top of page

Hadar Dor's User Manual

​

I made this in June 2021 when I started a new role as a Product Lead at Shopify. It was a fun way to share with my new teammates how I think about career and work, and level-set on some of my default tendencies and self-perceived strengths vs weaknesses.

​

If you want to make your own, here's a template you can duplicate!

​

An older version of this I made when I joined Facebook can be found here.

​

​

------------------------------------------

​

​

Hey, I’m Hadar! I’m a Product Lead on Growth, focused on Launch.

 

I made this doc as a quick intro to who I am, what I care about, and how I’m most used to working and communicating. Think of this as a cheat sheet to understand my values and tendencies.

 

Who I am

  1. Pronouns: he / his / him.

  2. Born in France to Israeli parents. Grew up in the SF Bay Area and living there now!

  3. Most intellectually curious about history, political philosophy, and economics.

  4. My biggest hobbies are music (I play guitar/drums/singing and used to go to a concert every week), travel (35 countries so far!), and angel investing.

 

What I care about (and why I joined Shopify!)

  1. Working with amazing people who I enjoy collaborating with and learn from every day.

  2. Further social missions that I care deeply about, in particular economic opportunity. Especially when the organization’s incentives are aligned with its beneficiaries!

  3. Building and growing communities, socially and within organizations I’m a part of.

  4. I wrote more about my career goals in detail here.

​

My values in the workplace

  1. Ownership: We all equally own delivering the optimal experience to our merchants. My goal is to empower you to co-drive that impact, and to support you along the way!

  2. Rigor: I work best in environments where we all completely and exhaustively seek to understand all options, assumptions, and trade-offs before making decisions. Anything Tobi might ask in a review about our project, we should already have thought of too.

  3. Bias for action: While there’s always more that can be done to further the goal of rigor, I value finding the Pareto-optimal trade-off of incremental effort to thoroughly evaluate a decision vs just getting shit done.

  4. Strategic: I’m here to help build a company that lasts much longer than even 100 years. That means investing in not just the short-term wins immediately in front of us, but also in scalable systems, merchant empathy, and big bets to get us there.

  5. Proactive: I love sharing my learnings, mental models, feedback, and general musings with as broad an audience as possible. I write publicly, and you’ll soon see me share my Shopify-specific thoughts in our internal blogging tool.

  6. Growth mindset: Feedback makes the world go round. No matter how much we already know or how effective we already are at what we do, we can always be even better. And those learnings can be found anywhere, from anyone else we collaborate with. I try to embody this every day and hope you’ll all teach me new things!

 

My working preferences and tendencies (I want to know and accommodate yours too!)

  1. I tend to be direct in sharing my opinions / feedback. I also prefer getting direct feedback, and I always assume good intent.

  2. When discussing something I prefer to zoom out as much as possible first and then zoom back into the specifics throughout the conversation. Might be jarring if you like starting with specific / concrete examples.

  3. Especially now with remote work, I often tend to do some non-work stuff in the daytime and some work stuff at night.

    1. I’m regardless available for meetings during work hours.

    2. Don’t feel pressured to respond quickly if you see a message from me at night.

  4. I love chatting in person (or video nowadays) and getting to know teammates. I do think written comms are crucial though for posterity and for getting others involved.

    1. I am okay in meetings but really shine if I have time to read and write.

    2. I aim to be concise and direct in my writing so as to minimize time for you to process. I hope this doesn’t come off as curt - not my intention!

  5. Tell me the best way to communicate with you. Workplace Chat? Email? Text? Video call? Audio call? Only during certain times? Can do.

  6. I prefer meetings with clear agendas and won’t hesitate to ask if there is one beforehand.

  7. I’m an over-communicator, if this doc isn’t already proof :)  It’s my way of embodying a default-open culture. Let me know if it’s ever too much.

  8. I don’t like acronyms.

  9. I prefer docs over slides. Even for reviews. Easier to think clearly / holistically IMO.

 

Self-perceived strengths:

  1. Clear documentation / goal setting / communication.

  2. Big picture thinking / strategy / framing trade-offs.

  3. Coordinating across large groups of stakeholders / execution.

  4. Contributing to improving org-wide processes.

  5. Mentoring and sharing my learnings 1:many in writing.

 

Self-perceived areas to improve:

  1. I bias towards action and ship emails/posts quickly. My intent is never to exclude teammates from decision-making but I have sometimes inadvertently moved too fast for some teammates to weigh in

  2. I talk too fast :)

  3. Balancing being accommodating and personable with being direct

bottom of page