortable speaking their mind, raising issues, and questioning beliefs without fear of retribution.
Transparency & Honesty. I communicate transparently and with honesty: "I say what I mean and I mean what I say." I value clear, transparent context from my manager, partners, and reports, and I value hearing honest, truthful opinions and thoughts from them as well.
Extreme Ownership. I hold a very high bar for myself and those around me. When taking on a project, I see myself as responsible not only for tasks in my direct control but also for everything that affects whether we achieve our desired outcome.
Autonomy. The corollary to extreme ownership is valuing autonomy. I prefer broad direction over tactical guidance and support my reports in the same way. I place a lot of trust in people and reward continuous proactivity, "I've got this" mentality, and resourcefulness.
Clarity and Focus. I value clarity in thinking, decision-making, and communication. I believe >80% of results come from <20% of actions, so I deeply value focus and ruthless prioritization while avoiding scope creep, empire-building, and lack of intention.
Servant Leadership. Leaders serve their team and organization first, not their own objectives. People in a servant-leadership environment are more likely to feel that their voices are heard.
Humility & Balance. I don't take myself too seriously. I work to live, I don't live to work. Work is a way to express ourselves, step away from individual egocentricity, and create great things together.

My vision for analytics

The role of analytics in an organization is to drive decisions that will help us build products that deliver value to people.
To do this well, we should plug into every stage of the product lifecycle - from ideation to testing, scaling, and iteration. We leverage data and measurement to help engineers and designers build and promote products that people and businesses actually want to use.
I think of "data science" and "data engineering" as a bit of misnomers. Data is not an end in itself. Our job is to help engineers, designers, marketers, and product managers understand how people are using our products, and how we can improve those products to better serve people. Our tool to do that is scaled data - we log people's actions in our apps and make inferences with that information.
I have three core tenets for how I want my analytics team to perform:
- 1/ Proactively drive strategy. Analytics must provide key input in defining the strategy for the product space. We must see around corners; this means thinking about not only the strategy for the next 1-3 months but also for the next 6-24 months.
- 2/ Operational rigor. Analytics must drive clear understanding of how our business is performing and make the process of answering questions about how people use our products into a well-oiled machine. Clear dashboards, automated data flows, redundancies in the team to avoid single points of failure.
- 3/ Speak truth to power. We have the responsibility to question prevailing beliefs in the organization, particularly when they are held by senior leaders. We should not shy away from presenting data that counters the status quo.

My philosophy for building teams

Foster diversity of backgrounds and thought. I value psychological safety. The best teams are the ones where people feel safe to say what they are thinking and question beliefs. Avoid groupthink. Hire with diversity in mind.
Stay as lean as you can. The most effective teams tend to be made up of a small group of highly competent people operating with a cohesive culture and operating system. Avoid scope creep and bloat.
Stay as flat as you can. Added layers slow down decision-making and information flow, in both directions. Avoid unnecessary layers.
Build clear paths for ICs to thrive, at all levels. ICs produce the immense majority of the impact driven by any team, particularly technical teams like DS and DE. ICs should have extreme clarity from their manager on how they progress in their career - both in terms of levels (external yardsticks) and skills they want to acquire (internal yardsticks). Senior ICs should have an equal say on the direction of the organization as senior people managers.

My management approach

In my view, managers have three core jobs:
- 1/ People. Coach their people to be the best version of themselves. Align their people to roles that both move the product forward and tap into their strengths. Hire the right people. Show care for your people, truly & genuinely.
- 2/ Product. Define the high-level direction of the team. Ensure everyone in the team has the context and the information they need to do their jobs and move the product forward. Elevate the team's impact.
- 3/ Process. Define the team's operating system - the way we make decisions, how we prioritize, and how we work together to augment each other's work.
In a lot of ways, I see managers as working for their reports, not the other way around. I firmly believe in servant leadership. The responsibility of managers is to unlock the best possible work (and hence highest level of impact) from their people by doing #1, #2, and #3 above.
I tend to manage people primarily through coaching. I try to provide autonomy, and debate/align on principles and goals over specific actions. That said: When I do make an explicit tactical ask, I try to be very direct about it.

My strengths & areas of development

My core superpowers are:
- 1/ Clarity of communication. I'm good at synthesizing gnarly, multi-faceted problems into something crisp and memorable, driving clear decisions, and landing it with execs.
- 2/ Getting things done. I have a bias toward action. I like extracting the "so what?" for every analysis. I'm usually the one in a meeting pushing for "so, what are our next steps?"
- 3/ Hiring & coaching outstanding talent. I'm good at finding and attracting strong talent. I'm good at helping people become the best version of themselves at work. I can help you understand your own superpowers and where you are uniquely positioned to add value. I can help you overcome your limiting beliefs and unlock your true potential. I love helping people grow.
My areas of development:
- My closest partners have described me as "Strong opinions, loosely held". I tend to firmly believe what I believe in, but I quickly change my stance when presented with countering evidence.
- This means I can sometimes come off as too opinionated, too forceful, or overly confident. This isn't my intention. Push back on me when you see this happening. I love being proven wrong. See "My core values at work" for more details on this.

My role

I'm focused on helping more people get more value from the incredible products we're building.
We've built a truly magical thing that meaningfully improves people's lives, both personally and in the context of their work. Right now only a relatively small % of people in the world are using it and even fewer are using it to its fullest potential. I believe we have a moral imperative to remove barriers to access and help more people make their lives better.

Feedback and recognition

I think of feedback as a gift. It arises from the generosity of the giver (who takes the time to think about & deliver the feedback) and it leads only to growth (both for the receiver and for the project). I treat feedback seriously and will often commit to act on it promptly. I also give feedback openly and often.
I usually prefer feedback in person/live, but will take it in any form you can give it.
I love when people share positive feedback about me or my team. I derive a lot of purpose from doing great work and supporting people who are doing great work.

Schedule

Working schedule:
- My typical working hours are 8 am - 4:30 pm. I try to reserve time for family from 4:30 - 8 pm. I usually pick back work in the evenings, but I try to minimize this as much as possible. See "My core values at work" above for more details on my passion for ruthless prioritization.
I use the first hour or so of my day for deep work (writing docs, reviewing key work, providing async feedback) so that time is blocked off and I don't take meetings then.
Don't hesitate to ping me at any hour of the day that is convenient for you. I manage my own notifications and working hours so feel free to just ping whenever and I'll reply to you when I'm online.
I generally do not expect replies outside your working hours. If for some urgent reason I do need you to reply quickly, I'll let you know explicitly.
I think of weekends (especially Saturday) as sacred time for family.

Communication

I am very responsive over slack and am less good at managing emails. I try to do inbox zero on slack, but not on email.
I communicate in a pretty informal way, especially live and over chat. I sometimes "think out loud" over chat or in person which means my ideas come out a bit unpolished. I am that texter who sends you three short texts in a row instead of one well thought out message.
I value directness and being succinct. When talking to me, don't feel like you need to beat around the bush or have some big preamble. Jump straight into the meat of the topic and let's work it out together.
If you see me around the office, don't hesitate to come up to chat. I'm totally fine being interrupted.

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