Dan Mckean Readme

My bio on the team’s page

What I do at Sourcegraph

I’m the PM (Product Manager) for Distribution & Security

About me!

I live in north Dorset in a pretty little town called Shaftesbury 🗺️🔗 with my wife, her 2 kids (5y,8y) and our identical twin boys (15m as of May ‘21).

We also have a 3 legged dog—Fender (10y). (He doesn’t let either his age or his missing leg stop him sprinting everywhere and jumping in cow troughs when out on a walk.)

Talk to me about…

  • Woodworking
  • Tattoos
  • Food

How I like to work

I’m an early bird. So once the kids are fed I get to work around –8am. But I’m in the UK, so most of my lovely colleagues aren’t awake till my afternoon/evening. So my mornings are a mixture of bouts of focused solo work and reclaiming some time for myself.

I tend to have meetings from about 3/4pm till about 8pm, though I try and break for dinner and bathtime with my family (bathtime 🛀 is chaos).

Feedback

I love feedback, but it can be so damanging done badly. I think it has to be timely, and reasonably direct, but most importantly it has to be with empathy. IF you can’t appreciate (and show them you understand) why someone did something, don’t give them feedback.

Other than that, I like to give and recieve in a way that allows for discussion. Questions, exploration, shared understanding, and mutual empthay.

Communicating

I like time to think, and writing helps me process (so the async Sourcegraph culture is 💯 up my street), but I’m equally happy chatting things over.

I’m always a little sceptical of the value of big meetings. It’s hard to give everyone a voice, and without a strong lead and even stronger agenda it’s hard to make them really valuable. But they can work.

I love 1:1. It’s where I’m most happy. Both people have to be focused, and it’s all about achieving a shared understanding. It’s also the best way to actually get to know someone, and doing so is utterly invaluable for working with people.

Career history

I started as a network and security engineer—managing firewalls, web filtering, wireless, WAN and LAN connectivity and security, virtual networking, load balancing… etc. I realised I didn’t have the patience to fixate on any one subject for too long… and that’s how I arrived at management 😆

I did that for a while before being asked if I wanted to help lead building products like that. I did. Very much so 👍 That was for a company that built an on-prem (nearly always physical!) firewall and web filtering appliance.

Then I moved to London 🇬🇧 (I’m from Southampton) and became the 1 and only PM for a SaaS property management product… it was a great experience, and I hired and trained up someone (who’s now a great friend) to be a second PM.

Then I hopped over to Snyk, where I spent 2 and a bit years working on everything from APIs to onboarding to user acquisition to partnerships (all as a PM).

And now Sourcegraph 🎉🎉🎉