Personal User Manual

Write one when you begin a new manager-report relationship, join a team, start a close collaboration, or keep tripping over the same misunderstanding. Keep it to one page and answer four questions:

• What can you expect from me?
• How do I communicate and make decisions?
• How should we handle feedback and disagreement?
• What do people sometimes misread about me?

Describe observable behavior and name a concrete way to work together. Share the document before a one-on-one, ask what fits and what does not, and invite the other person to write one too. Do not require it. At Stripe, Hughes Johnson’s reports wrote their own documents and used them to discuss work styles; she later warned that making the exercise mandatory is risky [3].

A manager’s document carries extra weight because a report cannot reject the manager’s preferences as freely as a peer can. Camille Fournier argues that manager READMEs can turn flattering self-descriptions and admitted bad habits into burdens for the team [4]. Skip quirks other people must absorb, promises your behavior cannot support, and anything that belongs in a performance standard. Let observed behavior overrule the page.

Start with four people who wrote from different kinds of operating experience:

• One-page brevity: Ivar Kroghrud co-founded QuestBack and ran it as CEO for 13 years. His user manual, published by The New York Times in 2013, shows how little space the document needs: a few direct statements about communication, openness, idea ownership, and revision.
• Operating detail: Claire Hughes Johnson ran operations at Stripe for seven years while it grew from roughly 160 employees to more than 7,000. Her “Working with Claire” document is the example to study if you need to make meetings, decisions, communication, feedback, and expectations explicit across a scaling company.
• Candid self-awareness: Julie Zhuo led Facebook’s product-design organization as the company grew from hundreds to thousands of employees, then wrote The Making of a Manager. Her user guide earns attention because it names what she does that may annoy people, what gains and loses her trust, her strengths, and where she is still trying to grow.
• A founder-executive contract: Jay Desai wrote his while running PatientPing, a health-technology startup with more than 100 employees and seven direct reports. His user guide shows what the document can become when a founder has hired a real executive team: a detailed contract covering feedback, a new executive’s first six months, strategy, management, and logistics.

More examples

Each of these shows another useful format or setting:

• A visual deck: Steph Smith is a product and growth operator who led The Hustle’s Trends subscription business and later worked at HubSpot and Andreessen Horowitz. Her 14-slide manual proves this does not have to be a memo; it mixes working preferences with background, stress signals, and a few memorable personal details.
• The same template, filled in by someone else: Madi Taskett wrote her version of Smith’s slide deck while working in growth at Auth0. Compare the two to see which prompts produce distinctive answers and which merely invite boilerplate.
• A public-service leader: Pete Vowles led international-development teams for the British government and later served as British Ambassador to Zimbabwe. His manual is useful because it takes the practice outside the technology industry and names its risks, including self-importance and self-fulfilling labels.
• The engineering-management lineage: Michael Lopp has led engineering organizations at Netscape, Apple, Pinterest, Slack, and Palantir and has written Rands in Repose for decades. “How to Rands” earns its length by making an actual week legible: one-on-ones, staff meetings, communication, operating principles, meeting protocols, and the behaviors a colleague might otherwise misread.
• An open-source document: Daniel Thomason is a fintech product leader and entrepreneur. His manual lives on GitHub, calls weaknesses “known bugs,” and invites pull requests—an unusually literal way to make the document revisable.
• A company operating system: Sid Sijbrandij co-founded GitLab and led it as CEO while the all-remote company made its operating practices public. His CEO handbook is the maximalist edge case: the leader’s preferences sit inside the same handbook the company uses to run itself.
• A team practice: Abby Falik founded and led Global Citizen Year. Her account of writing a manual matters because her leadership team adopted the practice, shared their documents, and treated them as material to revisit rather than a one-time exercise.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Ness Labs guide offers a shorter introduction, a six-prompt template, and its own example list.

Borrow their questions and level of specificity, not their answers. Your colleagues need a document they can test against your behavior.

Download the Personal User Manual template

Download Andy Sparks’s template as Markdown or open the original Notion worksheet. The longer worksheet covers background, values, working preferences, feedback, trust, strengths, weaknesses, active growth, and optional personality notes. Delete any prompt that you do not want to share or that will not help someone work with you.

The documented lineage begins at Google. Urs Hölzle wrote “A Guide to Urs”; Claire Hughes Johnson learned about it from a panel of Google managers and wrote the first “Working with Claire” around 2010 or 2011 [1][3]. She adapted the document when she joined Stripe, where it spread through the company, and published it in High Growth Handbook in 2018 [1]. Her 2022 book Scaling People renamed the reusable template “Working with Me” and positioned it as a way to set mutual expectations with a new report [2].

Management Craft uses Personal User Manual as the category name. Hughes Johnson calls her version a “Working with Me” document; Hölzle’s “Guide to Urs” remains the precursor.