"- Growth areas:

1. Set up your team for success: While it's amazing and beneficial for you to be indispensable to your team and to be a strong individual contributor, you have a great opportunity to apply a team-oriented mentality to more of what you do. Sometimes there are things that you can do very quickly and well, but there are ways to solve those same problems in ways that are more sustainable and less dependent on your individual talents. A point of feedback would be to spend a little bit more time thinking about how you can implement things that are foolproof, that other people can easily pick up and work on, and that are easier to teach - especially when you're building something audit-oriented that prevents the team from missing important actions. I would encourage you to work on shifting your thought process from """"How can I make this work right now?"""" to """"How can I make this work, while best enabling the team as a whole to back me up and cover this process?""""  - or even """"How can I make this work in such a way where someone unfamiliar with the rest of our work can step in?"""" If you're aiming to be a manager someday, this is an important way to approach your work - the whole team can benefit from your knowledge if you add a little time/effort in to design things that way. You do some good work on this already - but it would help your effectiveness to approach everything you do with this lens. I think primarily this will manifest itself in developing your instinct for documentation and coaching. Audit processes need to be set up to make them near-foolproof, so that you can be sure that nothing is getting missed. Documentation needs to be intuitive to someone unfamiliar with your systems, clear, and created at the same time as the process itself.

2. Communication: You have a very focused and efficient workstyle that allows you to put your head down and get a lot done quickly. In O3s, because you're freed up to focus on your development and your role, you are much more directly communicative about things that affect your day, the way you feel about your management, and about your ideas for improvements to the team's functioning. It would be a huge benefit to teams you work on if you found a way to work that into your day-to-day - proactive feedback from you about key issues would help in a plethora of different areas. While I agree too many unfocused meetings or lots of brainstorming time aren't particularly useful, maybe you could spend more time managing upwards/outwards at multiple levels, not just your direct manager. You can manage outwards with other teams, peers, etc. You have so much specialized knowledge and great instinct, I believe you could go to the next level if you found ways to help everyone around you use your talents better.

From my brief time working with you, I have been very impressed by your level of talent, dedication, and instinct. I think you are on your way to becoming a great manager level employee if you can figure out how to accelerate the teams you work on and help them best use your skills, develop strategic sense (i.e. learn about metrics and think about how to use them to measure and improve your work, and how you can use them to help other teams create mutual benefit), and manage your colleagues, peers, and management actively to help them take advantage of your strengths. Even if you decide to be more technical than strategic, these skills will help others comfortably rely on you while helping you make sure you enjoy and get a lot out of your work."