Interview with Michael Lopp, VP of Engineering @slackhq

 **Location**: Los Gatos, CA **Current Role**: VP of Engineering @slackhq #### What’s your background and how did you get into management? I’ve been working in the Silicon Valley my entire life. In order, I worked at Borland, Symantec, Netscape, Icarian, Apple, Palantir, Pinterest, and now at Slack. I got into management at Netscape. Tony asked me to lead a team and I said “Yes” not knowing what he was asking. #### What are the biggest challenges you face? Scaling culture. #### What is your approach to hiring? I will narrow this down to the fact that I am always hiring. Whether I have open head count or not, I will have coffee with just about anyone because your ability to hire is a function of the size of your network. #### What’s your advice for managers who are just starting out? Find a mentor that doesn’t work where you work. Talk with them once a week with three topics you’ve prepared from the prior week. #### Whats your work day like and how do you manage your time, emails, etc.? What’s email? I wake up, drinking a bit of coffee, and then spend a solid hour scrubbing the day which means prepping for meetings, answer longer messages in Slack, and do a bit of writing. I try to write ~500 words a day. Ok, day has begun. I’m likely 60% in meetings which sounds horrific except that I made sure that every meeting I was in that morning was going to be valuable otherwise I will decline it along with a justification. The other 40% is transit time, usually at least one hour of time to build something… anything. End of day. Same process as the morning. Scrub everything. Prep for the next day. #### What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success? Saying “no”. #### Share an internet resource or tool that you can’t live without. [www.strava.com\](http://www.strava.com) #### If you could recommend one book to managers, what would it be and why? Can I pick two? Ok, good. 1. [Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War](http://amzn.to/2DpaX6r). This is not a book about way, but about decision making. Bring a highlighter. 2. [Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within](http://amzn.to/2C5G4YA). This a book about writing. Good leaders are good writers, so… read about writing then write… and write. #### Where can we go to learn more about you? (LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, etc.) Read [Managing Humans](http://amzn.to/2BNS64G). It will tell you a lot about what I believe. _This series asks engineering managers to share their experiences with the intent of helping other engineering managers learn and improve. Have someone you want to see featured_ _or questions you think we should ask? [Contact me](http://www.managersclub.com/contact/).\_