Wasn’t last week’s episode on accessibility in product design enlightening? Well get ready for more!
The goal of the last episode was to give you solid understanding of accessibility, and all the things you could think about when designing a product with accessibility in mind. But we understand it might be a lot to tackle, which is why in today’s episode we’re going to boil it down into 3 key tips that are critical and will make a big impact.
Laura Allen is back to enlighten us. Laura is the Accessibility Program Manager at Google for Chrome and the Chrome operating system.
As you watch today’s episode you’ll learn:
Here are some additional resources to checkout that Laura mentioned in the video:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
## 3 Key Tips To Keep In Mind When Designing For Accessibility Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: In the previous *Build* episode, we talked about the importance of accessibility. If you missed that episode, I've included it below. Now, in that episode we talked about a number of things that you could do to improve your product. In today's episode, we're going to boil it down to the three main things that you want to think about when you're designing and building your product, so stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, I invite innovators, and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. We're continuing our conversation today on accessibility with Laura Allen, who is the accessibility program manager at Google for Chrome and Chrome operating system. Thanks again for joining us, Laura.
Laura Allen: Absolutely. Thank you for having me again.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Last time we talked about a number of things that our audience can do when they're thinking about designing products or revisiting their products and incorporating more accessibility. In today's episode, I want to focus solely on the top three things you think are super critical and will make a big impact in people's products.
Laura Allen: Great.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, let's start with the first.
Laura Allen: First.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Laura Allen: OK, so I would say the first thing to do is to train your team.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Laura Allen: Thinking about accessibility, it's not just one person's job, and that's something really important to keep in mind. This is a full team effort. There are different roles that different people have to play from design to research to development to just release processes, all of those different things. Everyone needs to play their individual part, to be totally honest with you. A lot of teams just will honestly benefit from just going through different trainings, leveraging resources that are out there. There are a lot of great things, like for example, I know a few of my colleagues actually have put together this awesome Udacity course just all about web accessibility. That's a great resource. There are lots of videos out there. There's this great YouTube series called The A11y Casts, it's like A-11-Y, which is an abbreviation for accessibility. If you've seen that before, it's A, 11 characters, Y, mean accessibility. So, lots of different things out there. We can definitely link some resources for sure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Laura Allen: I would say, yes, training the team. Make sure everyone feels comfortable with the concepts of how to start building this in. That will go a really long way.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice. So, it's not just to put the onus on the designers of the team but really your PMs, your engineers.
Laura Allen: Exactly. Thinking about, for example, like the designers when you're scoping out a project, let's incorporate accessibility into design docs. Think about, "OK, well what should the keyboard model actually look like?” just as one example. "What should contrast? Am I thinking about contrast in my mocks?" So, bringing it in at the design phase, and then basically working with your engineers as you’re developing, testing for accessibility as you're going along, having PMs to help make sure that that process is happening, it's being managed all the way through. I think it's really critical. Basically, having everyone ramped up on this, everyone understand the fundamentals is really key.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Wonderful. What's tip number two?
Laura Allen: Yeah, so tip number two would be to integrate accessibility. Honestly, I understand why a lot of people might get to the end, be ready to release a product, maybe even release it, and then say, "Oh, shoot. We forgot about accessibility."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Laura Allen: Maybe they'll get bugs filed against them. That's not the situation that you want to be in. It's also just not an inclusive way to be building your products. I think just working hard to integrate into each step of the way, and that's what's helpful to have each different role on your team understand accessibility, of course. So, integrating so that when you're preparing to launch a product, that's at the phase. When you're actually designing and building it, that's when you're working on these concepts and implementing these principles instead of, "OK, we're ready to go. We're going to launch," and then, "Uh-oh."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Laura Allen: So, integration.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What's the third and final most important thing people should consider?
Laura Allen: Yeah. I would say to engage the users.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Laura Allen: This is something that's really important, again. So, just understanding how...read a list of technology users or just users with any variety of accessibility needs are interacting with your product. One really simple step that I think is, if you're going out and you're conducting user research in the first place, why not add somebody who's an assisted technology user right to that pool? Add someone who's a screen reader user or someone who can only use the keyboard, for example, and can't use a mouse. Try to diversify that pool, and make sure you're collecting that user feedback, and understand how your product is working for a variety of different users.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Very nice. Yeah, keeping the user in mind. Are there places that you can try to recruit from? A lot of people might use something like user testing and there's a few other services out there, but anything you would recommend to recruit people?
Laura Allen: Yeah. I mean, one thing that I know we've seen a lot of success with is partnering with organizations. Just as one example, we're here in San Francisco today, the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, that's just one example of a fantastic organization where they're more than happy to partner with teams or with individual researchers just to give feedback. They want to be helping. They want to make these products even better and better. There are lots of different types of organizations that are similar to that, which maybe local for people who are not right here in San Francisco, also national organizations, international organizations. So, just thinking about how do you leverage different communities, and you'll find that oftentimes if you just kind of approach different people and say, "Hey, we'd love your feedback on making this better and making it work better for you. Can you help us out?" It helps if you're going to go and have one of those conversations if you've thought through some of these core concepts and some of the things that are mentioned in the WCAG Guidelines, and you're not showing up without having even considered accessibility. Right? It goes a long way to bring real people in, real users in, and just make the products that much better.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, thank you so much, Laura, for boiling these down into three useful tips. I know our audience is going to get a lot of out this.
Laura Allen: My pleasure. Thank you so much.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, Laura and I want to know, have you tried one of these three tips when it comes to incorporating accessibility into your product, which of these did you try, and what was the impact it made? If you've got others, be sure to include them in the comments below. That's it for this week's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll dive into incorporating accessibility into web versus mobile. Special thanks to our sponsor Pivotal Tracker for their help in producing this episode. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build *is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
It’s a new month and with it a brand new theme for our upcoming Build episodes! When designing products we often think about usability: how easy to use a product is. But we often overlook another aspect of product design: accessibility. So all this month we’re going to dive into accessibility.
One reason accessibility gets overlooked is because we think it’s a challenge to prioritize it given a company’s size and resources. We may think accessibility makes sense for a big company, but a startup that is getting off the ground just doesn’t have the resources to incorporate it.
Well, actually that’s not true...
In fact, accessibility maybe just the differentiator you need when it comes to product design that is going to give your product a competitive advantage and increase adoption!
And in today’s episode, we’re going to explore what accessibility is, why it’s important for any size company to incorporate, and show you how to do an accessibility audit for your product.
To help us out, I've invited Laura Allen, who is the Accessibility Program Manager at Google for Chrome and the Chrome operating system.
You’ll learn:
Here are some additional resources to checkout that Laura mentions in the episode:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
## Product Design: Why Accessibility Needs To Be Prioritized In Product Design Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: We often think about usability when we're designing products, but not accessibility. In today's *Build* episode, we're going to talk about the importance of accessibility and how to prioritize it regardless of being a startup or a big company, so stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker, I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode of *Build*, I host innovators and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Now, one often overlooked aspect of building products is accessibility. In today's *Build* episode, we're going to talk about what accessibility is, why it's important, and how you can do an accessibility audit for your product. To help us out, I've invited Laura Allen, who is a accessibility program manager at Google for Chrome and the Chrome operating system.
Thanks for joining us today, Laura.
Laura Allen: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure. I know that a lot of times people think about usability when they're building products but they don't often think about accessibility. Let's talk about what is accessibility and how is it different from usability.
Laura Allen: Accessibility is the design of products, services, devices, and environments for people with disabilities. I always like to take that one step further and think about accessibility as really empowering users with disabilities to be productive, to be socially engaged, and to be independent. This is super closely aligned with the concept of usability and also even just universal design and inclusive design. You think about universal design being this idea of building products that are going to be usable by the widest range of people and the widest range of situations. It's so closely aligned with this, that absolutely includes designing for people with disabilities.
This whole concept of usability, yes it's critical to be thinking about all the time, of course, but we can make products functionally accessible, we can go through checklists, we can incorporate design principles and what not to make things technically work, but if you don't think about how is this actually going to be used, what is the experience for someone with assistive technology—like a screen reader, for example—if you don't think about that experience and usability of that experience it might not be productive or efficient at all. All these things are really closely linked together and they all help to move towards building an inclusive product.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why is this even important? I think a lot of people would say, "Oh, we have a really niche customers customer base, we don't think anybody has accessibility concerns so why even bother?"
Laura Allen: Accessibility is something that impacts everyone at some phase or at some point in their life. Fifteen percent of the global population has some form of disability—that's a huge number, that's over a billion people. We tend to think about a few different distinct groups when we're thinking about design. We might be thinking about people who are low vision or blind, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people who have motor or dexterity challenges. Then people who are, what we consider to be, neurologically diverse that can be anything ranging from dyslexia, to perhaps being on the autism spectrum, to any forms of intellectual disabilities.
When you think about these different groups of people, people might be developing disabilities at different phases of their life, different severity levels, different combinations of disabilities, and then you start to think about, what about temporary impairments? Like what if you break your arm and all of a sudden you can't type on your computer for a few months? Situational impairments, like what if you're at a loud restaurant or a loud bar and there’s something on the TV that you want to be listening to, it's too loud to hear and you have to actually rely on those captions that were there specifically for the deaf population but they're helpful to everyone. Then, you take it one step further, and you think about this growing aging population, which thanks to increasing life expectancy, which is great, the aging population of people over 60 is growing, and growing, and growing, and the World Health Organization estimates that by 2050 it'll be over 2 billion people that are over the age of 60.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Wow, so it's like doubling. Hopefully not, but yeah.
Laura Allen: As we all age, at any point in our lives, we may experience some slight deteriorations in vision, or of hearing, or of dexterity, so these concepts are really, really critical to be building in, in general.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That makes sense. Now, some would say that this makes sense for really big companies with hundreds of millions of users, but does it really make sense for our tiny little startup that's just getting started?
Laura Allen: I would honestly say, accessibility is something that is critical for all companies, at all stages, all phases. To be totally honest with you, it's actually easier to build this in four startup-sized companies, smaller teams, smaller processes. Of course, it's completely doable at large companies as well that have established processes, but at a startup, you're building from the ground up, you're defining what you want your product processes to look like, and it's so much better just to be able to integrate accessibility in at that level, get people understanding what these concepts are, make this just a core part of inclusive design from the very beginning, and it'll be that much easier as you grow, and grow, and grow.
Another thing to think about here is accessibility because it impacts such a large number of people this presents, honestly, a growth opportunity in many cases. It just opens doors for a lot more business, a lot of growth potentially. One thing that I like to think about, especially for startups and just hiring in general, if companies are focused on actually making their own products accessible then it opens the doors as well for being able to hire a more diverse and inclusive workforce. You can hire assistive technology users and have them come in and be able to use your products and that opens the door.
A lot of us, obviously, at the companies we're thinking about how do we further diversify? How do we get people in the room who have a diverse set of perspectives? This whole idea of diversity a lot of times we are thinking about race, and ethnicity, and gender, sexual orientation, but disability is a huge part of this. It is a very, very big part of this group and we need a voice.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Making it into your process, your priorities, your core values can really open doors for you in terms of your customer base and make things, hopefully, easier as you grow.
Laura Allen: Absolutely. I will say, too, for a lot of people, like I mentioned before, accessibility will touch everybody at some point and in many cases it'll make the experience better, and more usable for many, many users. For someone like me, I happen to be low vision myself—
Poornima Vijayashanker: What does that mean, “low vision?”
Laura Allen: Really good question, because it can mean a lot of different things. For me, I basically have a central vision disorder, so if you can imagine all in my peripheral vision is still intact, it's still clear, but anything I'm looking directly at is this blend of flashing lights, and distortion, and blurring, and whatnot. This all happened for me when I was about 14, happened really quickly, really rare condition. I basically went from having typical 20/20 vision to being what's considered legally blind within about a week when I was 14. At that point, it was like I'm getting ready for high school, and all of a sudden I'm going to be moving to a bigger school, and then what happens? I couldn't read a book at that point. I couldn't see a blackboard. I couldn't recognize faces in the hallway. It was a huge period of transition for me, and for my family.
For a few years there, it was one of those things where if materials weren't actually accessible in formats that I could listen to, for example, instead of visually read, I was stuck. I had to literally come home from school and my parents and my brother would read to me. That, to me, was the definition of dependence and I really, really hated it. I was so fortunate to have a family that was able to help me that way. It was just unbelievable the amount of effort they went through to get me through to the point where then I was able to regain my independence through discovering assistive technology like text-to-speech software, or magnification, or a larger mouse cursor, things like that.
It was that period of my life that really propelled me into this world of accessibility and usability, because I saw the huge potential of what technology can do for someone's life and I just want to help to make that better for the rest of the world.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It's great to hear you have a personal stake and it inspires everybody out there, but it also inspires you to realize and relate to people who might also be having these recognitions so that's wonderful to hear.
For people in our audience out there who are building products, how can they get started? How can they prioritize this and gain the benefits?
Laura Allen: That's a great question. There are a lot of different things to be considering. One thing that I would recommend is doing an audit, understanding where is your product right now, what's the level? This may vary. If you haven't really been thinking about accessibility yet, that's OK. It's a good opportunity to look at the holistic picture and see what's going on, and what bugs you may have. I would recommend just going through and leveraging a lot of the different resources that are out there and using those to create your own audit, however that works for you.
For example, there is a great resource out there from the web content accessibility guidelines and we abbreviate that to WCAG. This is a W3C standard guidelines for accessibility. They've been really widely adopted by a lot of designers, engineers, companies, and they're wonderful. They outline different steps and different things to be considering.
For example, they break it down into four different categories: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Each of these things has a lot of different checkpoints, but just as a brief example, when we think about “perceivable,” what assumptions are you making about your users basically? What are we assuming that they can perceive? Are we assuming they have perfect sight or sight at all? Are we assuming that they can hear? Thinking about how they're perceiving the product and then different design guidelines that go hand-in-hand with that.
“Operable,” similarly, is what are we assuming about the users, how they're actually operating with the product? Are we assuming they have really fine motor skills? That they can use a mouse, that they can use a keyboard? Are we assuming that they are able to use really quick reaction times, things like that?
“Understandable,” what is the general understandability of the product? Are you assuming really high language skills to be able to navigate? Or the ability to just remember really complex sequences, all kinds of things like that? Then, “robust” is a little bit different in that it talks about how is your product working with assistive technology? Like a screen reader, for example, which would be leveraged by someone who's blind to be able to listen to the product, listen to the phone, or the computer, whatever it may be, and get that audio output instead of the visual.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice.
Laura Allen: The WCAG is a great resource. I tend to think when I'm thinking about checklists and working with designers and whatnot, I break down into a few key groups as well. The first around keyboard and focus, just really taking a quick poll of—let's say you've got a site, how does it work with just the keyboard, no mouse whatsoever? It's a great thing for engineers and designers to be able to try that out themselves as well. Just try using the keyboard only and as you're navigating through, can you get to everything that you need to? Can you also see visual focus indication? If you don't see that and you're just tabbing through, you don't know what you can actually take action on. Have you thought about that in the design process, basically?
Then, I start to think about semantics. How do we actually make it more clear for screen reader users what the page is actually all about or what the app's all about? For example, do we have labels in place for buttons so that as you navigate with a screen reader, you don't just hear, "Button," or, "Unlabeled button," which is not helpful at all. Thinking about how do we just convey that experience and make sure that it's clear for a screen reader.
Then a third bucket, which I like to call think about in my audits, is just this idea of flexible interface. That can be anything from color contrast—so WCAG actually says we should have a minimum color contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for text against its background color. That's super helpful because for anyone, like me, with a low vision or just anyone who doesn't have the perfect 20/20 vision, it can be really hard to actually distinguish those colors, or a low contrast text, so that's a really helpful usability improvement for a lot of people.
In this same group of flexible UI, you think about things like how does this interface look with magnification at a 200% zoom level, for example? Or are we using just color, or just sound to convey information? Just color, one example there, is if you have an input field and you type an error and all of a sudden maybe just the text will appear red. In that case, people who can't distinguish color will miss that information, screen reader users, or braille readers will completely miss that information as well. Thinking about how do you go one step further and convey that and make sure there's also error messaging. You can still use the color red and all, that's fine but it can't be the only way that you're identifying that information.
I like to think through questions like that using the WCAG guidelines and other things that help there—like I know Vox Media has a really great checklist—and just get a sense of where's the current level? From that point, you may have a lot of different bugs, you may have different things that you want to be able to address, and the next step is naturally to work on, “How do we triage this? How do you prioritize?” I think one really helpful thing to do there is just to think about each of these bugs, what is the typical user impact? How critical is this? Would this bug stop somebody from being able to actually interact or take action on your site and your core purpose of your site or your app? I like to think about that, and help to prioritize, and just go from there.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Wonderful. We'll be also sure to include the resources you mentioned below in the show notes.
You've mentioned a number of things that happen during the audit. What happens after the audit?
Laura Allen: I think the next natural step, of course, is going through that triage and prioritization process. Then as you're solving these problems, as you're fixing bugs, continuing to go through and help to honestly integrate accessibility into each step of the process. I think that's the really critical step. One holistic audit is not going to take you all the way. We have to start bringing this into our development process and building it from the ground up. Then, honestly, getting out there and working with users, understanding what the feedback is. I think that's a really critical component to understanding how to improve.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I know in the next episode we're going to be going into a little bit more detail and boiling it down for viewers out there. Thank you so much today for joining us Laura.
Laura Allen: Thank you.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, Laura and I want to know: how does your company handle accessibility? Let us know in the comments below.
That's it for this week's episode. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where we'll dive in a little bit deeper and share three key tips that you want to think about when designing for accessibility. Thanks so much to our sponsor Pivotal Tracker for their help in producing this episode. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
Think you’re onto something BIG, and surprised you’re receiving so many NO’s from investors?
It can really make you second guess yourself, and shake your confidence...
… but it shouldn’t!
Receiving a LOT of NO’s is natural.
You may be tempted to listen to the feedback after receiving some NO’s and think you just need to launch your product, change your business model, or grow your customer base, and then you’ll be more attractive to investors.
Guess again.
The reason you receive for the NO and the feedback you get may not be aligned.
Why?
Because at the end of the day, investors are human. They don’t want to hurt the feeling of a first time founder, and don’t want to seem rude in case they want to invest later.
Yes they just might invest later.
So how can you tell what is really going on?
Well that’s what we’re going to debunk in today’s episode of Build! To help us out I’ve invited Ooshma Garg who is the CEO and Founder of Gobble, and Danielle Morrill who is the CEO and Founder of Mattermark. They've both recently become investment partners at XFactor Ventures, an investment firm that's focused on investing in female founders and mixed-gender teams.
We’re going to help get comfortable with receiving NOs and deciphering what they really mean.
You’ll learn:
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
--
## Why Investors Keep Saying NO To Your BIG Idea Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: In the previous two episodes of *Build*, we talked about why, even if you have an idea, you might not get investment from it, and it needs to be a big idea in order to even attract interest. But even if it's a big idea, chances are investors aren't going to say “yes.” In today's *Build* episode, we're gonna uncover all the reasons an investor may say “no” to your big idea, so stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Now, one misconception that a lot of first-time founders fall prey to is if they have a big idea, some investor's gonna want to put capital and fund it.
The truth is that a lot of funders face nos, and just because they face nos doesn't mean that someone won't eventually invest in them. In today's *Build* episode, we're gonna explore all the reasons that investors may say “no” to your big idea. And to help us out, I've invited both Ooshma Garg and Danielle Morrill.
Ooshma is CEO and Founder of Gobble, and Danielle is CEO and Founder of Mattermark. They've both recently become investment partners at XFactor, an investment firm that's focused on investing in female founders and mixed-gender teams. Thanks a lot for joining me today.
Danielle Morrill: Absolutely.
Ooshma Garg: Thanks for having us.
Poornima Vijayashanker: We've come a lot way since that first South by Southwest where we all shared a hotel room in 2010, and all of us have gone out and fundraised a number of times. I want to start by asking the two of you, what was that first no like that you got from an investor?
Danielle Morrill: I was bummed. I mean, I think the first 10 investment meetings were just nos back to back. First, you're like, "I guess that it would happen. I would get a no," but I'm like, kind of the straight-A's type kid. I keep thinking, “Of course I would get a yes every time," and then after you get them over and over, you're like, "Oh, maybe this just happens. Maybe this is true that you get way more nos than yeses." What do you think?
Ooshma Garg: Man, you know, your company is like your baby. It's a reflection of yourself, so the first no, and even ongoing nos, they're always so personal. I think you get a little bit used to it because you just build some armor and build some strength every day and every year as an entrepreneur, but especially in the very beginning, it's kind of like a survival-of-the-fittest process. You have to be able to psychologically get through the nos, take some feedback, and develop that never-quit attitude early on if you're going to be successful ultimately.
How To Get Over Rejection When Fundraising And Keep Going
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So, how did you get over that? How do you even know that you should just take the feedback, deal with the rejection, and keep going?
Danielle Morrill: I made a fundraising playlist on Spotify.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Danielle Morrill: I think it's Jay-Z who says, "On to the next one." I used to blast that song, like after every pitch, actually after the good ones, too. But honestly, you kind of just have to keep living, and I think part of it is just putting it in context with the rest of your life. Having a playlist for me was sort of a reminder of, “Oh, life just kind of goes on.” It's fun with your team too, I think, to just be...I guess not everyone does this, but with my team at the very early stage, it's not like you can hide the fact you got turned down.
Later on when you're raising, maybe you don't tell everybody that you're raising a series A, but when you're raising early stage money, you get your team to cheer you up. They buy you beers. You do silly things. You kind of have to let life keep happening so that it doesn't get too serious.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah, I agree. What's funny is my fundraising song is "Survivor," by Destiny's Child.
Danielle Morrill: How many people do you think have a fundraiser song?
Ooshma Garg: I don't know. This is the first time we're talking—
Danielle Morrill: We need to make a playlist.
Ooshma Garg: We need to make a playlist.
Danielle Morrill: That's a good idea.
Ooshma Garg: We need to make a playlist for our portfolio.
Poornima Vijayashanker: We'll link with the playlist to you guys. So, do you ever go back to the people that said “no?” Because you guys have done multiple rounds now, where you might have had to go back to those early investors who said “no” and ask for more.
Ooshma Garg: Absolutely. In our case, even our first check as a seed investment, it took me three different introductions, multiple follow-ups, to even get in the door before the no. After someone says “no,” it feels very final, but I think that the big secret is that you have to go back and that you should keep following up. Time and time again, I hear friends talk about series As, series Bs, and so on, where they got a no. They were...they kind of welcomed it and took all the feedback. They updated different investors every week for two months, three months, sometimes six months, and then they close that same investor. They might be a Sequoia, or Andreessen Horowitz, or what have you.
All those funds are looking for stamina and looking for breakout businesses. A breakout business has to have someone that's willing to listen, iterate, and improve. So, the funny thing is, you should see that as just the beginning of your relationship. For our venture financings, we had multiple failed fundraising attempts and then ultimately successful ones. Our funds that invest in us now, Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Ventures, etc., absolutely said “no” once or twice before. But I maintained that relationship.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. What about—
Why It’s Valuable To Reconnect With People Who Said NO
Danielle Morrill: You have to think about it like sales. Like, would you have never contacted a lead again because they didn't convert at the end of the trial? No. If you are in my database, I am going to be talking to you for the rest of your life. If you're in this business, there's a certain set of investors that you really wanna work with. Frankly, they're looking for the people who don't take it so hard that they never come back, to your point about stamina.
I think also, once you go back to people a few times and kind of...you have that feeling of like, “This feels like it's against the rules to go back.” Then you realize that it's actually respected, and so it's a self-fulfilling thing, and you start to find yourself going back more and more.
How To Push For Specific Feedback
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, it's great that you got feedback, but I think a lot of times, you get this generic feedback, where it's like, "I wanna see more traction," and you're like, "I'm already at, you know, 10k in monthly recurring revenue," or, "I'm already at, like, a million-dollar run rate," like, "How much more traction do you want to see," right? So, how can you kind of push an investor to give you more directed feedback in that note?
Danielle Morrill: Well, I mean, I think...We sit on both sides of the table now, so I think sometimes it's laziness that causes people to ask for these things. So, for example, the "I wanna see more traction." It's kind of like going into Macy's and being like, "Why isn't this a Dior dress?" It's like, OK, if you want a Dior dress, maybe you should go buy one. If you wanna find a company that has, like, $5 million a year of revenue, and you're at seed stage, sorry, this is what we have, and this is what I'm selling, and if it's not what you're interested in, it's fine for you to turn me down, but I'm not...this is not a buffet where you can come back anytime between 10 and 1. I'm trying to raise a round.
You kind of have to, at least inside, hold a certain amount of entitlement over your time. It's not that you need to be entitled to their money, but you're running a process, and I think that that is really important. So, for a lot of these unclear feedbacks, I think it's more important to say, like, "What do you think of what I'm selling now? And if it's not clear what I'm selling, let me remind you and redirect." Honestly, you have just as much a right to claim your time as they do.
Ooshma Garg: Absolutely. And you have to kind of draft or pick your draft, in a way, with your investors. There are ones that I really wanna follow up with, and I would love to work with, and it's not just from my side of the table. I think, just like with employees or anyone else, or with a relationship, you want it to be good with both sides. So, you might see something that they don't, but they've only known you for 30 minutes. You've done all your homework. You know what they've invested in. You know the other founders.
So, you don't just follow up with everyone. You hear the nos. Sometimes, it's not even worth following up. Sometimes it was an introduction, and you didn't really connect. A no is OK. Other times, it comes with something that says, "Our fund requires x, y, or z. Someone at this stage. We need this much ownership." It's important to know what's a BS no and what's actually a valid no. Sometimes...it took me a long time to learn that funds vary drastically in size, and that actually has a huge impact on who can invest in you at different times in your lifecycle. So, timing is important.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, hold that thought. We're gonna come back to that in a little bit, the whole fund size, and what makes sense and what doesn't. So, but let's go on to some of the more easy things that you hear and might get rejected. So, I don't know if either of you have faced this, but the whole, "You don't have a technical co-founder." And somehow that's like a gating factor to even get a dollar out of this investor, right? You hear things like this where you're just not meeting a certain checkbox. What's been your response to that sort of stuff?
Danielle Morrill: It depends on the checkbox. Basically, what I would say for technical co-founder or a lot of these is, they're like risk boxes. So, each one...it's almost like if it was a survey, and you added up enough points, then there's too much risk here. It's probably no one reason that's gonna knock you out, but they're trying to figure out where you fit. So, technical co-founder is not necessarily a problem if you nail everything else, but if you don't have a product, and there's no one to build it, then of course, that's gonna be expensive.
So, I think it's—sometimes the way it seems to be coming across to the investor is like it's a checkbox thing, but they're really trying to ask a bigger question. So, I think one thing I've found is that it's good to say, like, "Tell me more about why you're worried about that," rather than just answering the question, making them elucidate more. Cause I've been surprised by some of the answers that I get. The technical co-founder question, I think the assumption is, who's gonna build the product? And they might just be thinking, "Dang, we're gonna need to go raise a big round because you need to hire two or three engineers instead of building it yourself."
They're not actually worried about you not being technical. They don't care that you're not technical. They're more like, "OK, so now I have to assess fundraising risk cause this person's gonna need to go build a team." So, it's easy to think it's about you, and, "Oh, you can't code." And then you kinda like lock down and feel guilty, but I think that's not always the case. A lot of these things are not actually what they seem on the surface.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. Yeah, I think another one along those lines is also, "Why are you working on this idea?" Right? So it's, what puts you in that unique position to kind of own domain expertise? Have you guys ever gotten that question, like, "Why this? Why Gobble, Ooshma? Why help people with cooking at the end of their day?"
Ooshma Garg: Right. Well, Gobble is a lucky one for me because it's a mission-driven company, and it started out of my family. What we do is we help people cook home-cooked food in 15 minutes in one pan, and we bring this tradition, and ritual, and love of a household into the modern, busy life. That's something that's very near and dear to me. So, because of that, it shows that I'm just gonna give it my all and not quit.
I think some folks stumble on an opportunity sometimes. You are...you're just a inventor, and you want to tinker around, and you try finding what's gonna fit in today's zeitgeist. Just like founders come in different flavors, I think investors come in different flavors, too. There are investors who are great at investing in arbitrage opportunities. There's investors who really wanna back founders, or social good, or mission-drive folks. Or they wanna back moon-shoots. Or some people wanna back things that have a linear, direct, immediate path to growth.
So, I think having that context when you assess someone's response to you is really important because you kinda, just like with your friends, you have to find your tribe with your investors, as well.
Is The Market For Your Product Big Enough?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So, there's definitely this sizing-up thing, and I think one of the early signals is, they don't feel like your market is big enough, maybe because they're not aware of that market, or maybe they don't get the space. Have either of you had that situation where you come in, you've already got traction, you've got the go-to market team, products in the hand of customers, and they're just kind of scratching their head, like, "Oh, is food...do people eat dinner still these days? Is that still a thing?" How do you deal—
Danielle Morrill: Oh my gosh. I actually don't think it's worthwhile to continue to have the conversation, and I have to shout out to Hunter Walk, who wrote an excellent post about this, I don't know if you guys saw, around a woman who was pitching, and someone said like, "Convince me this market's big enough." And she just said, "Look, I don't wanna work that hard. I've already got traction, people eat dinner, right?" I think there are times when you're looking at this investor, and you have to consider, if they don't get it at this point, especially if you're doing something where you have traction, and it's fairly obvious that the market is big...
I mean, most of us...if you're building breakthrough tech, you might find a situation where markets are unclear in terms of size, like Blockchain, for example. But in most cases, these are professional investors, and they may be testing you, and they might wanna know what you know, so it's worthwhile to at least give them a rough answer, but I would take it as serious data, if they need to be convinced that the market's big enough.
The other side is that, not all markets need to be big to be interesting. It's more about if you can create something that can grow. Obviously creating a market that doesn't exist is a really valuable thing. So, again, I think it goes back to flipping the script a little bit in terms of trying to make sure you understand what they're really getting at. Like, do they not know? Are they testing you? Are they gonna be a huge waste of your time?
How To Get To The Real Question They Are Asking
Poornima Vijayashanker: How can you kind of suss that out? Are there questions or techniques?
Danielle Morrill: I would just start getting curious, like, "How much do you know about the market? Have you invested in this space? Obviously you're interested in us. What do you think?" And it doesn't have to become combative. It's much more of just, like, how does this become a dialogue instead of playing 20 questions, where you're doing all the talking? I think about it kinda like a job interview, I think, in both parties are confused about who's interviewing who, and you really wanna make sure that you find a balance where it's not you, as the founder, talking 80% of the time.
Ooshma Garg: The framing is so important. So, if you're getting some feedback repetitively that, "I don't understand your market," or, "I don't understand your path forward, or your path to revenue, or how you're gonna hire," then you do have to take that feedback and try to iterate and improve your pitch itself. I think that every company...it's very hard that you meet a perfect de-risked company at an early stage. They all have some mini risks, and often times, one big risk. So, sometimes it's, "Wow, there isn't a market for this, but we see that being the future."
Other times, there's a really big market, but maybe it's crowded. So, the question is, how are you gonna be, for example, defensible in the food space? Other times, it's...you have something defensible and proprietary. It's a huge market, but no one's willing to pay for it. So, people aren't willing to pay for music, or TV, or whatever. So, how are you even gonna make money for something that everybody's using?
Whether it's revenue, market, defensibility, IP, every business typically gets stuck, I find, on one big discussion. The better you can hone your slide and your couple lines to make sure that your message is getting across properly, and that resonates, it's just to your advantage cause people have such limited time with you and attention span. You know what is gonna be the hot button in your pitch, so identifying that early and practicing that part the most would probably do you well.
How To Get At An Investors Hot Buttons
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, we previously had Marie Perruchet on the show, and she talked about taking your pitch and then seeing how other people reformulate it, or what are the pieces that they extract? That usually becomes these hot-buttons, or the thing that is most memorable that maybe you need to dive into. Are there other ways that you guys have found to extract that information?
Danielle Morrill: I think...reformulating, literally having someone pitch it back to you, is that what you mean?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. As one technique to, like...what's sticky, what is impactful, but then there's the other case of, yeah, what is the hot button that people are probably gonna step away from?
Danielle Morrill: I mean, I think one of the things that is really interesting is whenever you're opening the conversation with an investor, at the very beginning. If you can get them to tell you, like, "Hey, what do you know about my company?" Because that actually is gonna tell you a ton about what they've already decided you're doing, and it's sometimes really wrong, or it's like...you know, there's a lot there, and then you can kind of work from there. If you notice that, pretty consistently, people are having the wrong idea, I mean, kinda to your point about feedback, it's another way of getting—
The reality is, people act like you setup your pitch, and then you go out. But you actually create your pitch, start to go out, and then you're continuously iterating on the pitch. So, you have so many opportunities to make the pitch better. I actually look at the first 10 pitches or so. I kind of set up pitches with targets where I would be interested in working with them, but they're not my top picks, so that I'm actually running the pitch against those folks. That way, if the first three or four say that their first impression of you is different, then you can realize, “Oh, the market already knows who I am.” Very rarely do you get to just go pitch, and no one knows who you are. That's another tactic that I think can be really helpful.
Finding Investors Who Are a Fit
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, coming back to kind of Ooshma's point around finding investors who fit into one of many opportunities, like arbitrage, moon shots, love the space, etc., there's also people who really get beholden to certain stages, right? They're like, "Oh, come back and talk to me once you've figured out your customer acquisition cost, or your lifetime value," right? Are there ways in which you've been able to address that, even if you don't have those metrics yet?
Ooshma Garg: One concept I keep running back to is that MVP concept, or minimum viable product, or even like a prototype. So, with my first company, the vision was to make this recruiting platform for universities all around the country. I made...I started by making wireframes, and envisioning the product, and keeping it simple, but thinking through those wireframes. But then, an advisor kind of looked at that, told me to scrap the whole thing, and said, "Why can't you just start with a mailing list? You're making a recruiting platform. Why don't we just see if there's people interested in your concept, and can you get 10,000 people, or 50,000 people, or how ever many students on your mailing list?"
At first, I was offended because I thought, "Oh my gosh, a mailing list is not a tech company." But often times, you can think about some scrappy proxy or prototype to prove what the person is asking, even if you don't have that exact number or the software or resources to get what exactly they want.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, what's an example...yeah, if somebody throws out, like, "Ooshma, early days, three years ago, what was your LTV?" And you're like, "I don't have an LTV because I don't know," what would your response be to that?
Ooshma Garg: You know, I probably do two things. So one is, I would look at comparables in the market, and so, just doing studies of the general food industry, in my case, like how often people order takeout, or how often...what are people paying for SAS for these particular products each day, or whatever's relevant to your market. I mean, I'm assuming that you're...that you have some prototype. Very few companies pitch pre-product, so whatever data you have for three months or six months, there has to be something there, some monthly active users, how many times people are logging in, how many purchases people have made.
So, you just have to...I mean, our seed round was raised off of two to three months of early prototype data. I think that's all you need. It's just some prototype that shows some user willingness to pay or engage for three months, and then you can extrapolate that into your vision.
How To Handle Disagreements
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, there's obviously times where people may disagree, right? They may say something like, "You know what, Danielle, I don't like your distribution strategy. I really just don't think it's gonna work. So, you know, cause I think it's gonna be expensive. Come back when you've figured out something that's a little bit cheaper. Then let's have the conversation. But, for now, no."
Danielle Morrill: It seems like an opportunity for them to prove their value-add as an investor. You know, I think that's valid for people to challenge strategy, but I think, what I would wanna know in that situation is, "If you were my investor, what would you suggest that I do? I totally hear your concerns." Make sure to show them that you're listening, but I think that's their opportunity to step up and actually offer something constructive. I think if they're gonna be in an investor where they're gonna be critical without being constructive, that's actually data for you.
The truth is that strategy's tough. Strategy often breaks down, and we change strategy all the time in startups. That's a huge part of what you're testing. So, I think being gracious and not taking it personally is important, but also making sure that you're asking them to demonstrate their value. I actually think that's gonna make them want to work with you. If that goes well, that's actually gonna be a way to test out, what would this working relationship be? So, I think that's...see it as an opportunity.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I like that.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. And most people kind of...they send you that no via email, and I'm sure that the large majority don't even ask further questions. Some may not even respond, and others might respond and say, "Thanks for your time. I'll move on." But some small percentage are asking follow-up questions, and I think that's just making them stand out and starting that relationship that we said is so important.
I think that if you really did like someone, and their no isn't tactical or directional enough for you, to ask for a 10-minute phone call just to get a little bit more detail or their advice on strategy towards de-risking that investor's concern, I think can go a really long way. So, I think folks should just practice embracing the no and getting that 10-minute call and feedback as much as possible because that will help give them building blocks for another three months, if they can, and not just sort of wander aimlessly, wondering what someone was saying, or worse, completely ignoring it.
Danielle Morrill: Right. If you're gonna go and worry a bunch about the feedback but not ask for the follow-up, go round and round in circles over three glasses of wine, it would be much less painful to just have that awkward 10-minute call and just know where you stand. I think I've seen founders go in circles over this stuff. Literally years later, they'll tell these stories. It's just not worth the energy. The investor's also probably super uncomfortable giving the rejection. We're gonna talk a little bit about saying no on the other side. So, they're kinda beholden to you to give you that 10 minutes, honestly, so you should take it.
How To Know When An Investor Isn’t A Fit
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, there's a lot of times where it's very obvious, you know, they tell you, "Here's the no," but...aside from some of the ambiguous feedback around the traction, there are times, though, where they may see a signal. Maybe it's something that happened in a meeting between you and your co-founder, or something else. Maybe they did some back-channeling, right? How do you handle those situations where they might feel like, “Oh, there's no chemistry,” or “I'm not sure where this is going?”
Danielle Morrill: It's tough cause they usually don't tell you.
Ooshma Garg: Yeah, they usually don't tell you. I think that's quite rare, as well. I think the way...the best way to handle that or avoid that is actually to construct your own back-channeling. So, like I said, some of the biggest investors, they will only invest based upon referral. Then, when you get so, kind of, well-known and in high demand, they'll only invest based upon two or three referrals. So, every single step is just like hard work. You can't ask for one intro. You can't just take the no on face value. You have to ask for three intros. Then you have to ask for follow-ups. Then you go to the meeting. Then you follow up on the meeting, and if they say “no,” you follow up again. There's all those little, little, extra steps that other people are doing that I think more folks should know about.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, and invest their energy in that versus what Danielle said, around the drama in their heads. So, anything else you guys have heard from your experience? Any other nos that we maybe haven't covered? I know there was some of the stuff that Ooshma was talking about, like the type of investors. Maybe we can dive into that a little bit?
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. I think...Well, with regards to the nos that people give, one of the toughest ones is simply just environmental. There are times when you're starting a company, and it's just a rough funding environment where it's just rough for your market. There might be bigger companies who are...for whatever reason, they're not doing well on the public markets, and that's affecting you. So, like the stamina, managing your psychology, being frugal, focusing on just the minimum prototypes, all of that's so important because the main thing you need to get to yes and get funding is time. You can correct a lot of things in the nos overtime, but there's some environmental factors you just have to weather.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit more. What do you mean by like, public companies? "How does that impact me? I'm just a two-person start-up, why should I care what Google or Facebook is up to?"
Ooshma Garg: Yeah. Well, hopefully your aspiration is to be a big public company, or to just be a big organization in general, and to be, one day, going from wherever you are to making hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of value for your shareholders, for your employees, for your customers, and so on. So, investors will look at the current state of the market, at the public market, to understand what's happening in your industry. How are those companies valued? What are your chances of getting there, of breaking out? What is it gonna look like when you IPO? That trickles all the way down and influences your valuation, even as early as at the seed stage. So, it's very well-advised to not be delusional and to take a look at the public markets of your industry—
Poornima Vijayashanker: The landscape, yeah.
Ooshma Garg: —and be able to speak to that. I think people will be very impressed.
Paying For A Previous Founder’s Mistakes
Poornima Vijayashanker: I think another situation is, often, we have to pay for previous mistakes. So, the investor might have invested in a space when it was too young, or maybe the founders that they invested in weren't that knowledgeable or were the first. You know, just a number of factors to where, now, they just aren't willing to look at the space, or even...no matter how amazing you are, they're like, "No, sorry, not interested in the space. You might be amazing, unicorn person, but I'm just gonna say ‘no.’"
Ooshma Garg: I would take that no. It's kinda like in relationships. Someone had some issues with another girl that looked like you, or whatever, like it is not your—
Danielle Morrill: He is never gonna stop saying that.
Ooshma Garg: That is not the best guy for you. So, there are many investor fish in the sea, and I think that's just when the numbers game comes into play, and you have to make sure that you're not just talking to five, you're not talking to 10, but you have a big target list that you're just setting up and rolling through.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome.
Danielle Morrill: I think one other thing that is valid but complicated is, people might say to you, "This isn't venture-backable." I actually think that's very helpful feedback to hear. Whether you agree is sort of beside the point. Find out why they think that. Sometimes, investors know things about markets that you never...can't learn until you're in them for a long time, and they can save you years of your life.
So, part of why people get a bad taste in their mouth often has to do with, like, a poor-margin business that can never get better, or a business that caps out somewhere, and there's this trough of sorrow that seems to go on forever and ever, and you don't get to find out until you're a $50-million company, which is great, except for when you have a huge burn rate and expectations. So, especially if you're entering a market where you're fairly new, maybe you're a software-centric person, but you don't have domain expertise, those types of nos can tell you a ton about things that.
It's easy to say, "I don't care. If I get to $50 million of revenue, I'll deal with that then." And you can still make that decision, but I think the key is to actually make sure you understand that no because they are in the business of billion-dollar outcomes. They might know something that you don't, and they might be able to help you redirect towards something that is worth it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Alright, well thank you, Danielle and Ooshma, for walking us through all those nos. For all of you out there who are watching, if there was a no that you recently received that maybe we didn't unpack, feel free to share it with us in the comments below this video.
That's it for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel where we'll continue the conversation and talk about what it's gonna take to get that yes from an investor. Ciao for now!
Ready for more myth busting around startup funding? Let’s get to it then!
Last week I shared a number of reasons you should share care fundraising whether you’re a founder or startup employee. Here they are again, and in the Build episode we talked about why it’s a bad idea to reach out to investors when you have an idea.
This week we’re going to continue our theme and focus on what compels us to think we need to raise capital like competition heating up, the belief that the business will stop growing, or that the idea we’re pursuing isn’t really BIG enough. We’ll also be diving into the mechanics of investment talking about the nuances of an angel versus a venture capitalist, and why it’s important to look for investors that have knowledge of your marketing or industry.
Erica Brescia is back to help us out with this episode. Erica the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor Ventures as an investment partner. XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to fund female founders as well as mix-gendered teams.
Erica is a founder and investor, and having sat on both sides of the table, she knows how to dispel fact from fiction!
As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn:
In the next two episodes we’ll explore handling all the rejections you receive from investors, how to motivate yourself to keep going, and what it’s going to take to get that first check!
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
## Startup Funding: When It Does And Doesn’t Make Sense To Fundraise For Your Startup Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: Last time, we talked about how as a first-time founder, you don't necessarily need to immediately rush out and get investment to get your tech product off the ground. We discovered some alternate ways of funding your product development and company growth. If you missed that episode, I've included it in the link below this video.
In today's episode, we're going to dive in a little bit deeper, and talk about when it makes sense to go out for that angel investment, and then how do you transition from getting capital from angels to eventually getting it from venture capitalists, and what you need to do in the interim to make sure you're growing your company. So stick around.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, I invite innovators, and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
What Compels Startup Founders To Fundraise
One myth a lot of founders fall prey to is the need to constantly fundraise. They're worried that if they don't, their competition is going to swoop right in and outpace them. Or their business is just going to stop growing, and even worse than that, people might not think that they are actually onto a big idea.
To debunk these myths and more, I've invited Erica Brescia, who is the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor as an investment partner. For those of you who aren't familiar, XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to invest in female founders and mixed-gender teams. Thanks again for joining us.
Erica Brescia: Thanks for having me!
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah! I know we talked a little bit in the last segment, but let's just quickly do a refresher, tell us a little bit about your background and what you do at Bitnami.
Erica Brescia: Sure. Bitnami automates the packaging and maintenance process for server software for containerized, cloud, and behind-the-firewall deployments. We're most known right now for the Bitnami Application Catalog, which contains over 150 different pieces of server software, ranging from business schools, like content management systems, more project management systems, to development tools like GitLab and Jenkins for building out your development processes and pipeline, to stacks of things for building applications, like Node, or Rails, or Django. We work with all of the major cloud providers, and have over a million deployments a month of the apps we package across all the platforms that we support.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome. In addition to Bitnami, you recently joined XFactor as an investment partner.
Erica Brescia: I did, yes.
The Difference Between Angel Investors And Venture Capitalists
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah! We talked a little bit about that last time, and I want to pick up the conversation from our last time and dive a little bit more into not only what does XFactor do, but this whole position between angels and venture capitalists. How do you guys think of XFactor? Are you considering yourselves as angels or VCs? Would it help to start with defining angels and VCs?
Erica Brescia: Sure. I mean, I tend to think of angels as primarily investing their own capital, and VCs are investing other people's capital. We all actually have our own funds in the fund as well, so we're LPs in addition to being the investment partners.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What does that mean?
Erica Brescia: That means that we're the people who put money into the fund, as the limited partners, who just put money in the fund, and then they step away, and they entrust, basically, the team of investment partners to invest that capital in companies that will produce ventures that yield returns.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Where is that money coming from? Is that your own hard-earned money, or is that from somewhere else?
Erica Brescia: In the case of the LPs for the XFactor fund, it's from a range of different people. Some of them have just been very successful in business. Some may be managing endowments or trusts, or other investment vehicles, and they invest both in the stock market and in VC and angel funds as part of their diversification strategy.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. I think some of you have also contributed personal funds, right?
Erica Brescia: Yes. We have put our own funds into the plan as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's important to note. Yeah.
Erica Brescia: You've got to put your money where your mouth is, right?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Great! No, I certainly appreciate you guys doing that.
Erica Brescia: Plus, honestly, I think we're going to make money off of it! So why would you not do that?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Exactly!
Erica Brescia: That is the whole point.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. You guys are operating a little bit like angels, but a little bit like VCs as well, but let's dive into more of a traditional VC model. What does that look like?
What Seed Stage Investors Are Really Looking For And The Size Of Check They Write
Erica Brescia: Sure. The distinction there is interesting, because I would say there's seed-stage financing, which a lot of people think of as coming from angels a lot, but VC funds do as well. Those are typically much smaller rounds and much earlier stage. The company probably has something built, probably has some users, probably can show some traction, but they're usually not raising huge amounts of money, at least not by Silicon Valley standards, which are different than the rest of the world.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Let's get some ranges. Because I know some seeds can get crazy.
Erica Brescia: Huge. Yes.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So let's do a more middle-of-the-road seed. What would that look like?
Erica Brescia: These days, I would say they're usually between $500K and $2 million. I know that's a wide range, sometimes it's smaller, sometimes it's bigger, but the fundraisings that we're participating in are usually somewhere around there. We have had some companies raise significantly more than that, and we've almost gone in more at like a Series A stage. But typically you're raising $1 million or $2million to get your idea off the ground and show a little bit more traction, before you go and raise at a Series A. Those used to be maybe $2 or $3 million. Now, most of the time, you're looking at maybe $6, $7, even $10 or $15 million as a Series A, which we certainly see in the cloud and container space in particular, which is where I'm focused with Bitnami.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. That makes sense. Now, I'm not going to dive into microfunds and syndicates, and all that stuff. We're going to do that in a later episode. But let's go back to you, and let's talk a little bit about how you initially funded Bitnami.
How To Initially Fund Your Startup When You Cannot Attract Investment
Erica Brescia: Customers.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Customers!
Erica Brescia: We sold stuff. Yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. When was this, by the way?
Erica Brescia: We started with a company called BitRock over 10 years ago, and BitRock built some really interesting technology around application packaging and deployment, which has become the foundation of Bitnami. We're very unique, I would say, for a Silicon Valley company. We developed a package software product. We sold it to customers, and we generated money that way.
Then we started providing a subscription service to a lot of software companies that needed us to build, we called them "stacks" of software, so their products could be installed and distributed very easily, and we worked with a lot of the biggest names in open source, in those days. So we had that money coming in—
Poornima Vijayashanker: If you don't mind sharing, how big were some of those contracts?
Erica Brescia: They were in the tens of thousands of dollars a year. So reasonably sized, but we now, in retrospect, we charged far too little. But that's one of the lessons that you learn as a founder, you're always underpricing yourself in the early days.
So we did that, and built up the company that way. Then we decided to evolve into Bitnami. We went through Y Combinator in 2013—
Poornima Vijayashanker: So before you did that, you actually had revenue coming in?
Erica Brescia: Yes.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Give us a range of how big you were at that size?
Erica Brescia: We had 12 people, and seven figures in revenue, when we—
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh! That's fabulous!
Erica Brescia: —went through Y Combinator.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. OK. So why even bother going to—
Erica Brescia: That's a great question! It was a subject of much debate, but again, interesting story, I suppose. My co-founder's wife had gone through Y Combinator with her own company, and had a great experience with it. And we knew that we wanted to send the company on a different trajectory—
Poornima Vijayashanker: Which was?
Erica Brescia: Growth.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. OK!
Erica Brescia: We wanted to build a huge business, and the model that we'd had previously was really what we talked in the last episode about, more of a lifestyle business. Right? We built a solid business, but that's not what we were there to do. We wanted to build a huge and very meaningful company. And we felt like Y Combinator was the right way to do that.
It gave us a lot of focus, and helped us make some interesting and difficult decisions. It also helped us a lot with hiring in the early days, and bringing more folks to the team. We've been on a pretty healthy trajectory since then. Over 75 people. I don't give out revenue numbers, but we're profitable and growing, and doing well.
All of that money, except for a million dollars, which we still have sitting in the bank, has come in through customers. And that million dollars we raised after going through Y Combinator. We brought in some angel investors whom we really liked, for different reasons. Some of them have a lot of experience in building companies, specifically in our space, and we felt like they could help us a lot with that.
A couple of them are VCs who invested personally in us, because we didn't want to raise a VC fund, and a few were overseas venture investors, but they make seed stage investments. One from Japan, and one from China. And that was purely because we plan on going into those markets, and we thought it would make sense to have some people over there with a vested interest in our success.
Y Combinator served as a good catalyst to bring that round together-
Poornima Vijayashanker: How big was that round?
Erica Brescia: It was just a million dollars?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh! OK. But you were already in the seven-figure revenue at that point, when you raised that million.
Erica Brescia: Exactly.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Erica Brescia: And that money is still sitting in the bank, and we've added a healthy amount to it, and—
Poornima Vijayashanker: That was what year?
Erica Brescia: 2013.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh! It's been a while. It's been four years.
Erica Brescia: Yep.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, interestingly enough, you have that million, you're raising revenue, and you had grown without a lot of outside capital. I mean, you were already growing, so in that span of time, weren't you afraid that some competitor was just going to swoop right in and go out and raise $10 million or $100 million dollars, and put you out of business?
Don’t Let Competitors Intimidate You Into Fundraising For Your Startup
Erica Brescia: What's actually funny about that question is we had a bunch of competitors do that, and they all went out of business..
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, OK! Yeah!
Erica Brescia: OK! Some spectacularly so. One raised $40 million, had huge names. One of the people on their board tried to come and intimidate me, and say I could never compete with—it was actually a woman running that company, too. But I won't name her, because that's not good for anyone.
Yeah. We had a lot of companies come and raise money, but the model wasn't there yet. And that's why we didn't raise, either, right? There's a time, and we talked about this in the last episode. It's my belief that in most cases, you're better off raising when you have product-market fit. We had that at small scale, but we hadn't found what was really going to fuel exceptional growth of the company. It took us a while to get there, and a bunch of other companies tried to come in and do that, and they all went bust.
I mean, there is a time and place when I think it does make sense, and when you do have to worry about competitors, because the truth is, once a big name competitor raises a big round, it's really hard to get anyone else to invest in you. I think Docker's a pretty good example of that in my space, right? They have tons of money. Nobody's going to invest in another container startup. Why would you do that? It doesn't make sense for investors.
It is something to consider, but I think a lot of people spend way too much time worrying about their competitors, and not enough time worrying about their own business.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Or their customers.
Erica Brescia: Yeah! Or their customers. Exactly. So, yeah, that matters, but you need to do what's right for you, and what's right for what you want out of your life and your business. You should ask yourself those questions. Taking on VC is taking on a lot of additional responsibility, too—
What Kind Of Return Venture Capitalists Look For
Poornima Vijayashanker: Like what?
Erica Brescia: Well, they're expecting a certain level of return, right? A $100 million exit is not something a VS wants, where it might be completely life changing for you, if you don't have venture capital in the company. If you're taking venture capital, you're committing to running the company for at least 5–10 years, providing they don't push you out, which happens sometimes, too, if you're not doing things the way they want.
You're committing to managing a board, with outside parties who are going to have sometimes divergent interests from you. It could even be the case that the fund cycles are usually 10 years, and they have to return the capital to their limited partners, which we talked about earlier. They might need to get out, and want to push you to sell when you don't want to. They might want you to sell to somebody you don't want to.
There are a lot of great things that come from venture capital, if you partner with the right people. Obviously, you get the capital you need to fuel the growth of your business, and that can be incredibly important, especially to support go-to-market activities, or SaaS business models, where customer acquisition costs might be high, but the LTV is huge. There are reasons to take money.
I'm not against that. But you also need to understand what you're signing up for, and what it really means, and that there may be an alternative path for you if that's not the path that makes the sense for you. If you don't want to run this company for 5–10 years, and you don't expect to sell it for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, don't take venture capital.
Startups That Focused On Growing Their Business First
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Some folks in our audience might be thinking, "Erica, that's fabulous for you and Bitnami, and all of the success, but I could never do that. I couldn't just sit and wait for my business to grow organically." Are there other examples of companies here in the Valley, that you're familiar with, who have done a similar approach? I know I can think of a couple, but I'm curious—
Erica Brescia: Absolutely! Well, Atlassian, they're in the Valley now, but they came from Australia, and that's a spectacular story. They really couldn't raise, because they were in Australia, and especially back then, the VC climate in Australia was almost nonexistent. They raised very late, and a lot of it was secondary to the employees, and they've done spectacularly well. GitHub's another example. They raised very, very late in the process, in a very big round, and that gave them a lot of flexibility to do other things.
We've seen that happen a lot. It really depends. Again, I think, going back to what I said before about product-market fit. It's my view that the best time to raise is when you just need fuel for the engine. You already know how the engine works, and it's already built, and the machine is there, and you know, "If I put X in, I'm going to get Y out." Right? That's when you can really take advantage of venture capital, and that's when it can really make a difference.
I'm not saying take a long time to build your company like I did. I would certainly do a lot of things differently this time around, but a lot of it just has to do with where the business is, and what the capital's going to be used for.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It's been a four-year period, right? Where you haven't taken outside investment. You took the initial million. But in that period of time, how has not taking capital, or not thinking about fundraising, how has that helped you and Bitnami?
Erica Brescia: Well, several ways. I think the most important thing is focus. Not having $10 or $20 or $50 million in the bank makes you focus on what's really going to move the business forward. It's really easy, and I have seen this countless times with companies that I will not name. They raise a ton of money, and they go out and hire a ton of people, and everything falls apart.
Because humans are humans, right? These are not just cogs in the machine, especially when you're trying to build a breakthrough or game-changing product. You need incredibly smart people. They're going to have strong personalities. They're going to have past experiences from other companies. And you need to be able to get those people to work well together. So many startups have failed in doing that, and it's led to their own demise, or at least slowed them down a lot, and really burned a lot of bridges with fantastic employees.
I'd say it's allowed us to build out the infrastructure to responsibly scale the team, and it's helped us to focus, again, on making the right investments in terms of where we're spending our time. It's also great for negotiating business deals, I will tell you. That doesn't come up a lot—
How To Compel Customers To Do Business With Your Startup
Poornima Vijayashanker: How so?
Erica Brescia: I was in meetings, even earlier this week, and these are quite big, multimillion-dollar-a-year deals, and they were asking some questions about what the business model looked like, and I could look at these people with a straight face and say like, "Look, we're not VC backed. My company needs to make money. You want me to be around. This needs to make sense for us, financially."
That drives a lot of my decision making. I'm very, very involved in the corporate and business development stuff that we do. I need to do deals that make sense for my business. For some reason, it's a lot easier for people to get their heads around that when you don't have venture capital, which is kind of a funny thing, right?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, people understand where you're coming from, and what resources you have at that level.
Erica Brescia: Yeah! I'm not BSing them. "I have to pay people, and you're going to get a lot of value out of this, and you need to pay me, and I'm not going to do it on a bet that the relationship itself is going to benefit me enough, because that wouldn't be responsible business." That's what I go to all the time. It's not responsible business, you're not doing it. I think being bootstrapped and funding through customers really helps you think through that and make very good business decisions. We say no to all kinds of things, too. And I think that's easier, as a result of that.
The one other aspect I'd say is, we don't have to manage investors. It takes a lot of time to build investor relationships, which I do do that anyway, because we may raise in the future. But also just to raise funding, to go through the diligence process, and then to manage a board of directors that involves VCs, again, who might have competing priorities, or other things going on.
Again, we don't get some of the pixie dust you might get if you're VC funded, and sometimes we have to have interesting conversations with procurement departments, and show them our financials, to prove that we've got a great business, and that they can feel comfortable working with us, but it saves a lot of time and overhead.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that's interesting. So you feel, because you're in the B2B space, the enterprise space, some companies may feel like, "Oh, you're not VC backed, so you might go out of business sooner." But what you're saying is, "Actually, we've got customers. We're going to stick around because we've got real revenues coming in, so no need to worry about this."
Erica Brescia: Yeah. And I can point to, we do business with Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Google. All these big companies. It's gotten a lot easier, now.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. You've got the credibility.
Erica Brescia: Exactly. And we've got a track record. We've not just been around for a year, and we have an established team of senior people, and we've proven that we can execute, and we can deliver. And what often happens is we'll start with a smaller relationship, and it grows over time. After you get your foot in the door, what they care about is do you deliver on your commitments, not whether or not you have a VC in the company.
Keeping Your Options Open When It Comes To Investment
Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome. Now, I know you said, "Never say never." So you are thinking about capital, and then your future. How are you thinking about attracting that VC capital?
Erica Brescia: Let me be clear: we haven't decided to raise capital, but it's a discussion that we're having currently between my CFO, my co-founder, me, and some of the other people on the executive team, because we're launching this new enterprise business. We're incredibly lean as a company right now.
I told you we have in the mid-70s in terms of employees. Over 50 of those are in engineering and product. So the business team is quite lean, and we have very, very little sales on the sales side. Building on an enterprise business means I need a whole new go-to-market plan that involves field people, inside sales, solutions architects, and support people, and a bunch of other folks. Account executives, all these things.
That's very capital intensive to build. We can do it off of cash flow, actually. We're in that fortunate position, but at the same time, we might grow a little bit more slowly, and especially hire more slowly, than we would if we had, say, $15 or $20 million in the bank. So we're starting to think through the tradeoffs, and what might make sense there.
I've been in the Valley now long enough, I know a lot of VCs. There's several whom I like and respect quite a bit, and I still develop relationships with them, and we talk about the industry in general, and Bitnami, and where we're going. I think it's a little bit different than a company that's just coming out of nowhere. We have people who know us, who know the business, who have said that they're interested. So when the time comes, it's more of a matter of sitting down with people who are already friendly and interested in the company, and talking through what makes the most sense.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It's a partnership.
Erica Brescia: Mm-hmm, absolutely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you for sharing your experience with us today, Erica. I know our audience is going to get a lot out of this episode.
Erica Brescia: Thank you so much!
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll dive in deeper with some of Erica's co-investors and explore more topics around funding your startup. Ciao for now!
Voiceover: This episode of *Build*is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
I don’t know about you, but I cringe at the thought of having to commute. The traffic, road rage, not to mention having to find parking… it was enough to make me throw in the towel 7 years ago!
Since then I have been managing remote teams around the world, and as I continue to scale my team I learn best practices from companies who have been doing it for longer than I have like Olark.
But, I know there are a lot of people out there who just don’t know if they can do it.
Maybe you’re one of them. You worry if you’ll be productive, able to communicate effectively and fit into the company culture.
One of my employees, Meghan Burgain felt the same way about a year ago. She had a number of reservations having never worked remotely before.
In today’s Build episode, Meghan and I are going to dive into some of these reservations, how you can get over them, and of course the wonderful benefits aside from working in your jammies ;)
You’ll learn:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
Transcript for Remote Working: How To Succeed In Your First Remote Working Position
Poornima Vijayashanker: Hey, guys. I'm hanging out here in beautiful Bordeaux, France, and taking you behind the scenes this week to show you what remote working is like at Femgineer. If you've been on the fence about taking a remote position, stay tuned for a number of tips in today's *Build* episode.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. For the past seven years, I have been managing remote teams around the world for my startup as well as other companies. Today, I'm joined by Meghan Burgain, who is the mother of twins and expat who lives here in Bordeaux, France, and is Femgineer's community manager. For the last year, Meghan has been working remotely and she's going to share some of her favorite tips to help you get over any reservations that you might have when it comes to taking on a remote position. Thanks for joining us, Meghan.
Meghan Burgain: Thanks for being in France, Poornima.
Remote Working Reservations
Poornima Vijayashanker: I know a year ago when I approached you about remote working, you were on the fence. Let's talk about what some of your reservations were.
Meghan Burgain: Yeah. My education and a lot of my experiences are in education. I was actually a teacher before I moved here. I was a little concerned about getting up to speed, getting trained at Femgineer. That was one of my concerns was getting trained.
The other one of course was that Bordeaux is nine hours ahead of San Francisco. I knew that there was going to be some difficulty there. Would I have to stay awake at night to get all of the work done or not? Those are my two concerns.
How To Handle Time Zones When Remote Working
Poornima Vijayashanker: While you got over the hurdle and joined the team, I know there was that first hiccup that you had where you missed a meeting due to the time zone. What did you learn from that experience?
Meghan Burgain: Time zones are really tricky. I learned that basically communication is paramount, especially when you're working remotely. You need to be explicit, very clear, search for the clarification, ask the questions that you need and really just be polite when you're dealing with people through email. With chat, it can be difficult to maybe misread something so just to be polite and that avoids 90% of the issues.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Then you eventually got over that and learned a number of things over the last year. Let's start with the first thing that you learned.
Recommended Tools And Processes To Stay Productive As A Remote Worker
Meghan Burgain: Right. The first thing I learned basically was the importance of the tools that we use. Being that we're not in proximity, we use the tools like Trello and Slack. Trello is great because obviously for communication you can see who's doing what, if it's done or not, but also allows for transparency. You can see the bigger picture: what we're focusing on at Femgineer, what the priorities are, and how that should affect how I prioritize my own tasks as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, I know another thing you've learned that is even though we're a remote team we still do weekly check-ins where we sync up. Walk us through how weekly check-ins have benefited you.
Meghan Burgain: Weekly check-ins are really important. In startup plans, especially, products change, priorities change, and the weekly check-ins really help me, us both I feel, to stay focused and to stay in the same page working towards the same goal.
Training New Remote Hires
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, I know the third thing is that you were concerned about training, getting trained, training other people. I know as we've scaled the team, you had to train others. How have you gotten over that hurdle?
Meghan Burgain: It's funny that that was one of my reservations and that's actually something that I've been doing at Femgineer. Well, I've realized that training someone via Zoom or Slack, it's not that much different than training someone in person and, in some cases, can actually be better because we can record the training and use it in the future which is what we've done a lot. I've also been relying a lot on our handbook.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What's our handbook?
Meghan Burgain: Our handbook is basically a recipe book for anything that's recurring at Femgineer so whether it's daily or just a certain time of the year, if it happens more than once, it's in the handbook. It's outlined. There's helpful tips and there are links to any outside resources that we might need.
Remote Working Benefits
Poornima Vijayashanker: Great. Walk us through what a typical day is like for you.
Meghan Burgain: A typical day I wake up. We get the girls ready. Send them off to daycare. Then I have the majority my day to do the daily tasks that I need to get done, answer emails that came through to do all of my tasks. Towards the end of the day, when the States wakes up, I'm able to schedule phone calls, have meetings and that sort of thing. It's where I base the first part of my day, I didn't have any of those interruptions. I was able to just do whatever I wanted at my own pace. At the end of the day, I have all the things that I need to interact with people. Then I do my to-do list for the next day and it's off to get the kids.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice. It sounds like you have a lot of flexible hours.
Meghan Burgain: Oh, yeah. Well, for sure. I have deadlines just like anyone else, but I do have a lot more flexibility with how I get those things done.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What do you think are the key benefits that you've experienced by remote working?
Meghan Burgain: You mean besides being able to work anywhere in the world and in my own kitchen and in my own sweatpants?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yes. Those are great benefits, by the way.
Meghan Burgain: I would say that the biggest benefit of working remotely is that I've really been able to find a work-life balance that works well for me. I'm able to not only be there for my kids and my family but to provide for them as well. I think that that's just an invaluable thing. It's a win-win.
Remote Company Culture
Poornima Vijayashanker: I know for some folks out there they might be on the fence about remote working because of the culture. They might feel like, oh, it's isolated or distant. How have you managed to manage that?
Meghan Burgain: I could see how it could be lonely. You don't have someone just next to you to talk to or whatever but I haven't felt that way and I think to go back to the weekly check-ins, that that's really one of the reasons is that we do get that face time. Also we have Slack which we can talk to all of our team members. I would say when it comes to the culture and the team feeling, you get what you give. It can be tempting in any working relationships, especially in remote working, whenever you find someone that's available within your timezone to just ping them with the 20 questions that you have or to ask a hundred things of them. But, I would suggest to all of you that the first thing that you do to someone should really be to ask them how they're doing, to find out what their interests are. It goes a long way towards creating the spirit and creating a team.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Building a rapport maybe through a water cooler channel on Slack.
Meghan Burgain: Yes. Yes. That's what we have.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Wonderful. Well, thank you, Meghan. This has been really helpful. I know our audience out there is going to benefit from these tips.
Meghan Burgain: It's been my pleasure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Wonderful. Well, that's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where you'll get more helpful tips like this.
Meghan Burgain: Ciao for now.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
Hey, guys. I'm hanging out here in beautiful Bordeaux and I'll just start again. All right.
In today's Build episode, we're going to talk to you about ...
Meghan Burgain: Remote working.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, I know. I forgot what I should introduce you before I ... I think I do need to. OK. Take two.
Did you share last week’s Build episode on product design sprints with your teammates?
Wait! Give me two chances to guess what the outcome was...
… you did and you faced some pushback? Well, kudos to you for putting it out there!
… or maybe you didn’t because you were afraid of the pushback you’d get? That is OK too!
Charbel Semaan and I are back this week and prepared to help you get over the pushback you received or will receive once you bring up the idea of product design sprints to your teammates.
You’ll recall Charbel Semaan has been a product designer for the last 20 years and recently launched his brand, Made in Public.
Charbel and I have built a lot of products, and we know that even if our teammates hate the current process and the outcomes it produces, they will still find comfort in it and resist adopting a new one because there’s a lot of fear when it comes to change.
But no one is going to willingly admit to being scared, so they’re going to couch their fear in remarks that are skeptical, just say no, or create excuses like: “Now is not a good time.” “We just don’t have the money to run extra experiments.”
Then there’s my personal favorite: “Prove to me that this is going to work!” But the whole point of an experiment is to test assumptions by following a process, and then seeing if they were right or wrong. You can’t prove anything until you do the experiment! #chickenegg
Because we want you to be really prepared for all the excuses and pushback around a design sprint, here are a few more excuses that you’ll hear when it comes to product design sprints from our friends at Invision. There are also some guidelines and prerequisites that we recommend you consider mentioned in this post to make sure a product design sprint is right for your team.
By the time you finish watching today’s episode you will have learned how-to:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
Transcript: Product Design Sprints: How To Get People To Adopt Product Design Sprints
Poornima Vijayashanker: In the previous episode of *Build*, we shared how you can use design sprints to help you test ideas out faster and get that much-needed feedback. If you miss the episode, I've included a link to it below this video. And of course, anytime you want to institute a new process in your organization, there's going to be some pushback, so in today's *Build* episode, we're going to tackle how you can evangelize design sprints within your organization. So stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by PivotalTracker. I'm your host Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Today we're continuing our conversation with Charbel Semaan, who has been a product designer for over 20 years, and most recently launched Made in Public.
How To Handle The Pushback When It Comes To Trying Out Product Design Sprints
OK, Charbel, you and I have built a lot of products, and we know that even if our teams hate our current process, and we give them a new one, they're still going to be reluctant to adopt that new one because there's that fear of change.
Charbel Semaan: Sure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: And we're going to get pushback. So how do we handle that pushback?
Product Design Sprints Aren’t Meant To Replace Existing Product Development Process
Charbel Semaan: I think one of the ways I found to handle it successfully is to emphasize it's not a replacement to your existing process. It's a way to supplement, complement, or augment. And if you can run a design sprint in parallel and you're really doing it as a side branch to what you're already doing, and it gives you an opportunity to learn quickly in five days, and then be able to integrate that back into your existing processes. It's super helpful.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. So that's great in theory. But I know having to run a parallel process oftentimes for either a small team or even in a large organization can be a lot of setup. It can mean trying to carve out that time, so one of the key things to consider is what are going to be the benefits. Someone's going to come and say why should we do this, how is it going to help?
The #1 Benefit of Product Design Sprints: Speed of Execution
Charbel Semaan: Great questions. Why should we do it, how is it going to help. I think there are two key areas. One is speed of execution.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: And what comes along with that, with the sprint, is constraints. And through those constraints you get clarity. So you're moving quickly, you're going from thinking to action in a quick way, and you're also constraining yourself so you don't have an infinite amount of time to decide what features, what angle, should we try it this way or that way, so you get to move quickly and you constrain yourself, so you get to clarity faster.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. So I'm sure for our audiences out there, there's probably going to be some pushback around, ah that's great on like a nimble team of maybe five, six people—but I've got 10, 20, 30 decision makers or stakeholders. I'm not going to be able to mobilize my team fast enough. So how do we get to handle those folks?
Can product design sprints work for larger teams?
Charbel Semaan: Yes. I think you can work with those 10 to 20, or even 30 people to understand what are some big problems that you're facing, that you'd want to solve, that are top priority, or they're really affecting and impacting your productivity and your flow, your ability to ship.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Even if they're conflicting?
Charbel Semaan: Even if they're conflicting. I think you first start by gaining an understanding. So with a team that large, I've got 20 to 30 product managers and squads of teams of PMs and developers and designers, etc. You gain an understanding, if you're that org leader, gain an understanding of what are some of the top big, immediate problems that are affecting the team and affecting shipping and product and affecting the business. And prioritize those. And then think about if I can run a sprint, if I could run something within five days and gain clarity and be able to unlock some blocker that's going on across those 10 to 20, then who of that large group, who would make most sense to bring into this sprint.
We're not going to stop the presses on everyone's workflow. But we can at least prioritize, run a sprint with some key players, see how that goes. In some ways it's a look at like an 80-20 perspective of 80% of the orgs, when you continue going as-is, there's going to be this 20% or even 90-10, there's going to be this small experiment we're going to run. And if that's successful, then we can see if we can apply it to other areas or aspects of the org, no matter how large.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Of course there's fragile egos. So some people are going to want to be in that special pool.
Charbel Semaan: Sure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why wasn't I picked?
Charbel Semaan: Sure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So how do you message that?
How To Convey Who Does And Doesn’t Needs To Be Involved In A Product Design Sprint
Charbel Semaan: Not easily. Not easily. It's not always easy. I think one thing I've found a bit helpful is to communicate openly that we understand we have X-Y-Z challenges. We're all clear on that. And there's...hopefully you have consensus, you have agreement. And from there it's...we can't tackle them all at once. We all agree to that. And so I think you're gaining that consensus and that understanding. That mutual understanding. And then communicating, we want to try something that might help us start to chip away at the stack of challenges that we have. We're going to run small experiments. As those turn out to be successful and we learn from them, we want to continue embracing and permeating through more teams and more people in the org.
So it's coming and if it's going to work, they know it's coming, if you have a deep interest and you have a really...you're raising your hand and you really want to be a part of this, please come to tell me. If you're the org leader or the business leader, whoever you are. I think that kind of openness and communication starts to also be a signal for you to understand who are the people who, as you mentioned before, who are the people who can become those evangelists and those change agents in your organization as influencers to adopt something new like design sprints, and then be able to take it to their parts of the org as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I think it also serves as a signal to see how open your organization is, right?
Charbel Semaan: Absolutely, absolutely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So I think maybe some people may get disheartened as they do this exercise and find out that they're not getting a lot of interest, so how should they take that? It's not a reason to send in your resignation letter.
Charbel Semaan: No, no, not at all. Don't do that yet. I think one thing though, is just discussing with a CO of a global manufacturing business, is people need to feel involved. In my experience, in org development and innovation with an organization, especially large ones that no one really wants to have something just told at them, and that this is the way we're doing things now. So introducing something like a design sprint into your organization, that can foster and cultivate innovation throughout all your people. Doing so by involving them.
So first it just starts with communicating that. We're thinking of doing something new. Who has some initial interest? They're like you said, you'll start to see if there is or isn't. That might be an indicator that are you really getting that kind of engagement from your folks, and as you test and as you do small experiments and you see who continues to raise their hand and want to be more and more involved. And when you're not seeing that engagement, it may actually be an opportunity to run a design sprint on internal communications.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK, yeah.
Charbel Semaan: So that's the beauty of it for me is, I think you can sprint on any kind of challenge you have.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: It may not always be a business challenge in the product sense, or in the service sense. Sometimes it may be about your internal organization.
Poornima Vijayashanker: And what happens if you get too much interest? Everyone's like, “Oh yes, I want to participate,” and all of a sudden you've got your 5,000-person organization and it's like, “I've got things to say. I see things that are broken.” Yeah, I get this a lot when I go into places.
Charbel Semaan: Sure, sure. I think for starters, I think that's a great problem to have. I think you want that level of engagement, that employee engagement, and your people care about solving challenges in your business. It's far better than the opposite. Two, there is such a thing called mega sprints, and Jake Knapp actually runs mega sprints, which were pretty interesting, where there's simultaneous sprints happening in one large room.
Short of that, the—to your point about the question is to get to a place where there's an opportunity for people to raise their hand, have a voice, to be able to add to the mix and add say, “Here's the challenge I'm facing,” and then it's really, I think, an opportunity to create a culture of that mindset. So I go back to design sprints not just being this rigid five-day process, and the irony is it's...it can be viewed as some rigid five-day process even though it's a sprint, it's meant to move quickly. The reality for me is that when you embrace it as a mindset, and that people in your organization, no matter if you have 5,000 people with 1,000 problems each, it's an opportunity to think, “How could I solve this problem or test a new idea quickly, and can I use the framework of the sprint, can I use the elements of the sprint to take action faster?”
And I think anybody who's leading an organization, no matter how small or large, would love for their people to have that type of empowerment and to be able to feel enabled and equipped to take action.
How Product Design Sprints Different From The Lean Startup Methodologies And Agile
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now there's also a lot of skeptics out there who might say, “Yeah, you know, I hear what Charbel's saying but I've tried something like this a year ago, or like five years ago we tried lean or agile—how do I know that this is the new thing?” So a lot of times the concern is how is this going to be any different from what we tried in the past that failed miserably, and in the wake of it, caused a lot of destruction.
Charbel Semaan: Yes. Great question. This has actually been coming up recently for me and I've been doing more and more review and research on this. I think for starters it's valid. It's absolutely valid to be wondering, “Great, this is just the methodology du jour. This is now the new thing, and everyone's going to jump on this bandwagon.” I completely understand that.
Product Design Sprints Are All About Constraints And Speed Of Execution
What I come back to though is the corner about the mindset. Lean can be thought of as a mindset. Agile can be thought of as a mindset. It's a way to knock down blockers that otherwise impede you from trying something, learning from it, and iterating on it. So whether it's this model, that model, or this or the other. I think the nice thing about sprints is that for me as a designer, because it's rooted in design thinking, and it provides this construct to float through five days—and again I mentioned clarity through constraints and that speed of execution—it gives you an opportunity to go from empathy all the way to testing the idea. And prototyping is of course in there, inside of that.
Whereas lean is focused on build, measure, learn. So you just start out by building and you're going to put it out and then learn from the reactions. As a designer I am a big believer in that initial upfront step of empathizing and understanding. When you understand what that problem is and who you're solving it for, and it carries you through that initial slice of the prototype that's just enough to get in front of users, and I have a hard time imagining folks who wouldn't want to move faster and learn more, and be able to then iterate.
And this is one way of doing it. It's a methodology that I've embraced that I...it gets me out of my own decision deadlock as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So in the wake of that kind of feedback around, “Hey, how is this going to be any different, you're saying treat it as a mindset,” hopefully people are willing to adopt a new mindset or at least test it out. But there are also those who start to get kind of nitty gritty, right? They might say something like, “Oh, I don't even know where to get customers to test this prototype,” or, “I don't want to bother our existing customers.” How do you get over some of those more practical hurdles?
Charbel Semaan: Sure. That's a great question. On the customer front, I think, on one hand, you hopefully have a pocket of customers who have a major interest in everything you're doing. They want to be those early adopters. They want to test new features. They're your biggest fans. And so on one front you can always start with them and then treat them right, treat them in a way where you have this open communication that we appreciate coming to you because you're such a fan of ours and we're a fan of you, and we want to come bring you our latest and greatest to see are we doing right by you. Are we solving the problems that you need solved, are we getting the jobs done that you need done through our software or through our product or service?
So I think on that front you build those ongoing and sustainable relationships with them.
Poornima Vijayashanker: And if it's a new customer base?
Charbel Semaan: If it's a new customer base, I think going back to that understanding the problem and understanding who. When you understand those two things, it's surprisingly simple to find where they are. If you understand their habits, you understand their desires and their pains and their struggles, you understand where they seek the solution to this problem elsewhere, you can go to those places.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So do you have an example of a situation where a lot of these practicalities started to add up and people just completely lost sight of making a decision on design sprints?
Case Study of A Product Design Sprint
Charbel Semaan: Yeah. Great question. There's an example where...come back to the internal learning development team at Medallia. We had big needs, we had problems to solve in terms of scaling, training, especially for the growing sales team, the growing engineering team, which are very common teams that start to spark and grow quickly. And especially globally. So how do we scale the training? And practicalities like, well, video's going to be expensive. Getting all the equipment. Having the studio. Do we even have time to shoot video and do that. People don't watch online learnings. A lot of the common...what might be common sense or these truths that we think we have in our businesses, and the reality was when we ran a sprint, it was actually a colleague of mine and we ran a sprint.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So how did you get over that hurdle to actually get them to run the sprint given these practicalities?
Charbel Semaan: That's a good question. There were a couple of people who were advocates. They wanted to embrace it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: And the challenge was showing that running the sprint and the output of the sprint...the output of the sprint was actually more important than the sprint itself in a way. So because the output...and first they wanted to embrace the approach. They embraced the approach. They wanted to try it. And they wanted to get to that output. So we shared that video with the entire HR organization, and the output, the video itself, was what people focused on. Then when they wondered, “Well wait a minute, when did you do this and how did you do it so quickly?” That's when we were able to say, “Well, we ran a sprint on it.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Interesting.
Charbel Semaan: And we just shortcut a lot of the decision deadlock, a lot of the concerns and a lot...we did it with an iPhone on a makeshift tripod in this corner office that we blacked out the windows and we were able to just run with it. And it's not the greatest-looking video but it's a prototype. Then people realized, “Wow, we can go this quickly and this nimbly, why don't we embrace this and actually try to do more?”
And the greatest part about that—I love the outcome here—is that, the head of the team said, “Great. Here's a budget to go get the equipment you need, on a reasonable amount of money, and why don't we use this corner room more frequently for these videos and let's run with this.”
If All Else Fails: Show People The Output of The Product Design Sprint
Poornima Vijayashanker: So that's pretty cool. You basically turned design thinking on its head. Instead of trying to get people to adopt the methodology, just show them the output, tell them about the outcomes, and then when there's a curiosity for how did this all come about, then you can say, “We used design thinking.”
Charbel Semaan: That's right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Cool. And I think then people are going to start to embrace it in more sections of the organization, or on more projects.
Charbel Semaan: That's right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, that is an awesome insight, Charbel. So for those of you out there who are stuck, feeling a lot of pushback, maybe instead of trying to get people to adopt the methodology, present them with the output and the outcomes and use that to strike the conversation.
Thank you for joining us, Charbel, and for our audience out there, how can they get in touch with you?
Charbel Semaan: Great. Thanks for having me on. This has been blast. You can reach me at charbel@madeinpublic.com, and visit madeinpublic.com, and see the projects that I'm working on, the sprints that I run publicly to help teach and empower to run sprints themselves. And sign up for the newsletter as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more great episodes and short build tips. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
How many times have you and your team spent countless hours building, bug fixing, finally releasing a new feature only to hear feedback from a customer that it’s not what they wanted?
Or worse, they don’t say anything…
Why?
Because they aren’t even using the new feature!
Back to the drawing board…
Yet again it again takes weeks or months to build and tweak and nothing changes. You just keep missing the target, asking for more time, money, and resources.
But it doesn’t help, and people just end up burning out building the wrong thing.
What if I told you that the problem in your product development process is that you are spending too much time, money, and resources and need to cut back?
OK, I’ll give you a minute to shake your head at me...
Sometimes when we have too much it causes us to go in a lot of different directions. Or worse no direction at all because we’re stuck in a decision deadlock!
We lose sight of our customers and end up building just for the sake of building, thinking that we know what problem we are solving, but we don’t.
As a result, our product debt keeps growing and a redesigns don’t help.
So how can we stop building the wrong thing and solving the wrong problem?
We can start by constraining the amount of time we have to help us focus on uncovering and solving one problem at a time.
And in today’s episode, we’re going to dive into the framework behind this new approach called product design sprints.
To help us out, I've invited Charbel Semaan, who has been a product designer for the last 20 years and recently launched his brand, Made in Public.
If you’re eager to get an idea out, worried about how long it’s going to take your team to execute, and concerned about wasting time, money and other resources, then you owe it to yourself to watch today’s episode!
Here’s what you’ll learn:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
## Product Design Sprint: How a Product Design Sprint Fast Tracks Testing Your Ideas Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: Eager to get an idea out there but worried about how long it's going to take you and your team to execute? Well, in today's *Build* episode, we're going to show you how you can embrace design sprints as a way to test your ideas and get your prototype out there faster. Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
One misconception a lot of us fall prey to is this need to do a massive build out before we launch a product. The results, unfortunately, are that we end up spending a lot of time, money, and energy possibly building the wrong thing. As a result, customers don't want it, teams burn out, and companies lose sight of their business goals. In today's episode, we're going to tackle this misconception, share with you how you can embrace design sprints to help you iterate faster and get your prototypes out there, and in future episodes, we'll talk about how you can evangelize design sprints within your organization and handle any pushback that you might get from your teammates or stakeholders. To help us out, I've invited Charbel Semaan, who has been a product designer for the last 20 years and recently launched his brand, Made in Public. Thanks for joining us today, Charbel.
Charbel Semaan: Thanks for having me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: I'm excited to be here.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. For our audiences out there, let's start by digging into your background a little. I know you've been a designer for the last 20 years and recently started Made in Public, but walk us through that evolution.
Charbel Semaan: Sure. I started out as a designer, self-taught, when I was 15 and fell in love with it. I continued to design through college, would dabble with side projects, and never formally studied it and was formally trained, but continued to develop my skills as much as I could. I've had this interesting blend of design specialties throughout my career. I've done product design, brand design. I've done curriculum design for training programs. Bringing all of that together, I've realized I've broadened my career or widened my career. What I enjoy most is using design as a way to solve problems as a methodology, and I also enjoy teaching it. I enjoy teaching designs so people can embrace it in whatever area of work they do.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that's great. Now, what does Made in Public do?
Charbel Semaan: Made in Public now combines all of that and I get to run my own side-project design sprints. I run sprints publicly so people can see what it's like to go through the process of going from idea to action in a very short amount of time.
And then in that way, as well, I use it as a way to teach. I really like to teach design through live experiments.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's dive into today's topic of design sprints. Before we talk about what design sprints are, let's maybe start with that product design background that you have and showcase what you saw was broken and why the need, maybe, for a new process.
Why Do We Need A New Process For Designing Products
Charbel Semaan: Sure. I think part of it is...there may not always be something that's broken, per se. I think design thinking has influenced my career heavily, and I've learned a lot through what IDEO has put out into the world and other great design firms out there. I think design sprints, in some ways, is a derivative of design thinking. It's another way of thinking about the design process.
What it can help guard against or help avoid are things like decision deadlock. Or it helps guard against overthinking what the big thing should be and helps you pair down because of constraints. You have five steps, and according to the Google Ventures-inspired design sprint and Jake Knapp and the author, the co-authors, the five-day approach constrains you so you're not trying to build something that could take you five months.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: Really, you're trying to create something in five days.
What Does A Product Design Sprint Look Like
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's talk about what that looks like. What is that design sprint over those five days?
Charbel Semaan: Sure. The first step of the five steps, or five days depending on if you want to compress it even further, the first step is to understand. Map and understand and unpack the problem you're trying to solve and for whom you're solving it.
I think for anybody who's creating any kind of product, it's always essential to get down to: what problem am I solving, and who has the problem?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: And do I understand that person and their journey and how they first might interact with my product all the way through to the interaction and to the end result, or what I like to call the desired outcome? What's the desired outcome that they want after using your product? What is it solving?
Poornima Vijayashanker: It's one person. A lot of times, we have multiple users or multiple personas, but in this design sprint, we're going to limit ourselves to one persona.
Charbel Semaan: You can. It's important in that unpacking and understanding to understand: who might the other people be?
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
One Key To A Successful Product Design Sprint Is To Pare Down The Problem And Who You Are Solving It For
Charbel Semaan: If there are multiple people, acknowledging that and having an understanding and awareness of that is great. Then you might, through the rest of the course of the sprint, you might say, "We're only going to focus on this one particular person or particular user of the product, because that's basically the breadth that we have." We can't really do much more. We know we've got other folks, but we're at least going to focus this sprint on this person.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it.
Charbel Semaan: And then that leads to, when you understand the problem, and you understand that person and how they're facing that problem, then the second step is to sketch. This is a fun part where...this is where most people want to get into brainstorming and get a lot of ideas on the table. One of the things I like to say—and I borrow this from what I've learned through IDEO—is to think with your hands.
Now you get to actually get pen to paper, pen to Post-its, and you get to sketch a variety of solutions. If you've got about six or so people in this room with you, even if you're running it with a co-founder or you're running it solo, this is where you get a chance to get a number, a variety of sketches out on the table or out on paper.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: The third step is to decide. You go through all the sketches that you've laid out, and through a number of exercises, like noting and voting and dot voting. There are a number of different ways to approach it...you actually decide: what will the blueprint be for your prototype?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: And then the prototype is the fourth step.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yep.
Charbel Semaan: That's where you actually get to create a realistic version of what you want this product to be, or the service, for that matter, and you get it out to real users by the fifth step or the fifth day. That's where folks get to interact with what you've created, the prototype, and then you can learn and observe and understand what you can improve, or did you—and this is a key part—did you validate your hypothesis? Did you validate or invalidate what you had sought out to figure out?
How Dot Voting Works In A Product Design Sprint Gets Rid Of Decision Deadlock
Poornima Vijayashanker: There's a few things going on. Let's kind of unpack them in more detail. The first is, you mentioned this concept of voting and dot voting, which I like the concept a lot. I've started implementing it. But maybe for our audience out there who's not familiar, we can shed some like into what that is.
Charbel Semaan: Sure. One of the exercises after you've gone through sketching...let's say you're in a room with about six people. You're running the sprint with six people.
All six people have generated really interesting ideas and really interesting concepts or mock-ups of what the product might be. Dot voting and noting and voting, especially if you've decided ahead of time—and hopefully you have—who the decider is. There will be one person who's going to be the decider, and they get the majority vote, or they get extra votes.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. Two votes.
Charbel Semaan: Or extra dates. Exactly.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: One of the things that's fun is doing what's called a museum gallery, where everyone's mock-ups on their 8-1/2 x 11 sheets of paper and Post-its go up on the wall. Everyone has a chance to review everyone else's mock-ups. You can vote with dots, like a marker and dots, on the elements or aspects that you find compelling or you find interesting. When it comes to decision time after the voting and whatnot, you actually get to distill the best ideas from the entire group. That's one of my favorite aspects of the sprint, is that...some people say, "Oh, I'm not very creative."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: Or, "I'm not the designer." Or, "I'm not the engineer. I'm a technical person."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: What I have found is when you bring a collective creative together like that, then sometimes the best ideas come from someone you might not expect to come from.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: Then the voting allows for decision making, because you can't do all the features. The voting helps you distill it down to some of the key elements that you want to focus on for the prototype.
Who Needs To Participate In A Product Design Sprint
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's talk about who needs to be involved in this process. We've already kind of mentioned that designers, engineers are great, people who are going to be building out that final prototype, but who, aside from them, needs to be involved?
Charbel Semaan: Great question. I found what's very important is to have someone who is part of the overall decision-making process. That can either be one of the founders or any of the founders or all of the founders, someone who's at a VP level or a C-suite level, depending on the structure of your organization and how large your organization is.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So maybe whoever understands the business goals?
Charbel Semaan: The business goals, for sure, and anyone who is even involved in sort of the direction and vision of the overall business.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: Certainly the people who would be doing the building itself and the designing itself, and definitely folks who are involved in the business side of things.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why? I mean, doesn't that feel like they're micromanaging? Shouldn't they just trust their designers and engineers and let them run free?
Charbel Semaan: Yeah. It's a great question. One of the key principles of design that I've embodied and believe in so much is this two-part or two-fold aspect of inclusivity and collaboration.
You want to be inclusive and collaborative, and that avoids this waterfall effect where...if just the engineers and the devs and the designers are in the room, and the so-called business folks are out of the room, then it becomes this, "Now let's go back and take it to them and show them this, get approval, and then..." But when folks are in the room together, that's when those ideas can come out. More often than not, an idea gets sparked from one person, and especially if you embrace this yes/and approach.
It's like, "Oh, that's a great idea. You know, what if we also did this." Or, "Could we also try this?" "I didn't think of that. That's great. OK." And then you get back to that voting and say, "Great. We can't do it all, but let's distill them." You actually have a richer conversation and a richer collaborative experience when you include more aspects of the business.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I think that's great that you're bringing all these people to the table, involving them in the process. Now, that's obviously a lot of overhead, right, for a founder or for a VP or some of these people to come in and sit in on a five-day design sprint. I'm sure there's going to be some pushback around it, which we're going to get to in the next episode. But for the purpose of this episode, how do we kind of constrain the time so that they don't feel like they're sitting in on a whole-day session?
Charbel Semaan: Right. I think there are a couple of ways of approaching it. One is to think about design sprints more as a mindset, or an approach. The pushback I hear a lot is this five-day—"We don't have five full days to have six critical members of our team..." I completely understand that. It makes a lot of sense. The response I often share to that is, "Would you rather invest up front in those five days, where all five or six of you or seven of you can come in, and you're investing that time, which is money. I understand. Would you rather invest that and have the opportunity to come out with something that yields you a real opportunity to engage with a real prototype with real people in five days instead of five months?"
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Instead of five months of a bloated product that you're not even sure is actually something that the people want or are going to use or pay for.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: You haven't validated. You may have those silos that you mentioned earlier. There tends to be tension. I mean, we've experienced it where there's tension between engineering and design and product and marketing and sales, etc. And you mentioned earlier about the business folks. It can be the founders. It can be the head of sales. It can be anyone who's involved in key elements of the business. When you bring them together for those five days, you tend to circumvent a lot of wasted money, wasted time, and I come back to decision deadlock. That's a key thing I've noticed, is the inability to get through that decision, that blocker, that keeps them from—
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Let's talk about that. Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Sure. The key thing about the sprint...and whether it's five days...sometimes it can be compressed to three if done well. I've tried one. It's very hard.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
How Having Constraints In A Product Design Sprint Leads to Clarity
Charbel Semaan: It's extremely challenging to do it in one day. I don't always recommend that. But the key part about the decision deadlock in the sprint—when you're using the sprint as a methodology, as an approach and a mindset, as opposed to fixating on the number of days and time—is it's going so fast, and there are so many constraints, that constraints lead to clarity.
You don't have a whole lot of time to spend on, should it be this way, or should it be that way? You're simply saying, "Here are the ways. Let's pick one, and let's try it. We're going to find out if it's validated or not—”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: “—and then we can run another one again."
Poornima Vijayashanker: I see. That's great. Yeah, because I think that's actually...I was going to ask the question around scope creep, but it sounds like if you're whittling things down, it becomes very obvious what that particular thing is that you're building, whether it's a feature or whatnot, and what the problem is that you're solving versus all these other problems that might be tangential.
Charbel Semaan: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, you get that real level of focus, but I'm sure unifying people around what that one thing is is a challenge.
The Role Of The Facilitator In A Product Design Sprint
Charbel Semaan: It is. That's why it's important at the start of the sprint for me, as a facilitator, to first get permission and to get that commitment from everyone that I'm here to facilitate. I'm here to guide the process and really help extract or be able to foster and cultivate their ability to create and to go validate what it is they're trying to find out. The second part is having that decider in the room. When everyone agrees and commits to who the decider is...and for that decider to be convicted in their decisions and to truly commit to, "Lot of these things are great things we can do. We could save them for another sprint. We're really going to hone in on and focus on this particular aspect."
Poornima Vijayashanker: I could imagine that whoever the decider is needs to have done their homework and be really wedded to the customers, the problem. Are there ever times where they're not sure? They may need to say, "Oh, you know what? It's two problems here. Not really sure which one. I need another day to go back and do research, or a week," in which case, now you're holding up the sprint.
Charbel Semaan: Yes. Great point. Again, the beauty here is, because you're aiming for that fifth step or that fifth day to get the prototype in front of users, to take another day, which will turn into a week, as you said, is not helping anyone.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Instead, note that you've got this second thing that you might want to do, or you think you have a hunch that maybe that's also a problem. It very well could be, and that's perfectly fine. Just let it be there.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Pick one and go with it, and get to that fifth day or get to that fifth step. Get the feedback. Learn from it. And observe how folks are interacting with it, whether it's a feature, like you said, or it's the entire mock-up of a product, and then iterate and do it again.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. Yeah, so then there's not a lot of leeway for ambiguity, and you have to get comfortable making those firm decisions to keep the sprint moving forward.
Charbel Semaan: Absolutely. I think that's the key part, is to be convicted in your decisions and to keep moving forward, because this is a sprint.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, yeah.
Charbel Semaan: You're just getting to that finish line.
Poornima Vijayashanker: We've talked about these five days. Day one is sort of this brainstorming session.
Charbel Semaan: Day one's actually unpacking and understanding.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: You want to have a good understanding of the problem and who has the problem. Then you go into sketching a variety of solutions. The third day, you decide what you're going to prototype. The fourth day is the actual prototyping. And the fifth day is getting that prototype in front of real people.
How To Measure Success For A Product Design Sprint
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. How do you know, once you've done these five days and put something out there, whether or not the sprint was successful?
Charbel Semaan: That can vary sometimes from team to team and people to people, and depending on the product and service. What I like to anchor to, though, is, did you get some level of a lightbulb moment or an a-ha moment?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Did you learn something? If you didn't learn anything by the end of the sprint, then you may not have understood the problem as deeply as you thought you did, and you may not have understood the person for who you're solving it for.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice.
Charbel Semaan: I like to measure it in terms of, on one hand, there's the analytical side.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure.
Charbel Semaan: Like, do we get buy-in, or do we get people who are turning into customers saying, "If you're going to launch that and that actual product in the next two weeks or month, OK, here's my preorder"? Great. On the other side of it, have you learned something from it?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Mm-hmm. Even if it's an epic fail here, nobody likes it, they thought the feature was just crap, there's insight there where it's like, "Hey, we're not going to be building that."
Charbel Semaan: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Or, "We're not going to flesh that out in greater detail."
How Product Design Sprints Help You Fail Faster And Cheaper!
Charbel Semaan: Like the majority of my products and ideas. I've learned something, though, or the team has learned something. If it's an epic fail, great. And this goes back to what I mentioned earlier. Would you rather have the epic fail and realize that in five days, or five months later after you spent tens of thousands of dollars or more? If you're outsourcing it, tens of thousands or more. If you've got an internal team, and you've got all your engineering and design and development time and dollars, that a-ha moment can go on the positive. Let's keep moving forward with this. We're onto something...or it's the, "OK, start over. But at least we only spent five days doing it."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. Yeah. I think that time investment is great. I think even in those epic failures, a couple things develop. You now have a process with your team. There's some comradery and some communication barriers that have been broken down. Then there's still some interesting customer insights. A customer telling you, "Hey, I didn't like this feature. What I was really looking for was X, Y, Z," that's a valuable conversation to have.
Just kind of developing, like you said, that confidence around, "OK, I'm going to practice active listening for what it is they're looking for."
Charbel Semaan: Great point. There are two things that...
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
How Product Design Sprints Bring Teams Together And Improve Communication
Charbel Semaan: You just triggered a couple of thoughts for me. One is on the team communication and bonding front. What I've noticed is the team ends up developing a common language and a common baseline or foundation to work with. The next time, I'll hear something like, "Well, why don't we go sketch this? Let's go sketch some...we're talking about a lot of ideas or a lot of ways that we could do this feature. Let's just sketch them out, and let's vote on them." Right? "And let's make sure one of us is the decider," or whatever it might be. The other part that you mentioned around the lessons that you'll learn from the actual people who are interacting with is, more often than not in my experience, folks don't simply say, "I don't like that feature."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Or, "That didn't solve my problem. Thanks. Bye."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: They're usually walking through. And if you're facilitating that empathy interview and that observation time, you're asking questions like, "Could you walk through, think out loud, while you're engaging with this?" More often than not, they're going to say something like, "Well, this confuses me. I'm not sure what this does. I kind of wish it would do this."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Or you could ask, "Well, what do you wish it would do for you?" You're going to learn so much more. It's not a binary: they didn't like it and you're going to walk away.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: You're still going to learn so much, like you said.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. We've run a sprint. We got some feedback. Maybe it was successful. Maybe it was not successful. But what's the next step?
Charbel Semaan: The next step, I think, is to understand: what did you get out of this? What was the yield? Did you learn something about what's working, and you want to double down on that?
You can double down on that in your existing product development methodology, whatever you have. Maybe it's agile, or whatever it might be.
If it's something that turned out to not work out so well, it was a failure—if you want to call it that—then you could think about, "Well, could we run a sprint on one of those other ideas that we sketched out?" Or taking what we learned from the people who interacted with it, it turns out, we had that in some of the sketches. Why don't we incorporate that next?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, nice. Yeah.
How Product Design Sprints Help With Your Existing Product Development Process
Charbel Semaan: You may not run another five-day sprint the following week, but you now are so much more informed about your existing product development cycle that you could start to pull in some stories, if you run agile, or whatever your approach is.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. The idea is to use design sprints for moments where you've got a lot of ideas, you're not sure which one to execute on, and really for that quicker design feedback, but not as a standalone methodology for every week, we're doing a design sprint.
Charbel Semaan: I don't think so.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Charbel Semaan: Yeah. I think it works out better in the way you described it. I think, particularly, sprints are great when you start to notice a little bit of that clog.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Charbel Semaan: You're getting to that decision deadlock, or you've got a problem you want to solve, but you're just grinding on it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Charbel Semaan: The sprint allows you to just get moving. It allows you to go from thinking to action.
Same when you have a new idea. You've got lots of new ways that you think...well, we think we might be able to roll out a feature that could generate another hundred grand in revenue. Or we think we could branch off the product. There's this whole other market, and that could be a million-dollar product on its own or more. Well, run a sprint on it instead of thinking about it or figuring out, “could it be? Should it be? What do we do with it?”
Poornima Vijayashanker: I'm sure other teams—maybe marketing, sales, customer support, all these other teams out there—are probably going to start embracing design and using it. Have you seen the design sprints used for other things?
Charbel Semaan: Yeah. Actually, this is my favorite part.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Why Product Design Sprints Aren’t Just For Product Teams
Charbel Semaan: It's not just for product teams, at least anymore. Two favorite examples of mine, where teams that you might not expect have used design sprints and they've used them successfully: learning and development team at Medallia used a design sprint. We ran a design sprint to think about: how could we start scaling training across the entire company through video and through online learning? We ran a sprint where we had a scrappy video set up in one of the small corner offices, and we got out an example, a prototype, of a training video on a completely low, tight budget. It showed a proof of concept to the team and the entire organization what's possible.
My other favorite example is my friend Brian Bautista at SoundHound. He's the customer support person and customer success for SoundHound, and he's been transitioning, actually, and has officially transitioned to the product marketing team because of a prototype and a sprint that we ran.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Cool.
Charbel Semaan: Not necessarily on the product itself, but he was helping educate on the product and wanted to ensure that people were using SoundHound and Hound in the best possible way. What he wanted to do was test a new type of video. It was more personable. Could showcase a little bit more of the humanity of the brand and the personality of the brand. In eight hours, believe it or not—
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, cool.
Charbel Semaan: —ran a prototype on what that video could be, takes it to his VP of marketing, and she loved it and greenlit more videos.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, thank you so much, Charbel, for teaching us about design sprints today.
Charbel Semaan: My pleasure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. For all of you out there who are watching and listening, Charbel and I want to know, is there something that you've been stuck on? Maybe a decision deadlock when it comes to a product or a service, or even something in your personal life. Let us know what it is in the comments below this video. That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll dive into how you can evangelize design sprints at your organization. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
Transcript for What Is Product Debt And Why You Need To Prioritize Paying It Down
Poornima Vijayashanker: Did you recently show your designs to an engineer and hear this?
Ronan Dunlop: It is going to be challenging to implement in time for the next release.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why?
Ronan Dunlop: They're pretty complex.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why are they complex?
Ronan Dunlop: This slider alone is new functionality that is going to take at least two days’ worth of time to implement on the front end, maybe more.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK, what else?
Ronan Dunlop: To do these visualizations we're going to need to pull in a lot of data, and that's going to slow down the performance of the app. Some of these new workflows require changes to our current APIs, which have already accrued a significant amount of tech debt.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Ronan Dunlop: It doesn't seem doable for the upcoming release. I'd recommend changing the designs.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I think we should go talk to Leslie about the importance of paying down product debt in every release.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, and I've got a new *Build* tip for you. Remember we talked about tech debt with Jay Hum from Pivotal? If you missed that *Build*, tip I've included a link to it below this video. Today we're going to explore product debt. To help us out, I've invited Leslie Yang, who's a Senior Product Designer at Pivotal Labs. Thanks for joining us, Leslie.
Leslie Yang: Thanks for having me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So Leslie, tell me what's product debt?
Leslie Yang: Great question. Product debt is the debt that a product incurs when the UX is really starting to change and cease to be as successful and helpful as it used to be.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Can you give some examples?
Leslie Yang: For example, you'll hear someone say, "Hey, I want to test this new feature. Where should I put it? Let's put it in the tabs." You're like, "Should we put in the tabs? Let's go figure this out."
Poornima Vijayashanker: What else?
Leslie Yang: Let's see, so you can say that our workflow is complicated because our users have gotten so used to it, so we just end up annoying them or losing them if we change anything.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Anything else?
Leslie Yang: Another one is we just added a new feature and we want to promote it, so can we just add a button next to everyone's name and just highlight the hell out of it? No.
Poornima Vijayashanker: These are all great examples I think of product debt that we have experienced both as consumers of a product, but also folks who are designing products?
Leslie Yang: Absolutely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I'll have to admit, as an engineer I have been guilty of ganging up on those designers responsible for deprioritizing product debt, and no, it's not a good practice. How can we help people in our audience who are designers avoid being ganged up on and making sure that product debt remains a priority?
Leslie Yang: Absolutely. As a designer it's great to be able to focus on the research, to focus on the user experience, but you should also focus on being a really good facilitator. Control the dialogue around feedback. Focus on the product vision and the product strategy and the business strategy and then connect that design feedback to it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What does that look like in practice, as an example?
Leslie Yang: Let's say, for example, a business strategy is to improve the number of active daily users for monetization reasons. You want to make sure that the user experience is focused on building up to that and meeting that metric. One more thing. You can totally work with PMs on this as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK, so as a designer approach a PM? How would that help?
Leslie Yang: You can work with product on this by pulling the data and looking at it together and then figuring out where the areas you want to improve on.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Great, so it actually provides some evidence for why you need to
pay down that product debt?
Leslie Yang: Exactly.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What about engineers? I'm sure they want to contribute and make sure that the conversations are useful.
Leslie Yang: Absolutely and I love that when engineers are in those conversations on product with us. What someone like Ronan could do if he was concerned about data visualization, he could come up to one of us as designers and say, "Hey, how does this idea of introducing data vis tools really fit in with the product vision? What do you think?” Just coming from a place of curiosity is really helpful. That creates this really positive dialogue.
Poornima Vijayashanker: He's probably going to learn more and not jump to, “Oh my gosh, this is going to cause a performance issue and a bottleneck” and all this stuff.
Leslie Yang: Exactly, and I think riffing with, I love the riffing that happens between designers and developers because you can come up with some really creative solutions you otherwise would not have come up with separately.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What can teams do to continue to prioritize and pay down product debt?
Leslie Yang: What my belief is is that developers should be brought into work early and often. They should be in the feature ideation process. I will have devs sketch with us on UIs.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, great. How does that help?
Leslie Yang: It makes a huge difference because by being involved early and in frequent times they're able to contribute ideas and also understand and have user empathy. The work that we create together is not going to be overly complex. It will be well thought out and by the time that the work comes to them it's not a surprise. They know what to expect.
Poornima Vijayashanker: These are fantastic tips, Leslie. Thank you so much for sharing them with us today.
Leslie Yang: You're so welcome.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Leslie and I want to know, how do you handle product debt at your company? Let us know in the comments below this video. That's it for today's *Build* tip. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more episodes of *Build* and great *Build* tips like today's. Special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
Transcript for Should You Worry About Your Skills Getting Rusty?
Poornima Vijayashanker: In the last episode, we talked about what it's like to transition from being an individual contributor into a leader, and explored some tradeoffs. If you missed the episode, be sure to check it out in the link below this video. In today's episode, we're gonna talk about one of the major concerns people have that holds them back from doing the transition, which is the concern that their skills are gonna get rusty. So, stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. One myth that often holds us back from transitioning from being that individual contributor into a leader is the fear that we're gonna get rusty when it comes to the skills that we've worked painstakingly hard to craft. If you're an engineer, you're gonna lose the ability to code. If you're a designer, you lose the ability to design. And if you're a salesperson or a marketer, you lose your ability to close. Well, in today's episode, we're gonna debunk that myth and more. And to help us out, Jean Hsu is back, who is an engineering leadership coach. She's gonna help us dive into this myth.
Thanks again for joining us, Jean.
Jean Hsu: Thanks for having me again.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Last time we talked about the benefits of going from being an individual contributor to a leader, especially in engineering. And not to shy away from it if we feel worried that we're not capable of doing it. But I know another concern that people have is not about their capabilities of doing the future work or being a leader, but, "Oh my gosh. I'm no longer going to be capable of doing my current job," whether that's coding, designing, marketing, or so on. Why do you think people have this fear?
Jean Hsu: I think it's something we touched on last time, which is they don't see the path of the leadership role. So of course you're going to hold onto what you know, which is the technical skills, the coding, all that stuff. A lot of the times when I have this conversation with people, what I say is, "As a coach what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna illuminate that other path, the leadership path." And for most of the people I'm talking to, it's not as much of a technical leadership path. It's more of a people management path, which are both leadership paths. But part of my role is to illuminate that, so that they then...then the question is, implies that you don't want those technical skills to get rusty, right?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Jean Hsu: Which I often feel like it's a symptom of they're not getting enough investment in seeing the rewards of stepping into a leadership role and having a more broader impact.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, or learning new skills.
Jean Hsu: Right, or learning new skills.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Is this a legitimate fear, though? Do our skills become rusty as we go into a new leadership position or any new role?
Jean Hsu: I mean, for my technical skills, yeah for sure, they're rusty. They're definitely rusty because I'm not practicing them. I think you do have to get to a point where you feel comfortable with that. I definitely was at a point when I wasn't comfortable with that, when I was in transition. I remember one morning, I woke up and my calendar was back-to-back, 9:00 to 5:30 filled with meetings. I pulled out my laptop and I opened up three pull requests, just delete code that I had found that was unused. It was like 15 minutes. I was like, "OK. Good. I've done something today."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, sometimes throwing out trash is helpful.
Jean Hsu: Yeah. And when I told my manager this, he was like, "Is that the best use of your time?" He asked me this. Like, OK clearly you know the answer to that. It's a rhetorical question. It's not the best use of my time, and it's actually indicative of something else, which is that I haven't really transitioned my mindset to the actual work that I'm doing in this new role, is work. And seeing the impact of it. That wasn't clear to me yet. So that's why I was holding onto this thing that made me feel good in my past role.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. How can you figure out what the new work is? I think that's a big problem for people, is they're thrust into this role, or it's a nice promotion, or maybe they genuinely want it, but then in that first week, month, even year, they're not really sure what to do on a day-to-day basis.
Jean Hsu: Yeah. I mean, I think adding to that is that a lot of companies have founders or managers who also haven't done it before. They're not getting that model of, oh this is who I want to be as a manager. As an engineer, you see all sorts. Oh, this person went to Android or front end, they're more of a tech lead. This person's more of a Ten-X engineer type. And you don't really get to see that as much if you're talking purely about the people side of leadership, the people management.
One of the ways that you can do that is, I mean it's a little bit self-promotional, but working with a coach like me, who can help you see that path or help the people on your team see that path. There's books. There's definitely resources. There's a lot of Slack teams, that I think just being in the Slack teams is lurking. You kind of absorb what are the topics people talk about. And what are the things that come up. When you're not managing people, you don't see the things, like performance reviews, performance improvement plans, how to reward people, how to give them positive feedback and incentivize them and motivate them. You don't see that as a post lead.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I think you're onto something, the concept of shadowing. Actually it can be really valuable. For me personally, I got to do a lot of that, having been at a very early stage startup and not as the founder, but rather as a founding engineer. Seeing how marketing and sales and engineering and product all operated and the leaders in those was valuable because when you're on the ground floor, you see how people develop, but not everybody has access to that. And not every manager enjoys being shadowed. What are some other ways you could simulate that kind of behavior?
Jean Hsu: You know, I think if you have a close peer group at your company, that can be a good place to start to have these conversations. Someplace that's trusted and confidential. If you're a tech lead or you're a first-time people manager, to have someone you can say, "Hey, I have this situation," and you don't have to be alone in figuring out a strategy to deal with it, but you can go to your peer and have this peer mentoring or coaching relationship. I found that that's useful just in seeing what other people are doing and their perspectives.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. What about setting expectations? I think some managers are good at setting expectations and some are more carefree and want you to discover it yourself. What have you seen in your experience?
Jean Hsu: What do you mean by the expectation?
Poornima Vijayashanker: So the expectation of, hey if you're a hiring manager, for example, you're gonna hire 30 direct reports.
Jean Hsu: Oh, I see.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Or if you are the team manager, you're gonna push this product. Whatever the goals are of the organization. Some people are better at delineating and having a clear set of expectations, along with standards. And others are like, "Well, here's the company motto. Do no evil and ship." So you're like, "Within the confines of that, what do I do on a day-to-day?"
Jean Hsu: Yeah. I think having some quarterly or monthly alignment and expectation setting is useful. It's the same as the first time you become a manager or a tech lead, it feels really awkward to not have...most people start off with like no stand-ps. Then they're like, "Well, I don't know what this person's working on. I haven't heard from them in three days." It's like, well maybe you should have standups, or maybe you should have some sort of weekly or bi-weekly, every other, twice a week meeting where people say if they're on track or not. I think that's generally a good strategy, is to set the high level expectations and then report back on those. Am I on track to hit those goals? Because then it feels like it's set up beforehand, so it's not, "Hey I noticed things aren't going well, so that's why I'm checking in on you."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure. Then it feels like am I getting reprimanded or am I getting guided.
Jean Hsu: Right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, coming back to this concept again of the skills. And as somebody who is either technical or has a craft, and moving away from that into this more amorphous, squishy leadership role, are there actual skills that you acquire as a leader?
Jean Hsu: Oh yeah, for sure.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, what are those?
Jean Hsu: One of the ways that I was told to think about it, for me, I was sort of like, "I don't understand. I have these technical skills and now I'm being asked to do this thing where I feel like it's a completely different skill set. I'm talking to people one-on-one all day and dealing with the things that are coming up there." The way I was told, or asked to think about it, was that it's still problem solving, it's just that the interfaces and the APIs are people and teams, rather than code and services and the systems. They're still systems, but it's people and teams, and you have to think about how do these teams, what's the API between them and it's more like that.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What are some skills that you can point to now on your resume or LinkedIn?
Jean Hsu: How to give difficult feedback.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's important.
Jean Hsu: How to debug teams that are not working efficiently. There's the low-level tweaks, like, oh, email once a day. The low-level things. But then taking a team that's not working very effectively and making a bunch of high-level changes in staffing, and then have them actually be able to execute because of the changes you made. That's something you don't get to see. Rather than the little refactors, you're doing more of a full rewrite or something.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, a re-org, right?
Jean Hsu: Re-org, yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Anything else?
Jean Hsu: Yeah. There's a ton. As many technical skills there are, there are as many in leadership and people management.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I think it's important for people to understand that. What about writing? Do you feel like that's a valuable skill?
Jean Hsu: Yeah. I mean, Medium was very much a writing culture. Everything was written internally, the internal version of Medium. I feel like that's something that—I consider myself also still in a leadership role, even though I just work for myself, but I work with a lot of people and I feel like all the time I spend in writing has come back. It's a huge investment for me. Yeah, it pays off.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So in being a leader, investing in writing is good, whether or not you're actually comfortable doing it or you feel like you're particularly good at it.
Jean Hsu: Yeah. I think it's something that's really valuable to get better at. Even if you're not publishing. Whether it's writing emails. I'm sure you've all had this experience where you get this massive email and you don't even read it. And then whoever sent it is like, "But I sent you all the information." It's sort of this brain dump, over-communication strategy. I think writing is just a part of communication and figuring out what's the right level of communication because you can under-communicate, and most people in engineering teams tend to under-communicate. And then there's this tendency to over-communicate, to try to correct for it. And then people just tune you out. Figuring out what do people want to hear. What do they care about. That's all part of the writing, too.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice. Now what prompted you to transition to being an engineering leadership coach?
Jean Hsu: In reflecting in my time at Medium, I realize that I had a lot of peer support. A lot of peer support and my manager's support in making that transition. And even then it was hard. So I started talking to people at different companies and realizing that that transition, most people don't have any support. They have their direct reports and they have to keep it together, so they seem like things aren't falling apart. And a lot of times, they have the absent, whoever, CEO or CTO, who's not really helping them and they don't have that peer. And so I really wanted to...I saw how the benefits of having a really people-centric and caring engineering manager, because that's really the type of team we built at Medium, and thinking about how to expand my own impact. It was like, "Oh, what if I worked with a bunch of different companies and tried to help them level up their engineering management game?"
That's kind of how I landed on that. I also really enjoyed the one-on-one work that I was doing at Medium for the team.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice. So that's what you're doing now? You are a leadership coach for engineering teams.
Jean Hsu: That's right, yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What's your sweet spot in terms of a team size?
Jean Hsu: See, it depends. I work with some companies that are like six people. I work with some companies that are like 3,000 people, but the teams themselves are smaller. I really enjoy the 10 to 50 people engineering teams, because I feel like there's still a lot of malleability in what they're doing and how they're building out their management structure. I like to work with first-time managers, because I feel like there's no bad habits to break. You can just be the one who is like, "This is what management is." They're like, "OK. Yes.” That's where I initially started when I created my business, but now I'm working with anyone from trying to figure out whether they want to go in the people management direction or stay in the technical side of things, or all the way through directors and VPNs.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's awesome. What are some questions or problems that you help them with?
Jean Hsu: A lot of it is honestly the mindset. A lot of it is as people move into leadership roles, or they don't have leadership roles, but they are expected to step up so they can get the explicit role. A lot of it is seeing that they don't really need the permission or they don't need someone to be like, "I bestow on you this role. Now you may do these things." So just getting people to see that. As a coach, I'll push them like, "Hey, what do you need to try? What are some things you can try out this week or next week?" Then they report back and I'm like, "OK, cool." It's really cool when you have a whole team of people just all experimenting with their behavior and you just see everyone just stepping up a bit more and taking initiative.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome. Well, thank you, Jean. For our audience out there who may want to get in touch with you because they have an engineering team or an organization that could use some of your coaching, how can they do that?
Jean Hsu: They can go to my website at [jeanhsu.com](jeanhsu.com) and I also have a link to my writing, too, there as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Great. Well we'll be sure to include the link right below this video.
Jean Hsu: OK, thank you.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
Have you been in your current role for a while, and are eager to try something new?
Perhaps you’ve thought about transitioning from being an individual contributor into a leadership role, but you’re not sure if it’s the right move for you?
You worry about being qualified enough, leading people, being an authority figure, and what your day-to-day will be like.
While it sounds exciting and maybe a great opportunity to grow, you worry about your existing skills getting rusty.
Well, all this month on Build we’re going to be exploring the tradeoffs that aren’t talked about when we choose to transition from being an individual contributor to a leader. In today’s episode, I’ve invited Jean Hsu who was formerly an Engineering Manager at Medium and is now an Engineering Leadership Coach.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
In the episode Jean mentions the book: The Manager's Path, check it out here.
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
--
Transcript for What Stops Us From Transitioning Into A Leadership Role
Poornima Vijayashanker: Have you been in your current role for a while and maybe you're considering a transition from being an individual contributor to a leader, and you're not sure if it's right for you? Well, in today's *Build* episode, we're going to explore some of the tradeoffs that aren't talked about, so stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Now one myth that I came across early in my career was the transition from being an individual contributor to a team leader. I struggled with this transition because I worried about my skills getting rusty and whether or not I had the skill set to actually lead people. So if you're grappling with this, we're going to cover it in today's episode. To help us out, I've invited Jean Hsu, who is an engineering leadership coach. Thanks for joining us today, Jean.
Jean Hsu: Thanks for having me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. You and I met a couple months ago at a event. I'm really curious to know a little bit more about your background. If you can walk us through what drew you into tech and ultimately led to what you're doing today.
Jean Hsu: Sure. I went to school for computer science. I actually went to a liberal arts school. A few years in, I started trying to figure out what I wanted to do and what I really enjoyed was the coding and the projects and the—I didn't really know anything about applications, what the applications were going to be, or what software engineering was as a job, but I really loved the classes. I think that when people talk about how to attract women to tech, a lot of the conversations are actually, they don't seem as relevant to me because I really loved the actual coding itself, and I didn't know anything about what I would do after I graduate.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So where did you land after college?
Jean Hsu: I had interned at Google the summer before I graduated, and then I ended up taking a full-time offer at Google that started right after I graduated. I moved up to Mountain View and I was there for about a year and a half. Then I quit and wanted to see what else was out there, and kind of had the sense that Mountain View and the Google campus is a little bit of a bubble, and so I started to dabble in Android development. I ended up at Pulse and did some of the Android development there. Then after that—I was there for about a year and then I ended up at the Obvious Corporation, which later became Medium. I worked on their first prototype. Then I was there for about five and a half years.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, wow.
Jean Hsu: And then I left about six months ago.
Transition from engineer To engineering manager
Poornima Vijayashanker: So what catapulted you to strike out on your own?
Jean Hsu: It was kind of the right time to make a big change. I don't know if it's like, I have two kids. I have an almost two-year-old and a four-and-a-half-year-old and that's very, it's not stable, but there's sort of a monotony in taking care of them. I had been at Medium for five and a half years, so I think there was a part of me that just really wanted a really big change and I was ready to kind of jump in the deep end again and figure something out that was completely new to me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now when you're at Medium, that's when you did your transition, right, from being an engineer to an engineering manager.
Jean Hsu: That's right, yeah.
Our perception of who or what we think it takes to be in a role
Poornima Vijayashanker: What kind of prompted you to even consider this transition? Because a lot of people just think, “I'm happy kind of coding away. Why rock the boat?”
Jean Hsu: Yeah, I mean for me I was pretty happy coding away, but I think I wanted to see where I could be more impactful. I don't know that I really chose it for myself. I was sort of, I wanted to have more impact and influence. Sometimes I was stepping into tech lead or project lead roles. I think at some point it was like everyone kind of knew that this was kind of the path I was headed and I was almost the last person to know. It was interesting because when I made that switch and started to take on a few direct reports, I think everyone was like, “Oh, it should have happened like a long time ago.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: What do you think they saw in you that maybe took you a while to see in yourself?
Jean Hsu: I don't know. I guess I didn't really know what a manager did. Even at the time at Medium it wasn't called manager. I think they still call it a group lead, so it was very much this mentor, advocate, coach role, which is sort of, what I'm doing now is very similar to that. I think it was that people saw that in me, that they felt like they could talk to me about things and that I would help them solve their problems. I was never very much of a command and control, top-down type manager, which is maybe what I thought managers did.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, so maybe it was your perception or, “My misperception of this is what a manager is, so clearly I'm not a manager because that's not what I want to do,” when really you've naturally been doing a lot of great tasks or I guess things that managers would do.
Jean Hsu: Right, yeah, like when you, if you ask me like, “Oh, do I want to help people and support them and help them solve their problems,” like, “Yeah.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right, but not maybe the “I want to enforce strict process or—”
Jean Hsu: Right, like I'm just going to tell you what to do every day.
Why we think we aren’t capable of leading
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. Tell us some of your concerns, then, going in, aside from this “I don't know if I'm capable of being a manager or what a manager role entails.” What were some concerns with that?
Jean Hsu: I mean my transition was pretty gradual. But as I got more and more in it, I definitely had this concern that it was too early to go 100% in that direction.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why?
Jean Hsu: I mean I think a lot of it is the tech industry. I sort of have this sense that people who don't look like me, specifically white males, if they are, they look young and they're in a management position, people tend to give them more the benefit of the doubt and think, “Oh, that's someone who is like so talented that he got promoted into management.” I sort of worried the opposite would happen to me where people would look at me and say, “Oh, she doesn't even have that much technical experience,” or like, “She looks really young. She came out of a boot camp,” or something, whereas I really had like a decade full of experience. I definitely had that anxiety of how will I be perceived once I leave this company.
Poornima Vijayashanker: And how did you handle that perception, kind of get over it?
Jean Hsu: That’s a good question. I think that a lot of it was sort of—I mean I also had the sort of struggle of do I then count as someone who's like nontechnical anymore. You see these statistics of like, “Oh, 70% of women leave their technical roles.” I’m like, “Am I contributing to that?”
But I think what I landed on is sort of like the whole point is that you should be able to do what you feel, like is your calling, and that you want to do and not that I'm contributing to the statistic that we want to go down, not up. I think that's part of how I kind of came to terms with it. Then when I was thinking about how to, like if I was leaving the IC work too early, what my manager helped me focus on was what would I get out of doing more of it.
He's like, “Well, if you want to do VP eng or a head of engineering type role, I feel like you've already demonstrated that you can do that. Even if it's areas that you're not familiar with, you can work with engineers to figure it out, you've done that before, and so what would you get out of it.” I was like, “Oh, I guess I just…” It's sort of this feeling of like I should do it, I should do more technical work, not that I really wanted to or that I was drawn to do more of it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It's interesting that he led you down that path of what would it look like in your current role if you were to do more of maybe the same, or where would that kind of take you longer term, and is that the kind of work that you want to do.
Jean Hsu: Right, and he was very open with me and saying like, “OK, well, you know what? I understand that you may want to go, kind of like shift back a little bit, but for this quarter we really need you here and let's reassess.” It felt very like a temporary, not temporary, but it was like an ongoing conversation. It wasn't like if I wanted to go back into IC work, I'd have to leave the company. I always had that advocate in him.
How long it really takes to transition into a leadership role
Poornima Vijayashanker: So you ultimately decided to take the choice and go from being an individual contributor, an IC, into a leadership. What were the first few months like in that transition?
Jean Hsu: It was kind of a long transition. I'd say it was like over maybe two years. The first few months I mean I definitely had this sense of like, I don't have time to get my work done because when you're responsible for both the coding work and being responsible for teams or people, it's really hard to have that, like make your time.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right, contact switching.
Jean Hsu: So I definitely felt like it was easy to just say, “Oh, I had a day full of meetings. I didn't get any work done.” That’s a very, very common mindset to have when you make that transition.
When we don’t have something tangible to point to we feel unaccomplished
Poornima Vijayashanker: I think for me when I went from being an engineer to a founder, the hardest thing was I'm no longer going to have something to point to at the end of the day because before I could build something and deploy it and be like, “Look, what I built,” and at the end of the day I was like, “Yeah, I talked to five people.”
Jean Hsu: Yeah, I started keeping, in the times where I felt like the transition was the roughest I started keeping a log of what is the one thing that I felt was most impactful that I did that day, and sometimes I kind of had to make it up. I was, “Oh, I had a one-on-one with this engineer, and maybe she thinks about herself fundamentally differently now and is now going to interact with people in a slightly different way.” You kind of have to take those where you can get them.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It's squishy and you don't see the results immediately and it’s developing a level of comfort with that. I think that's one of the harder pieces and where people get demotivated when they're not seeing their results fast enough versus with code it can be very instantaneous.
Jean Hsu: Yeah, and I think management success or being a leader is a little bit more subjective and the feedback loop is a lot longer.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah.
Jean Hsu: I mean it could be, I mean if you're just talking about actual feedback that you get, that's, I don't know, at companies that kind of have—can I curse on here?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Of course.
Jean Hsu: —have their shit together, it’s like six months. Every six months you get some feedback on how you're doing, the official formal feedback loop. But beyond that you have the one-on-one. That's a very individual relationship. I think for a lot of people they don't really see the impact of their work. One of the things I've been thinking about is for engineering work for the most part your impact is somewhat proportional to the work you put in. If you spend two months building a system with a team, that's two months that you put in. Hopefully it's an important thing that you've done. Then the management work sometimes you can do some tweaking or some restocking up front that can have really big impact that people might not trace back to you, and so you sort of have to see that loop, that feedback loop for yourself.
Managing and leading your peers
Poornima Vijayashanker: Were you ever in a situation where you also went from being an engineer with a bunch of teammates to then being their manager and having them as direct reports?
Jean Hsu: Mmm-hmm. Most of my early direct reports were new grads. In some ways that was sort of easier. I had just been there eight years ago and so I had a very good sense of like, “Oh, this is kind of where you are now, and here's the type of support you need.” I'd say as a tech lead it was sometimes a little bit more difficult, especially when I was suddenly responsible for managing the work of people who were more senior than me, that I feel like I kind of took a very hands-off approach, which sometimes was like, there’s just miscommunication. But it is something I feel like especially as a manager you have to navigate, like how, it's OK to be friendly with people. I mean obviously you want to be friendly with people in the workplace, but how much you can be like good friends outside of work.
Poornima Vijayashanker: And how to be authoritative.
Jean Hsu: Right, and navigating that was a little bit tricky to me. Figuring out if someone invited me to something, “Should I go?” I’m like, “What? If I did something, who should I invite?” In some ways I just didn't hang out with people at work who were on the engineering team because it was like, I felt like I had to invite 30 people. I don't want to invite 30 people.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right, so you want to be careful about playing favorites and stuff like that.
Jean Hsu: Right. I think I was especially sensitive to that, because I had seen it, I'd seen it happen. People who are friends go to Vegas together and then you're just like, “Whoa, I understand you’re friends, but it's hard to say that that's completely separate from your work.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: What about the boss factor? I know for myself as an older sister bossiness is just totally normal for me. But did you have a sense of like, “How do I go and be more of an authoritative figure or disciplinarian” sometimes?
Jean Hsu: Yeah, most of my—that kind of stuff was in one-on-ones. I feel like one of the areas that I kind of grew into was to bring that to a more group setting and a lot of my feedback would be around like, “Jean has,” like, “We want to hear more from her, like we want…” People wanted to hear more from me. They knew that I was, kind of like, I had an opinion but I wasn't like—
Poornima Vijayashanker: Voicing it.
Jean Hsu: Voicing it. Actually after I had to figure out that I was going to leave and do my own thing, I kind of became more unintimidated. I was sort of just saying whatever I wanted to say in meetings, which probably actually made me better at my job.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What do you think kind of got you to that level aside from putting in your notice? Did you have a mentor that kind of helped you see these were hurdles or things that were holding you back as you were doing the transition into a leadership role?
Jean Hsu: Yeah, I mean I had a lot of peer support and my own manager was very helpful and kind of providing that feedback in an ongoing basis. I think for me it was also seeing that when I spoke up in meetings, because one of my pet peeves is like inefficient meetings and—
Poornima Vijayashanker: I agree.
Jean Hsu: One of the things I would start to do a few years in was like, “OK, I'm just going to get up and start to facilitate the meeting and get people on track and kind of cut people off,” and that came out of a facilitation role that we had at Medium, but sometimes there’s unstructured meetings so I kind of just take that role. The first few times it was like, “I don't know if this is OK. Do people think I'm being overbearing?” But once I started getting feedback of like, “Oh like, thank God you were there to do that,” or people would start electing me to be the facilitator—
Poornima Vijayashanker: You're doing the things they’re thinking of doing, yeah.
Jean Hsu: Right. I was like, “Why do I just sit here with this sinking feeling of like, ‘Ugh, this meeting, why don't I do something about it.’’”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, that's great, so you were, yeah, naturally gravitating towards taking the reins and steering people in the direction. It wasn't as if you were having one-on-ones with your boss, your manager every week and saying, “I have this problem. How do I deal with it?” You naturally saw opportunities and thought, “I'm going to dip my toe in and see what happens.”
Jean Hsu: Yeah, I think there was probably a long way I could have gone before. One of my goals—actually I never achieved this—was for people to tell, for my manager to get feedback about me that I was over the top because I knew there was a long way to go.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh god, yeah. I always push people for that. It’s like yeah, push to a level of aggressiveness and then they’ll know.
Jean Hsu: Yeah, because I could tell that it was really myself holding me back and there was so far from where I was and where that was really going to be a problem, and so I kind of wanted to see what was the range there.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Did you ever hit the—
Jean Hsu: No I did not, I left before.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Something new to aspire to then.
Jean Hsu: Yeah, maybe.
The choice to stay with the known path
Poornima Vijayashanker: What do you think you've gotten out of the—now, what is it, a year, two years since you've been a leader—what do you think you've gotten out of that experience that maybe you wouldn't have gotten had you stuck to your individual contributor role?
Jean Hsu: I think there's equal—I was going to say impact and influence, but I feel like even in the IC track there's ways to achieve that and to lead also.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, we’ll get to that. Let’s talk about the leadership.
Jean Hsu: As a manager, I felt like it's definitely pretty exhausting to be the person sort of taking care of people and supporting them, but there's a lot of rewards there too, which is like you know that these people have someone who they feel safe coming to and there's issues. I don’t know. It's just like a level of influence that, what I had from my manager, just being able to extend that to everyone else, that was really, that really meant a lot to me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Any impact on the product or the company that you can speak of?
Jean Hsu: In terms of the company a lot of my role was also doing engineering operations work, so kind of like team-wide processes, taking what was working on my team or other teams and kind of expanding them to be part of, more of the whole engineering team’s processes. Then something I also saw at Medium was engineering was the largest team. A lot of times engineering would pilot something and then it would work really well and so we’d expand it to the rest of the company. That was kind of cool too, to see that level of like, “Hey, like what's going on over there? They seem to be like pretty well supported.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Then coming back to the question that you proposed. If you had stayed in your individual contributor role, how do you think it would have manifested itself?
Jean Hsu: I don't think that was ever really for me, but I think that once I could see that I was capable of doing it, that also made me much more comfortable to switch to the management track, because I really felt like for a while that I wasn't cut out to do the hardcore infrastructure platform work, and they're kind of going that way as my career route. Then I did spend like a quarter or two, really diving deep into platform work, and I could see the path there. Once I could see the path and I was like, “OK, I can see this, if I don't do people management and some of the other things I'm doing and I just focus on this, I could see how I could get to where this person is in five years or 10 years.” It was interesting because just seeing that helped me kind of be comfortable with moving to the management track more fully.
Poornima Vijayashanker: You mentioned there being opportunities for leadership for individual contributors. So for folks who might in our audience choose to stay as individual contributors for the long haul of their career, what do those opportunities look like?
Jean Hsu: I mean there's a lot of different, even in the individual contributor, I mean some people include tech lead as part of that track. I think in the more purely individual contributor track you can still expand your influence and you can be the architect of larger, larger and larger things or just be able to coordinate. I mean it becomes less individual even though you're still doing the work.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure, you’re just divvying it up or directing people, but maybe not responsible for their career.
Understanding the path of a new role
Jean Hsu: That's right, or you're thinking more about the high-level technical strategy of the company or—I mean, that I think eventually leads to architect or CTO type roles, whereas once I had kind of figured out the paths, I didn't really have a sort of canonical like VP eng, like, “Oh, this is what a VP eng does, and this is what a CTO does.” Had worked at Google where you have no visibility, to those people, Pulse, which we were just all kind of figuring things out, and then Medium where my manager was the head of engineering and it was very much like a hybrid VP eng/CTO role. But once I had figured out what that actually meant, it was pretty clear to me that the path that appealed to me most was sort of the VP eng route.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, it's nice when you have a little bit more transparency.
Jean Hsu: Yeah, because otherwise it's just like, “I don't, I don’t know,” like, “I don't know where I'm going because I don't even know what the options are.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's a good final set of words for our audience, is getting a sense of what the various tracks look like before you pre-select or make the decision to not participate, just kind of get your facts straight, get a sense of what each role is like.
Jean Hsu: Yeah, the book *The Manager’s Path* was really good for that because she, Camille, the author, she lays out a lot of the—I like how she lays it out because at the end she talks about all the core things that a company needs and then the different combinations of roles that they use to achieve them, because VP, eng, and CTO can actually mean very different things depending on the company you’re at.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much Jean for sharing all this awesome information. I know our audience out there is going to get a lot out of this. For those of you now in the audience, Jean and I would like to know: have you recently done a transition maybe from being an individual contributor to a manager or a leader? What were some of the concerns you had, and how did you go about handling that transition? Let us know in the comments below this video.
That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll dive in a little bit deeper and talk about how you want to manage your concerns around your skills, getting rusty when you go from being that individual contributor to a leader. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
A redesign is a great way to reinvent your brand, get a leg up on the competition, and revisit those clunky and outdated workflows.
While we may be eager to jump right in, we have to be careful about what is actually going to help us accomplish our business goals.
In today’s Build Tip, I’m joined by Leslie Yang who is a Senior Product Designer at Pivotal Labs. Leslie and I are going to talk about how much to include in a redesign and what you need to do before you start a redesign.
You’ll learn:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
--
Transcript for Product Re-design: What To Do Before You Redesign Your Product
Ronan: I'm not sure about this, Poornima.
Poornima: What? What? What's going on?
Ronan: We've redesigned the entire landing page, the onboarding workflow, and the customer checkout experience. From the analytics, I can't tell which of these redesigns actually moved the needle.
Poornima: Did you redo them all at once?
Ronan: That's what I thought I was asked to do.
Poornima: I think we're going to need to talk about how much to redesign in today's *Build* tip.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, and I've got a new *Build* tip for you. Today, I'm joined by Leslie Yang, who is Senior Product Designer at Pivotal Labs. Leslie and I are going to dig into how much to include in a redesign and what you need to do before you start a redesign. Thanks for joining us, Leslie.
Leslie Yang: Thanks for having me.
Poornima: Let's first talk about why teams even want to do a redesign.
Leslie Yang: Totally. The ones that I can think of are three. One is you have your company and you really want to have brand refresh. You want to be out there in the market and you want people to get excited. The second thing, as a company, you want to get a leg up on the competition so you really feel like if I defined myself in the market against our competitors, we will have a winning advantage. The third thing is maybe you put your product out for a few years and you're feeling like all these workflows are pretty clunky, so we want to make sure we simplify it and take a step back and look at that, too.
Poornima: I know companies are really eager to do a redesign. What happens if they jump in too fast?
Leslie Yang: Totally. There is a lot of hidden risks involved. The number one thing is that companies can invest a lot of money and time into the visual design and improving that at the detriment of the user experience and that's always a bad call.
Poornima: Got it. How can they avoid doing that?
Leslie Yang: Sure. One of the things they can do is take a look at your workflows. If they're already doing really well for your company, don't change them. Don't fix what's already working really well. Definitely do user research to test to make sure that a redesign is something that people actually would find value in. Then you want to make sure that your design patterns are consistent across web, and mobile, and everywhere else, people are able to use the app.
Poornima: What does it mean, like design patterns are consistent?
Leslie Yang: Design patterns are the interactions are going to be the same ones you would experience similar in mobile versus web.
Poornima: What's an example of that?
Leslie Yang: For example if you're using Yelp. My experience on Yelp for mobile, if I'm going to see a list of search results, I'm on web, I should see something very similar to that.
Poornima: Got it. Consistent user experience.
Leslie Yang: Absolutely.
Poornima: What else?
Leslie Yang: Let me think. You should definitely work on developing a style guide that will work across all parts of your app.
Poornima: Great. If you have those four things nailed down, then it makes sense to start the redesign?
Leslie Yang: Yeah. It's definitely worth looking at it from that point.
Poornima: You mentioned a lot of times you want to revisit those clunky workflows. How can you do that in a way that's not going to end up causing you to go down a rabbit hole?
Leslie Yang: Oh, definitely. What you really want to do is work with product to look at your metrics. Find those areas where there's some hidden pains and work on improving those areas first.
Poornima: You look at the drop-off points and then go from there.
Leslie Yang: Absolutely. Yeah.
Poornima: One new insight that I learned in this conversation is a lot of people spend time doing visual design versus actually investing in the workflows. How can you make sure that that's not what's happening?
Leslie Yang: Well, a big thing is you need to look at your data. You look at your qualitative data and your quantitative data. From looking at that, you can figure out where in the user experience you want to improve that experience. Then you work on the visual design last.
Poornima: It's definitely the priority of workflow first, visual design second.
Leslie Yang: Yes.
Poornima: Now, let's go back to our initial example where Ronan had, bless his heart, changed a lot of things all at once. He redesigned the landing site. He redesigned the onboarding and finally the checkout and sometimes it makes sense to do them all at once if you've got the resources. But, in his case, things just weren't working out.
Leslie Yang: Yeah, totally. I think what would really help Ronan in those moments is if he had permanent metrics for each of those different experiences that he was looking to test and understand.
Poornima: For example, like the landing site, the metric for the landing is—
Leslie Yang: It's just checking to see how many people have had signed up for the site.
Poornima: Then for the onboarding—
Leslie Yang: It's improving the user experience from signup to becoming an active user.
Poornima: Right. Then the final checkout is monetize.
Leslie Yang: Monetize.
Poornima: For Ronan's case, I think where he probably did a lot of redesign within each, like changing a number of elements in the landing site, changing a number of elements within onboarding, and finally checkout. He doesn't know within each what's working. But then overall, not having those metrics siloed also made it confusing.
Leslie Yang: Exactly. In a specific workflow, if you're going to change something, change one thing at a time and then have some good metrics to test to see if it's successful or not.
Poornima: Well, thank you so much, Leslie, for sharing these tips with us today. I know our audience out there is going to get a lot of benefit when they consider doing a redesign next.
Leslie Yang: Thanks so much for having me.
Poornima: Yeah. Now, Leslie and I would like to know if you've done a redesign recently, what did you consider redesigning and how did it turn out? Let us know in the comments below this video. OK. That's it for today's *Build* tip. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more episodes of *Build* and *Build* tips like this one, and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help and support in producing this episode. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
All this month on Build, we’ve been talking about project management. First, we shared two ground rules you need to set for yourself to get through a software project successfully, and in the last episode, we shared strategies for handling new ideas and unexpected challenges that may derail your project.
But you’re probably left wondering, what do you do to get through the last 20% of a project? Especially when the deadline changes, and it’s clear that teammates are starting to burn out and become demotivated? Is it even possible to get through it and successfully ship?
And if you are able to get through those hurdles and successfully ship, what next?
In today’s Build episode, Jen Leech who is the VP of Engineering at Truss, and I are going to share proven strategies to get you through that last 20% and successfully ship!
You’ll learn:
- Why the last 20% of a project is really a lie!
- How to avoid the complacency that comes with a deadline that are very far away in the future.
- What to do when the deadline gets pushed up or back.
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
##Project Management: How To Keep Your Team Motivated And Successfully Ship transcript
Poornima: We've been talking about how to manage your first high-stakes project. We started by alleviating some of your anxieties, and then we talked about how to manage situations where people want to change course or bring up new ideas. In today's final episode on this topic, we're going to talk about how to keep your team motivated to help you ship your product. So stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by PivotalTracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions when it comes to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
So finishing that 20% of any project can be challenging. People get burnt out and demotivated. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how you can keep them motivated and get them to successfully ship. And to help us out, Jen Leech is back. You'll remember Jen is a VP of engineering at Truss, a software consultant. Thanks for joining us, Jen.
Jen Leech: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Why people get demotivated and burn out during the last 20% of a project
Poornima: So you've done a lot of projects throughout your career, and you know as well as anybody out there that that last 20% is the hardest. People get demotivated, they burn out. So let's talk about why this happens to begin with.
Jen Leech: Yeah. So really the fundamental reason that this happens is that the last 20% is never actually 20%. It's the 20% that you imagined when you thought about the project. But in terms of the amount of work involved, it's usually the most tedious and painstaking tasks that are reserved towards the end. When you get towards the end of the project, that's when new stakeholders start showing up and having ideas about things that need to happen on the project that weren't already there. So the final 20% ends up being like another 80%. So four times as big as you thought it was going to be. So that can be demotivating for people. And people who thought—if they really thought they were towards the last 20%, then it's especially demotivating because they suddenly see the work explode in front of their eyes when they hadn't really thought that it was going to be that much more.
How to handle project scope creep
Poornima: So there's a number of things that are causing the project to get bigger towards the end. One of them you mentioned, scope creep. How do we handle the situation?
Jen Leech: Yeah. So this is the point in the project at which you need to get really aggressive about defining exactly what you're trying to deliver and why, and for whom, and digging into every request that comes in and understanding how that impacts the final project. So the process of digging into that involves really having a good sense of who the users are, who the stakeholders are, and talking with those people as much as you possibly can. If a person comes in and wants to see a particular feature, you need to really understand why they want that feature, whether it's something that they dreamed of as part of the project from the beginning. That's something that they thought would be really wonderful for users, or whether it was something they determined through recent user's testing is going to actually dramatically impact the target market for this product.
Understanding where those ideas come from, the business impact of those ideas, how well vetted the idea is in terms of hard data, and then from there you can parametrize whether, "OK. This has been vetted. It's really clear how it connects to our business interests. It's a great path towards our goal. We need to get this particular thing in. Do we need to cut any other features? Are the other features irrelevant now?" You know, how does that change the whole scope of the project? So that's one angle.
Another angle is, "This idea is something that sounds pretty great. I love the idea. We haven't tested it. What's the quickest path to create a test to try to validate this hypothesis. Can we create a little feature? Can we create a mini version of this thing? Do we need to have a fully fledged version of this thing. How do we gather information to inform our direction so that we can make sure that we're going on the right course?"
Poornima: I really like what you said about being aggressive with pushing back, especially when it's going to expand the scope and it's not something that has a clear business goal versus the thing that has a very clear direction. The challenge though for many of us, is if that is an important stakeholder coming in then we worry about what will happen if we push back. So how do you navigate that conversation?
Jen Leech: Yeah. So I feel as though many of the tactics that we described in the last episode apply here. So when someone comes in and they have their idea, how they want to see something go, they're not going to be happy if they feel like you're shooting them down without having thoroughly considered the idea. And if you begin to really investigate that idea with them by asking questions to reveal assumptions about the idea, following the idea through to its ultimate conclusion. That can clarify both for you and also the other stakeholder at the same time, the aspects of that idea that are things that you should run with that are going to improve the product and that are maybe relatively low cost. And maybe there are aspects of that that you can leave on the table for now, and you can tease those things apart.
And if you go through that process collaboratively with the person who brings the idea in, then at the end of the conversation they're going to both feel like they've been heard, that you have really fully considered their idea, and very likely they will be glad at the things that you pulled out and left on the table. And you have facilitated the process of helping them see what the most valuable nuggets of that idea are and that's a huge value to bring to a project.
What to do when you’re burnt out working on a project
Poornima: But here's the deal. I am so exhausted. It's been three weeks on this project. I don't even have the energy to facilitate that conversation because I'm borderline burnt out and this is maybe the second or third request that this stakeholder has done. What do I do?
Jen Leech: Well to be honest, you should probably walk out of the room.
Poornima: Yeah, OK. Politely maybe?
Jen Leech: Politely. Politely walk out of the room. When you truly are burnt out, and you truly exhausted your emotional reserves, that's when it's time for somebody else to step in and take that role. And you should expect that that may happen some point in time and prepare for it. And so the preparing-for-it process is all about sharing your load with other people on the team, teaching other people on the team to do what you do. So on this particular project I have been referring to from last year, one of the things that I did on that team is I asked individuals from the team to rotate through the team facilitator role.
So I would ask everyone from the team, whoever they were, to run sprint plannings, to run retrospectives. We would have design discussions where we would have design exploration, and then design critique. We would pair discussions where we...they weren't exactly brainstorming. Not like the “everyone puts sticky notes up” kind of brainstorming thing. It's not like that. But the exploration and exploding of an idea to gather as much as you can. Then somebody would go and write those ideas up, and then we would get back together to make a decision.
All those processes have some kind of facilitation involved. And we would have everyone from the team facilitate those processes. Then when it came time, such that somebody was out sick, somebody needed to take a break, or was on vacation, those processes continued to occur without interruption and they vary a little bit and that's fine. And each person who has taken that role then is also much more invested in the team, and a much better contributor to the process. So essentially you need to produce your best factor. I'm sorry. Improve your best factor by increasing the number of people who have that skillset.
Poornima: Now the challenge with doing this though is there's a lot of handoffs. Which means a lot of setup and tear down, right? Like if I'm handing something over to you, I might say, "Here are the things we talked about before." I mean, like you said it's great for the bus factor, but it is not so great when it comes to that added investment of, "OK. Now I need to talk to Jen, and then Jen needs to talk to so and so." And each time they're doing that, that's an additional time cost.
Jen Leech: So you're referring to handing off responsibilities. So one thing that I discovered is that...so part of the handoff process involves creating a set of really simple, well-defined processes that are easy for anyone to follow. And each time a new person stepped into the role, they would refer to those processes and say, "Hm. I don't fully understand X." And then we would augment the process to cover, "OK, so somebody didn't understand and need an explanation for ..." And we use these process documents to hand off the roles. So eventually it didn't really require a conversation.
Poornima: OK. But what about people who might game the system? Like, say somebody is a stakeholder, right? They know, "OK, Poornima. She's kind of a pushover. So when she's the facilitator next time, I'm going to make sure I get my ideas in because Jen, she's really good and aggressive. I'm never going to get my ideas passed through her." How do you handle those kind of—
Jen Leech: Well you know, what ends up happening is that although one person is designated to make sure the processes are happening, everyone in the room eventually becomes a facilitator. And the facilitator role is really just about setting the stage. And if everyone in the room has rotated through that role, everyone in the room is trying to make it happen. And you no longer have a single point of failure. Let's say that facilitator doesn't show up that day, or they're not feeling very well. Someone else just does it because everyone's done it.
Poornima: OK. So do you feel like there's a level of accountability then where people wouldn't necessarily be able to come in and game the system?
Jen Leech: Yeah. Because the more people who...every time someone steps up and begins running the system, that really clarifies why there's value with facilitating a collaboration in a way that includes everyone's opinion, for example. The more people facilitate it, the more they understand the value in it, and then the more they reinforce it whenever they're in a discussion.
How to handle changing deadlines for a software project
Poornima: So there's that dreaded deadline. And sometimes it gets moved up or it gets pushed back. In the event that it gets moved up, we're kind of scrambling. In the event that it gets pushed back, we start procrastinating. So how do we hold ourselves to that deadline?
Jen Leech: I actually think that the case where it's moved up is the easier case. Yeah. So when a deadline gets moved up, assuming that you're working with humans, you have resource constraints. So the first thing that I look at is the project scope. And if you have defined what your deliverables are, the things that you absolutely have in your project, then you can look at those and think, "Well are there ways that I could deliver that in a way that is slightly simpler, or in a way that maybe doesn't handle quite the data throughput that we're going to need to handle?" Because maybe in the first week maybe we don't really need to handle that data throughput.
So having the deadline moved up can actually reduce you to be more aggressive in pairing down what you're delivering in a way that can actually really help. And if the pairing down process is something you bring to stakeholders and they say, "Oh, but we really need all these features." Then you have hard data that you can point to and say ... Especially if you're using a project tracker system like PivotalTracker, which is what we use, then you get estimates for the amount of work that the team can do in a sustainable basis, and projections for how much they'll be able to complete by a certain amount of time.
And those are real data-based estimates. So, didn't intend to pitch Pivotal here, but I actually, I love their company. They do some great things. So then you can bring that to the table and then have a really clear, honest discussion about, "Here's the what the team can do. Here's the features we can deliver. What do you think? How do we solve this problem?" Again, trying to solve it together. When the deadline gets moved out, that's when it gets more difficult.
Poornima: Right. People start procrastinating.
Jen Leech: Exactly, exactly. You already have people who are thinking of the last 20% as 20% when it's actually 80%. And then all of sudden when you move the deadline out, then it's so easy to—
Poornima: Check out.
How to manage a software project when the deadline is far away
Jen Leech: Relax a little bit. To think, "Oh, well. That feature isn't so big," and not realizing that you're misestimating the amount of work that's involved. So one of the things that I try to do, especially...so this works for both when deadlines are moved out, and when a deadline is being set for you that's actually really far in the future.
So as an example, we had a deadline last year that was nine months in the future. So we...what I did is I created an internal milestones document. So I created a bunch of internal deadlines for the team that we should be aiming to hit, and if we weren't hitting those things then we should be reconsidering what we're doing. That helped a lot to focus the team and to keep us on track. And then when you build out intermediate milestones then you can set an internal deadline for completion that's even months ahead of when you think it's going to be. And create that paired-down, really lean version of the product that is going to maybe validate the hypothesis you have about what you're building and why you're trying to build it, and add extra business value to the project for the company by saying, "OK, so you asked us to build this. You want it by December. How do you know that's the right thing to build?"
So you get to then have a version that lets people play with it enough so that if you're building the wrong thing, you can change it before the real deadline, and even though the business has told you they want X by date Z, if you give them a smaller version earlier and discover they were wrong, they will be singing your praises to high heaven. That's what they really want. What they really want is the answer that's going to serve their customers. And if that's what you're keeping in mind, then you're going to have a really successful project.
What to do after you’ve successfully shipped your software project
Poornima: Awesome. So you've done these kind of shorter shipping dates with the milestones. So you're kind of doing it iteratively, you're shipping periodically. What do you do though, right after maybe that first or second time that you've shipped? Because I think a lot people forget. They're like, "Ship. Time to go on vacation." It's like, "Hold up here." Right? Because you've broken it into milestones, there is another one coming up. There's another sprint, release, whatever you like to call it.
Jen Leech: Right. Right. Well it depends on what you've shipped. I mean if you really shipped your true milestone, you should probably go and have a party. Like celebrating your results has real value to it. Aside from that, you're getting ready to collect data about what you've built. And this is part of the process that I think is sometimes...although we talk in our industry a lot about gathering research and being product driven, and making sure that we're building for the actual users, however I think that...I've seen fairly often that people feel as though they've built a great product. "Great, let's move on." And they can sometimes forget who all the users are. Can sometimes forget what it means to be successful.
And as an example...and then maybe not gather enough data. And that's a huge failure mode that I'm constantly trying to correct for. The one example is, I talked about a validation system that somebody might build in one of your earlier episodes and we came up with an idea for this validation system which was based on real user experience from the previous system the company built. We built this new design, we rolled it out, and it was basically working. It was basically...it was allowing us to quickly and easily specify checks on data that we had generated. It was doing it in a way that didn't cause us to repeat ourselves too frequently in the code. It was doing it in such a way that people who were not engineers could author the validations and look at the results. We were able to say with a higher degree of certainty that the data was correct.
However, at the end of the day, because it was serving these fundamental use cases that we knew we had, that maybe the previous system had not solved these use cases well. So it was already better. We knew that. But we could have dug in a bit more. And we could have dug in a bit more by going back to the users and saying, "OK, do you want to use this? When you use it, what are the things that really irritate you?" And dig into those and get a good sense of why your baby's ugly. It sometimes is painful to do that.
Poornima: Yeah. Because you just shipped and you just had that party, and nobody wants to have a downer after that.
Jen Leech: Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah and you want to celebrate. But then after that, kind of pull your boots back on. Get back out there and be like, "OK. We were wrong. How were we wrong?" And that's the thing is that every time I ship a product, my first question is, "OK. Let's assume we're wrong. Let's find out how."
Poornima: Make it a game a little bit.
Jen Leech: Yeah. Well, you know, and if you come from the assumption that you're always going to have it wrong, then that's how you get it right. If you ever come from the assumption that you were right, it's guaranteed that you're going to miss how you're wrong.
Poornima: Or maybe that situation, but there's a new situation you can't apply that same assumption.
Jen Leech: It's new. Situations change. There's going to be data left on the table if you don't go back.
Poornima: Right. Yeah that's fantastic. Well thank you so much, Jen. I know I can talk to you about project management forever. But I think this is a great place to stop and I know you've given our audience a lot of awesome strategies. So thank you.
Jen Leech: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Poornima: So any final words for our audience out there?
Jen Leech: Yes. So I...Poornima mentioned that we run a consultancy, Truss. And we do consulting so we build all sort of different kinds of software, we do infrastructure, we work with big data, we work with highly sensitive data for the government including healthcare data, things that are highly regulated. We solve a lot of different kinds of problems and we would absolutely love to help you solve yours. So if you have a hard problem to solve, please come hit us up. You can find us online at Truss.works, and we have a form that you can fill out there to request a quote. Thank you.
In the last Build episode, we talked shared two ground rules you need to set for yourself to get through a software project successfully. But we know that managing our own anxieties is only half the battle to keeping the project on course, the other is navigating new ideas or unanticipated challenges.
Many of our teammates have ideas and solutions that can help. They are eager to have their ideas heard, so they speak up. While others are shy and worried about speaking up. But their insights and ideas can save the project!
As the project lead you know it’s important to hear your teammates out to uncover challenges early on and prevent them from derailing your progress. But how do you encourage and instill confidence in the introverted ones, and is there ever a point where you can stop entertaining new ideas and start building?
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
--
##Project Management: How to Respond to New Ideas in the Middle of a Software Project Transcript
Poornima: In the last episode, we addressed a number of anxieties that come up when you're managing your first high-stakes project. If you missed the episode, the link to it is below this video.
Today we're gonna tackle how do you handle getting blindsided by your teammates when there are new ideas or challenges on a project you're working on. So stay tuned to find out more.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, I host innovators, and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
We'll continue our conversation about managing your first high-stakes project with Jen Leech, who is the VP of Engineering at Truss, which is a software consultancy. Thanks again for joining us, Jen.
Jen Leech: Sure, absolutely.
How to respond to brand new ideas that may cause you to miss your software project’s deadline
Poornima: So, Jen, based on our conversation last week, I know you're awesome at listening to people, incorporating their feedback, and putting a plan into action, but there comes that time usually in the middle or towards the end of the project where somebody's got a brand-new idea and you are worried about the deadline and making progress. Do you have any rules or mantras for how to handle this situation?
Jen Leech: Yeah. In general, I love it when people bring new ideas to the table. That's what I want. That means that they're engaged, they're thinking creatively, that they feel some investment in the project. I wanna encourage that as much as possible.
If the idea that they're bringing to the table is a simple one, it's great. It's pretty easy to think about, pretty easy to reason about, and you can go with it or not go with it and move forward. The complexity comes in when the idea they're bringing to the table is something that is a much larger idea, or it has implications beyond the implementation of that idea itself. In those cases, I don't always know what the results would be of implementing that idea. As someone who's experienced leading projects, I may have an intuition for it. I may be wrong, following along from my last episode.
How to teach teammates to think through their ideas and the impact it will have on a software project
But the thing that I do in that situation is I ask the person who's presenting the idea to take their idea and follow it through to its ultimate conclusion. So that means asking them to say, "OK, so..." Using the example from our last episode, of a microservices architecture, I say, "Well, we have problems A, B, and C, and D in the system. And I think that a microservices architecture is gonna solve it." And then, as a project lead, I can say to them, "OK, well so let's say that we move forward with that. What are the implications for the project? Does it mean that we're gonna have more service support? Does it mean that we are going to have to have a different team structure? Does it mean that we are going to have new work in our backlog that wasn't there already? What is that work?"
And then ask them to think through their problem. In the case of microservices architecture, that might go something like, "Well, that means that we have to make sure that these units that we're turning into microservices are independently deployable, they're independently testable, that they have a well-defined interface, that that interface is versioned, that we have someone who is keeping track of what all of the requirements are from consumers of the interface." So you might need to have a product manager. The list of potential implication gets bigger and bigger, and then all of a sudden you need an entire team to manage this one component.
And then, we can look at that and say, "If this does solve the things that you're saying it solves, it's the cost of potentially increasing our headcount by x. Justify that benefit. Or are there other ways we can get the same benefit?"
Essentially asking the person to walk through all of the implications from the leadership perspective.
When it makes sense to adopt a new idea in the middle of a software project
Poornima: From their idea that they're putting out there.
Jen Leech: Correct. Think about what that really means for the company as a whole. Then it facilitates them realizing assumptions that they have made or costs that they have envisaged, and when you get to the end of it, either you're on the same page and you say, "That was a great idea, we should totally do that." Or you're on the same page and you say, "We should not do this." And you've gotten there together. So that means that the person who's brought these ideas to the table both feels like their idea has really been heard, and if it was an idea that you should not move forward with, they've convinced themselves. Then you can both move forward with whatever you agree is the right course of action.
How to instill confidence in teammates who are shy or reluctant to share their ideas
Poornima: I think some people would be up to that challenge, they may even think through their idea, but you've got a lot of people who are, just say, eager beavers. They may be new to the team, maybe they don't know this whole process or policies and just kind of blurt out in a meeting, like, "I've got an idea." Is that an appropriate time to say, "That's fantastic you have an idea, here's how we operate. We do X, Y, and Z. So let's have you walk through the implications, etc.?"
Jen Leech: That's a really good question. Sometimes a meeting is the right time to walk through that—depends on the meeting.
Poornima: Sure.
Jen Leech: A lot of times it's not. And in those cases then I'll usually say, "Oh, Kimmy, let's take that offline. Can we talk about that later?" And talk about it independently. However, through failure I have discovered that when bringing new people onto the team, they often need a little bit of intro. In this particular project that I was describing from last year, there were some new people that came into the team, stepped into these processes, started presenting new ideas, and then all of a sudden were blindsided when people started really probing into their ideas, and they weren't expecting it.
So then I had to take a step back and then I realized that I haven't given them the appropriate context. And I sat them down and I said, "Hey, I realize I didn't explain this, but in this team you should expect that we're gonna really thoroughly look at new ideas that are brought to the table, and we're gonna investigate them."
Poornima: I'd imagine it takes a lot of confidence even to just put an idea out there, so having it be shot down is going to impact people.
Jen Leech: Yeah, absolutely. What I started doing is I started having onboarding conversations, essentially, with new people who came onto the team to explain that we investigate ideas that are brought to the table really thoroughly, and that we do that with everyone. And it's not any particular person, there's not good, there's no bad, we just wanna understand what this idea means.
The particular person who I was talking to in this case hadn't yet seen somebody else go through the same process. Later on as we went through the process of exploring new ideas then it became more normalized. But I began having onboarding conversations with new people on the team to help them understand that we really investigate ideas really deeply, and that that's normal, and it's not to be taken personally.
When do you stop entertaining new ideas, building a consensus, and get to work on your software project
Poornima: So it's great that people are proposing ideas and that you're investigating them, but you remember from last time, we told our audience we would tackle this question. There's gotta be a point where you stop investigating, you've gotta stop consensus building or talking about the ideas, start making decisions and put a plan in place. So let's pick up that question.
Jen Leech: It depends on the problem but there are a few different approaches that you can use. One approach that I enjoy using is that of framing whatever question that we're looking at in terms of a hypothesis. And saying, "Well, right now we think we're trying to solve problem X." And then when you really target the problem you're trying to solve, it's easier to hone in on the specifics of does this solve that problem. Then, either it does or doesn't, then you can move on to the next thing.
When you're dealing with something more complex, let's say you're dealing with a system that is sufficiently complex such that you can't really say for sure what the result is gonna be, and furthermore, maybe you're trying to solve problems A, B, C, D, E, and F. Then there are a couple approaches I use in that circumstance. One is to say, "Let's build a quick and dirty prototype. Let's try it. Give it a limited amount of time, and see what happens." So you build out something very quickly. Ideally, you could do it in under a day, but it depends on what it is. And hopefully you've got your tools in place so you can do that. Maybe a week, but time box it.
At the end of it you then bring it back to the table and say, "Does it look to us like it's gonna be solving these problems? And what did we learn from the process?"
Poornima: So constraining the problem will hopefully constrain the conversation, and then creating a time box around when something is due will also create those constraints so that you stop that consensus building and get down to work.
Jen Leech: Yeah. And finding every piece of work you do, in terms of here are the problems we think we're trying to solve, here are the solutions we think might work, and make everything an experiment, a discovery of new information. And the discovery, at the end of the day, might be does this work for our customers.
As you frame it in terms of exploration and discovery, then it becomes natural to not have to have 100% solution. Because what you're doing is finding out.
Poornima: It's fantastic that you're making this a discovery and that you wanna get out there and explore more, but there's always that time where we think we've done a lot and still something comes up. Maybe even a customer says, "You didn't think through this enough." Or somebody on your team brings it up. What do you do in those moments?
Why it’s OK to constrain the problem space in your software project
Jen Leech: Right. I think of this as the curve ball question. You think that you have the right hypothesis, you think you have a good solution, and then all of a sudden something comes up that you didn't expect and you find that maybe what you've put together does not satisfy a certain circumstance or certain constraints.
In that circumstance, I think of it as having a new problem to solve. And when you have a new problem to solve the first question that I ask is, "How can I learn more about this problem? Who is on the team that knows about this? Who is in the organization that knows about this?" Maybe there's somebody in the finance department that can answer a question that we have. Who in the community can we talk to about this?
It's interesting because I find that taking a problem and expanding it beyond the scope of the team is something that I don't see nearly as often as I would expect, considering the fact that you have, clearly, a limited amount of information within the team.
Poornima: Limited brains.
Jen Leech: Limited brains, limited experience. And so it would seem completely natural to open questions up to a larger audience. And yet, it's easy for people to stay in their own little group and not necessarily bring in outside opinions.
This tactic is all about seeking new information. One example of this is when building this system that I was building last year. Some of the people who are gonna be using the system were data scientists. Some of them were experts on the data that we were processing.
Whenever a new component or a new feature came to the table as something that we needed to come up with a new design for, the first thing we would do is have kind of like a brainstorming session, but really more like an information gathering session where we would bring in everyone from the company, who might potentially have a real interest in the result or be a potential user of the product, and say all of the problems that they've ever had in this area that they want solutions to.
As an example, we were designing validations on data and we needed to understand a validation system existed before at this company. What did we like about that? What did we not like about it? And we had people who were not engineers, but who had to understand the correct use of the data, come to the room and tell us what their problems were.
This is a lot like user research. And then that led to a collection of problems that we eventually may have realized existed, but hadn't really framed as the problem that we were trying to solve here. And it dramatically impacted the design that we came up with.
Poornima: Let's do another example for our audience kind of playing that out.
Jen Leech: Another really, really good example is that we were using a tool for building the system that wasn't an open-source tool that had been built by Airbnb. It turned out that we had some questions about the right usage pattern, the right deployment pattern, some questions about how they manage the flow of data between nodes. And, coincidentally, it turns out that Airbnb was in the next building over.
Poornima: Oh, great. That's a great building by the way.
Jen Leech: Yeah, lucky. We contacted the maintainer of the co-depository and asked him if he would be willing to come and talk with us. And he said sure. So he came over and had an hour long conversation about how Airbnb uses the tool and various critiques and pluses and minuses of using it one way or another. And at the end of the conversation we had a much better idea of what things we were doing with it were good and we should keep on doing, and which things we needed to change. And it was about an hour of time for a huge improvement.
Poornima: I feel like this also helps you from causing more bugs because you know how to use the tool, or going through that drama of, "I don't know how this works."
Jen Leech: It saves you an immense amount of time to just ask the right questions to people who know things.
Poornima: That's fantastic. Thank you again for sharing these rules with us, Jen.
Jen Leech: Absolutely.
So you got tasked with managing your first high-stakes software project? Like handling tech debt, breaking up a monolithic code base into a microservices architecture, or something else?
Congratulations!
Are you excited?
Maybe a little nervous?
Or maybe you’re really nervous because you need to deliver on a tight deadline, and there is a lot on the line like your relationship with customers, revenue, and most importantly your job!
Fear not because all this month on *Build*, we’re going to be tackling the topic of how to manage your first high-stakes software project.
In today’s episode, I’m joined by Jen Leech who is a VP of Engineering at Truss. Jen and I dig into some valuable strategies that will address and alleviate your anxieties around managing your first high-stakes software project.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
Project Management: The Ground Rules You Need to Set to Get Through a Software Project Successfully Transcript
Poornima: You got tasked with your first high-stakes project. Are you excited? Maybe a little nervous? Or maybe really nervous because you're worried about the tight deadlines, the revenue, and your job? Fear not, because we're going to cover a number of ways to address and alleviate your anxieties in today's episode of *Build*, so stick around.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. One misconception I had early on in my career, when I was managing my first project, was that I was the only one who was a nervous wreck. I worried about meeting deadlines, budget, and shipping it. I thought everyone else had their act together and it was just me. Well, it turns out it was all a façade and some people were just better at hiding it than I was.
In today's episode, we're going to be addressing a number of anxieties that come up when you're managing your first high-stakes project. In future episodes, we'll talk about how to keep your team motivated to stay on course and successfully ship. To help us out, I've invited Jen Leech, who is the VP of Engineering at Truss. Thanks for joining us today Jen.
Jen: Absolutely. A pleasure to be here.
Poornima: You and I met a few months back when we were both speaking and I remember you talking about your first high-stakes project last year, but before we dive into, that let's start with your career. What got you interested in tech and eventually inspired you to start your own company?
Jen Leech: I wouldn't say that I ever got into tech; I would say I started there. I have always really, really loved math and science. I started coding when I was 10 and it was the natural place for me to be, that's where I was. However, I found that in industry I didn't always find the things that I wanted in my work environment, so I started Truss to create the work environment that I wanted to be in.
Poornima: What kind of environment where you looking to create?
Jen Leech: I wanted an environment that would enable me to ride for the leadership positions that I felt that I wanted to be in. I also wanted it to be an environment that was really empowering to all employees to arrive to their greatest potential, to bring to bear the greatest contributions that they could to the business, rather than necessarily trying to constrain or confine them to some limited pigeonhole of what the business thinks is best for it, which often limits the business potential itself.
Poornima: Nice. Tell us what Truss does.
Jen Leech: Truss is a consultancy. We do various software projects; our capabilities range from infrastructure and dev ops through to application development, to architecture, and we also do some management consulting. Really what that is, is a representation of the fact that our staff have a really broad skill set and we rotate roles on any project that we are on up and down the stack and across the stack. We feel as though that's one version of dogfooding that enables us to provide better service for anything we build.
Poornima: Maybe some of our viewers out there don't know what dogfooding is—what's that all about?
Jen Leech: Dogfooding is an industry term for if you are building a product you had damn well better try it yourself. Let's say that you put out a bowl of food for someone and you've never tasted it; it might actually be completely awful but if you make yourself eat it, then you have a sense of, "Oh, I should make that better," and the customer gets the benefit.
A day in the life of a VP of Engineering
Poornima: What do you do on a day-to-day basis as a VP of Engineering?
Jen Leech: As part of the dogfooding principle, I do the same work that our engineers do on a day-to-day basis insofar as I do client work. About three to four days a week I work onsite with clients. Then, what I do with the rest of my time is really the VP of Engineering kind of work. I define processes that dictate how the engineering organization operates, including things like our leveling process for how we help engineers move forward with their career, how we do peer reviews. We implemented a salary transparency policy at our company, and rolled that out in association with doing market analysis, and making sure that we had equal pay across our organization. I do all of those things as well as institute client engagement processes for making sure that we set expectations properly, making sure that we learn from our experiences with clients, etc.
Poornima: Last year, you got tasked with managing your first high-stakes project. Let's dive into that. I know you were initially pretty excited about it, right?
Jen Leech: Sure. I love a challenge.
Poornima: Who was on your team with you?
Jen Leech: This is where a client project, the project had been attempted a couple of times. It was for a V architecture of a big data-processing pipeline. The pipeline that they had, that they were already using at the company, was an MVP version of the pipeline and it had proved to be very difficult to change. It was very monolithic and it was slow to test any changes, slow to make any changes, very difficult to understand the code.
Poornima: Let's break that down. MVP is?
Jen Leech: Minimum viable product.
Poornima: Like a prototype?
Jen Leech: That's correct.
Poornima: Then, you mentioned that it was monolithic. What does that mean?
Jen Leech: Monolithic, that means that the code base that was used to process the pipeline was, in this case, two very large code bases that had become highly interconnected and so large in number of lines of code and the amount of time that it took to test any changes that it became very difficult to make any changes at all for fear of breaking the system.
Poornima: Probably like a lot of interdependencies?
Jen Leech: Correct.
Poornima: You fix one thing something else breaks and so on.
Jen Leech: Right and you would have things like a part of the code base had several-thousand-line-long python scripts essentially that you make one change in the middle and it wasn't really clear what would happen further down.
Poornima: Got it. What was the suggested course of action to fix that?
Jen Leech: When we came in—I didn't answer your earlier question—
Poornima: Go ahead.
Jen Leech: I should do that. The team that they pulled together, they asked me to lead the team and the people on the team included the company CTO, a director of engineering, a senior engineer, a data scientist, and one other Truss engineer, so a relatively small team, but a crack team. Our early discussions were attended by the COO and the VP of Engineering, so you can tell this is something they cared about.
Poornima: Very nice. How did you corral all of them and give them a sense of, “Here's what our prescription is to fixing this monolithic code base?”
How team dynamics impact the quality of the solutions
Jen Leech: I've read a lot of research on collaboration. I care a lot about building the best product that you can with the team that you have. The research that I have read talks a lot about the dynamic in the team, and how conversation occurs between people on the team, and how that impacts the solutions that the team comes up with. One really interesting result from that research is that if you have a team of, let's say, five people, one person on the team has a really high IQ, they're a genius, that team does not do as well as a team of five people who all have average IQs but who all listen to each other really well.
Poornima: Interesting. Why is that?
Jen Leech: Good question. The research did not necessarily try to explain why that was the result. However, what it did was they said repeatedly if you take a team and you measure how well they take turns in conversation, how well they integrate in all the ideas from everyone who's participating, that those metrics will predict the quality of the solution much more strongly than average IQ, as an example.
Poornima: Now, I'm not a mind reader but I assumed you were excited but also maybe a little bit nervous because you said there were a lot of C-level executives there, a lot of senior folks on the team that had a vested stake in it. How did you get over that initial hurdle? Did you set any ground rules or a framework?
Jen Leech: We had a really tight timeline and I wanted to try to get the best I could from the team, and we actually had to have a working prototype within four weeks. We're talking about working prototype, which was deployed and running real data, and on a big data processing pipeline.
Poornima: Why such a tight timeline, by the way?
Jen Leech: That was because for two reasons. One business needs, the company needed to increase the number of clients they had per, essentially, deployed resource. There we have a cost, scale at cost-scaling issue here. Then also, they had tried to do this project a couple of times already. They had given themselves, let's say, maybe six months to do it but burned away five of those months so this was last—
Poornima: Got it, they came to you. How did you take on this project or why did you take on this project? It's pretty tight.
Jen Leech: I didn't have a choice insofar as I showed up in a meeting room and they said, "Hey Jen, you're leading this project," which to be honest I don't mind. I think that's fun. That's part of why I do what I do. It became clear that I needed to make sure that the team was going to be extremely productive and simultaneously come up with a really good solution to the problem. I came up with some little tricks that I did internally to make sure that the team stayed on the right track and that I was facilitating the collaboration process toward the most effective result.
Poornima: Now, did you share these tricks with the other people on the team or are these just for yourself?
Jen Leech: I did not, actually. I didn't even fully coalesce them into a collection of things until hindsight 20/20, then I flipped back and I said, "Oh, I did these things. That was effective, that worked."
Poornima: How are you consistent about enforcing them? That's another thing, right? We make these rules, these tricks for ourselves, but sometimes we don't ever hold ourselves accountable.
Jen Leech: I found that whenever I deployed them, the conversation was more effective and so in a way it was really easy—
Poornima: The feedback to you.
Jen Leech: To enforce them because everyone in the room felt the effect and I found that people would come up to me after the discussions and say, "Wow, that was such an effective discussion. Like, that was great. I don't know what you did but ...," that kind of thing. It was self-reinforcing. When stress levels increased or when people were tired then sometimes I would forget and things would degrade a little bit. Then I'd step back and be like, "Oh yeah, I should do that thing again." It was easy to try to keep doing it because it was better.
Poornima: Let's tackle the first rule that you had for yourself.
Rule #1: State facts not opinions
Jen Leech: The first rule that I came up with was, for me, personally one of the biggest changes in how I participated in these discussions it was to say, "State facts not opinions."
Poornima: That's a great one. Can you give us an example of what that looks like in practice?
Jen Leech: Sure. Really this is about separating your ego from the ideas that you're putting forth. It's a mechanic that allows you to shed light on an idea without becoming so attached to it that if it's a bad idea, you have difficulty letting go. As an example, let's say that you want to suggest to a team that maybe a micro services architecture is the right solution for a problem that you have. You could walk into the room and say, "Hey, a microservices architecture, that's going to solve problems A, B, C, and D for us. We should do it. I think it's totally going to work. What's the next step?" You're excited, that's great. Being excited is great; however, you've immediately just jumped into that idea with your full heart and soul in a way at the get go. If for some reason your idea isn't necessarily the best idea, then if someone comes back to you and says, "Ah, maybe that's not the best idea," then all of a sudden your hopes are dashed, that's not so great.
You could take the same idea and you can walk into a room and you could say, "I think that a microservice architecture could be interesting to look at. My understanding is that it should give us A, B, C, or D, or maybe all four. Does that sound right? Do you think that we would actually get those things from microservice architecture in this situation? And would there be any problems introduced by pursuing a microservices solution to this problem?" Then, in that situation you are saying, "Here's some information. This is something we should examine. Let's examine it together." Then, when someone comes into the room and says, "Well, you know? I think that maybe it won't do C for us because in this situation that condition doesn't apply." Then you have a dialogue and when you investigate that problem, it's no longer your idea or their idea, you're trying to find the truth.
Poornima: I know our audience out there is going to be really curious to know how do you go from that conversation to making a final decision so that you're not stuck consensus building. We're going to cover that in the next episode, so stay tuned for that, but let's move on. What's another rule that you gave for yourself as you were managing this project?
Rule #2: Say to yourself, “Maybe they’re right”
Jen Leech: Another rule that I created was...that first rule was for your bringing an idea to the table, that perspective. The second one was the same thing...similar idea but from a listener's perspective of saying—it was a mantra I used and it was, "Maybe they're right."
Poornima: I love this one because it does a lot of good for you in that you're not concocting stories and a lot of drama, I think, around a project also gets dispelled because you're giving people the benefit of the doubt but it's so hard to do in practice.
Jen Leech: That's why it's a mantra.
Poornima: Let's talk about some examples that you had to use it in or that our viewers would have to use it.
Jen Leech: In this microservices architecture example, so someone comes to you and says, "Hey, you know? I think that a microservices architecture might solve our problem." Let's say, you as a listener have built microservices, you've transitioned from a monolithic code bases to microservices 20 times and you have a lot of context. You could say, "Hmm, nah. No, I don't think so." You could just say, "Based on my experience, I think you're wrong."
This tactic is about putting that on its head and saying to yourself, "Maybe they're right," puts yourself into their shoes. Once you're in their shoes and saying, "Well, maybe they're right," then you can say, "OK, well why do you think that a microservices architecture is the right solution to this problem? What specific problems does it solve for us?" Then it leads you in a path of thinking through their suggestion and as you do that it may reveal things that maybe you didn't realize they were trying to solve. Maybe they have a different problem in mind to solve than what you do. When you realize that they're trying to solve a different problem you're like, "Maybe it does solve that problem in a way I hadn't thought about. Maybe if we use it in this one particular instance it will solve a different problem that I thought we had."
Poornima: That's great. It helps you get over the assumptions of the problem that you thought or it gives you more context to see how deep of a problem it is.
Jen Leech: It reveals your assumptions, it reveals the other person's assumptions, and it opens you up to be a much better listener, and simultaneously also validates the other person's ideas, which may be one of the more importance of that interaction, in fact.
Poornima: I feel like both these mantras, rules, whatever you like to call them are great for like 99% of the situations we have when we're managing that high-stakes project, so thank you so much, Jen, for sharing them.
Jen Leech: Absolutely.
All this month we’ve been focused on the theme of pitching. We started out by talking about why many creative problem solvers shy away from pitching, leaving it up to CEOs, founders, and sales people. But, pitching is a really valuable skill that all of us need to hone in order for people hear us out, adopt our ideas, and believe in our solutions.
To help you embrace pitching, we shared the most common mistakes people make when pitching and how to overcome them. Then mentioned that the most effective and authentic pitches boil down to a powerful technique many of already do every day, storytelling. We covered why storytelling is powerful, how to condense a story down, and weave in our credibility.
By now you hopefully understand the importance of pitching, but you might be worried about having to pitch different audiences, and what to do in a setting where you only have 5 minutes or as much as 50 minutes to pitch.
Don’t worry Marie Perruchet and I have you covered! In this final segment on pitching, we’re going to share the various types of pitches you need to prepare.
You’ll learn:
- What to include in a long pitch
- How to condense a long pitch into a pitch that is five minutes or less
- How to modify your pitch to address different audiences
- How to practice your pitch, so you deliver it effectively
Need more help with your pitch? Reach out to Marie on Twitter or on her website.
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).
--
Episode Transcript
Poornima: Hey guys, we've been talking about pitching. I previously talked about the common mistakes people make when it comes to pitching, as well as some techniques to help you pitch in a way that resonates with your personality. If you missed either of those segments, check out the links to them below. In today's final segment, I'm gonna dive into the various types of pitches you need to prepare.
Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker, I'm your host Poornima Vijayashanker. Each episode of *Build* consists of a series of conversations I host with innovators, and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
I'm joined again by Marie Perruchet, who is the author of the latest book, *One Perfect Pitch*, and in today's final segment we're gonna dive into the various types of pitches you need to prepare. Now Marie, we are all pretty familiar with the elevator pitch, right? It's 30 to 90 seconds, and everyone obsesses about it. But in your book, you actually talk about having a lot of different types of pitches, or different lengths, right? Having even a longer pitch, and then whittling it down to that elevator pitch. So let's start by talking about why you should have a longer pitch, and what to put in it.
What to include in a long pitch
Marie Perruchet: Yes Poornima, people get fixed on the idea that they should have just one pitch, but actually you need many pitches, because they should be tailored to people you're talking to. If you're pitching a bid to see a company, or a bid to be company, it's gonna be a different pitch you know. If your software is addressing different industries, your story should start with a different character.
And the reason why I say that you should have a longer pitch, is that you should accommodate it, and make it flexible depending on the situation, and that over time, depending on the data points that you get, you rearrange your pitch. Also, why it's important to have a longer pitch, is that you can actually break it down and share the parts that you want to share, depending on the time you have, types of setting, the timing, the location; so many components that you have to include when you're presenting.
Poornima: Got it. So in a longer pitch, let's say we wanted to build our longest pitch, and it was what? Would it be like 15 minutes, or 10 minutes?
Marie Perruchet: It can be an hour, it can be two hours.
Poornima: OK, yeah.
Marie Perruchet: It can be five minutes. But definitely a great pitch would include a hook, a great hook, how you catch attention from people. It should talk about the problem, all the momentum, the achievement, or the breaking news, you know, what's new about your product. Talk about the solution, telling why you're the best at doing what you do. You know, great team, great founder's experience, you've had those awards in design, you learned to build the Siri technology.
Talk about your key differentiators, because so many other companies, all building the same product, or as advanced as you are, or you are belonging to a group and everybody's competing for funding. So you should be able to tell what makes you different and better than the others, and then you end talking, maybe about the market, or talking about the go-to market strategies, and finishing with an ask. You know, how do you want people to help you to build, and share, and keep working at your product.
Poornima: Got it. So your longest pitch has every single element that you talk about in your book, and all those various pieces.
Marie Perruchet: Yes.
How to condense a long pitch into a pitch that is five minutes or less
Poornima: So now, taking things away, that feels scary, 'cause it's like, "Well, yeah, the award was important." Or, having this one key player on the team was really important, so how do you know what to take away for those shorter pitches?
Marie Perruchet: As the minimal available product, you have to test your pitch. And what's important here, and people usually don't pay attention, you should listen. You should listen how people reformulate their pitch, and that was one of my early techniques. You know, when I came to Silicon Valley eight years ago I had no pitch. And what I would do is that, at the time, helping founders, helping them, talking to them, explaining what I was trying to do, and telling them, "Hey, what do you think? What did you hear? Could you articulate what I've just said? What makes sense, is it simple enough? Does it make you think of something else?" So trying to have those open questions.
And then, as you take down notes, if you're quick enough or used to that, or you can actually record with your phone, you know, videotape or just taking your voice recording, and then you replay it to yourself later on. And you see which words people are using. And you know, politicians, they do the same. They test it, and they see what the press picks up. And so, then you have to pick it up again, and then replay it, and practice it again, until, you know, the one day your pitch will be perfectly tailored to the person you're pitching to.
Poornima: Got it. OK, so see how people reformulate your pitch, and what are the highlights that they talk about when they do, and then that will help you kind of condense it down.
Marie Perruchet: Yes.
Poornima: Nice. Do you have an example from any of your readers, or companies that you've coached, where they went from a long pitch to a shorter one?
Marie Perruchet: Yes. So I worked with a company called Autodesk, and we worked with their marketers, and they would send me their pitch and I would review those pitches. And most of the pitches, they're very long, and include information that is not relevant to their audience, or they don't have a very specific call to action. So, I would go over and actually shorten the pieces that were not relevant, and then have them rewrite their pitch so that it would be a little bit more focused.
We start with founders, but also engineers and designers. What we do is that, if they have a 50-slide, or even 25-slide presentation, I'd listen to them, so that's kind of a first run. And then I tell them, "OK, this is what I think is important to highlight, depending on the time we have, and your target audience." And then I have them reformulate it and reframe it, and it gets much easier after we have them practice as well.
Poornima: What are some of the common things that you ask people to take out?
Marie Perruchet: Usually when I work with founders, but also engineers and designers, I like to focus on the story, you know, what makes them passionate about what they're doing, what drew them to work on developing that product or that project, because what I like is that understanding people perspective. They see things that I don't see, and this is from a more technical perspective, and what they do can actually change your situation. So I wanna know what drives them, and what are the problems that they've identified. And then they can share it with others. But you have to be able to communicate it in a very short and concise way, 'cause you know, I've been in the room with investors, entrepreneurs, and after 20 seconds they're being interrupted. So you have to give it right away.
Poornima: Got it. And so what are those pieces that you've seen over and over again, that people might put in that bloat their pitch, that you like to remove?
Marie Perruchet: The pieces that I like to remove is repetition, is rambling, is talking too much about the 50 features and characteristics of their products. I just want to hear about three features, and really defining features. Engineers tend to overwhelm you with too many details, they think that you wanna know more, so you have to understand and tell as much as possible, but this choice, you have to make it for people. You cannot let people make their choice for yourself. You have to work ahead. So don't overwhelm people with too many details, too many features.
Don't talk too much about yourself, but make it relevant how much your past experience is gonna be relevant to lead that team into building the next product. And also I would say, be very concise, and don't beat around the bush from the very first few seconds, or from the very first few lines of your pitch. Go straight away, dive into your pitch right away.
How to modify your pitch to address different audiences
Poornima: In your book you also talk about the importance of having pitches that are tailored to your audience. So question to you, how do you figure out who's in the audience, and then how do you go about doing that tailoring?
Marie Perruchet: You absolutely have no excuses for not knowing who's in your audience.
Poornima: OK, good.
Marie Perruchet: There's so many ways today, on the internet, to get information, and pull information about people, their taste, their location, what they're doing. If you're working in a company, you have to ask your workmates, you know, what a person likes, or is it a great timing for you to pitch to them, getting as much information internally. And also, for example, if you're speaking at a conference, you have to know beforehand, you know, the profession, the level of expectations. When I run a workshop, usually I send a survey before, through Google Docs, and ask people, you know, your expectations, how much they're knowledgeable, so it's great, kind of a quiz to engage people, and making them feel that what you're gonna say is going to be for them.
Poornima: Yeah, I think that's really important, tailoring it to the audience, and doing your homework ahead of time, to knowing what that audience is. Now, I do know a lot of times people get overwhelmed because they think, "OK, my audience is going to be a bunch of engineers, and there's a lot of different levels of engineers. How do I whittle it down to, maybe the beginner, versus the advanced, etc." So walk us through how you would whittle it down, once you have an idea of who's gonna be in the audience.
Marie Perruchet: So you cannot address everyone in the room, but who are the people, the target audience, who's gonna be the most relevant to grow your product or your business. So maybe you would pick a couple, or maybe three examples, you know, three case stories that is going to appeal and help the audience think that you're trying to relate to their own problems.
So let's say, today when you pitched the interview to me, Poornima, you know we are both women, both interested into public speaking, we love video and talking about skills that can be relevant to specific audience. So already you had me there, 'cause I knew you knew me, I can see you did your homework and research, and took the time and effort to make it relevant. Because we are all busy, we have less, and less time, we have very short attention span. So right away you have to be extremely precise, and be relevant, to engage, and actually instigate people to listen and keep listening to what you have to say.
Poornima: I really like what you said about, you can't address everyone in the room, 'cause I know a lot of people try to please everyone, and they're just...it's not gonna happen. So yeah, definitely tailoring it, making sure it's relevant, to even a handful of people, can be really valuable. I know the last thing that you talk about when it comes to preparing, is actually doing the preparation practice. Walk us through what you recommend when it comes to practicing your pitch.
Marie Perruchet: Many founders and entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, they wait for the last minute to practice their pitch. I've worked with this head of a Google Glass competitor, Japanese CEO. We practice, and I say, "OK, you have to practice at least 20 times." He said, "No, I will practice 200 times."
Poornima: Oh, wow.
Marie Perruchet: And I was quite impressed, because the reason why you have to practice, and it's one of my signature exercise that I do during the corporate trainings, is that I have people line up, like speed dating, but they have to pitch for a minute, and then they switch and then they do it again. And I can tell you, the first few minutes, people are bored, and then the pitch ends after 20 seconds. But then, after they do it like four of five times, I have to yell and tell them you have to stop. 'Cause first, you know, they get inspiration, they get idea, and they go straight to the point. They cut to the chase, and they don't give information that's not relevant anymore, because they see that effect that they have on the face of their audience. So practice is very important. Also, practicing in a room, meaning that every time that I go and speak to a conference I arrive an hour before, to do the recognition of the room, knowing where I'm gonna walk, where I'm gonna get closer to my audience so that I don't ostracize part of the room, because otherwise that part will leave the room, and as a speaker, you don't want that.
And I would say the third advice that I would give, is practicing using the technology. So you can use your tablet, you can use your phone; so you record it, and that's OK, to look at yourself. I know we are all the worst judges of ourselves, but then you play it with the sound and no image, without the sound with the image, and you can see and correct all your filler words, your repetitions, the “ehm, uhm,” but also if you're flapping your arms, if you keep touching your nose, or playing with your rings. And then, over time, maybe you're not gonna change overnight, but you learn how to be aware, what are the mistakes, where you can improve, and then manage it over time, and manage that anxiety of public speaking, but also knowing that your story cannot be perfect from the very first day. It takes time and it needs adjustment, you need to tailor it, and also understanding that it's for your audience, it's not for yourself.
How to practice your pitch, so you deliver it effectively
Poornima: That's great Marie. So how do you know when it's ready to go?
Marie Perruchet: How do you know if your pitch is ready to go? Don't wait. You have to do it right now, and start practicing with your friends, with a colleague. Great way to say is, "I have an idea, I have to present it to the management, to a partner, I'd love to get your feedback." Make sure that the person is qualified to give your feedback, not everybody is able to do that. But, "Hey, can I have a few minutes of your time? I'd like to run a few ideas." And then, take notes, or videotape or record with your phone what they've just told you. You have to be able to listen. Integrate that feedback, and then replace it in your next pitch. But don't wait, you know, the previous night before your presentation, to pitch. You have to practice beforehand, because also what's important, is that you will see the journey, and it will give you a lot of confidence.
Poornima: Yeah, I think that's valuable. And as you record yourself, you do see that progression. So, I know for a lot of people that I coach, they then realize they have made a lot of progress, because it's been captured.
Marie Perruchet: Absolutely.
Poornima: Well thank you so much Marie, for joining us, and I know our audience out there is gonna get a lot out of these segments. And be sure, audience, to check out Marie's book, *One Perfect Pitch*. And for people who wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way?
Marie Perruchet: To me what's important, is impact. I'd love to hear from you guys, you know, check the book, dive into the exercises, learn how to work around a method, and get back to me, tell me how it impacted your work. Whether it helped you refresh your ideas, your communication, pushed you to pitch more. I'd love to hear you, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Marie Perruchet. You can follow me on Twitter, send me messages through Instagram as well. You know, I love text messages, so please get in touch, I'd love to hear from you.
Poornima: That's it for our episode on pitching. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next *Build* episode, and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
One of the reasons people don’t like pitching is because they feel like they have to be someone else. They have to abandon their personality, get into character, and speak in a way they normally wouldn’t in order to impress a colleague, customer, or investor.
However, people on the receiving end of the pitch are going to see through and disengage quickly. A sales-y pitch is one that isn’t rehearsed and the person pitching hasn’t taken the time to figure out how to engage their audience.
What we don’t realize is that we don’t need to change who we are or how we speak to engage audiences. Many of us are already practicing a powerful pitching technique in our everyday lives, storytelling. And when we deliver stories in a conversational approach we come off as clear and authentic.
But we may still be opposed to starting a pitch with a story. We worry about it being too long or short, and the theme and details resonating with the audience.
Well in today’s Build episode, Marie Perruchet author of One Perfect Pitch: How to Sell Your Idea, Your Product, Your Business or Yourself is back.
You’ll learn the following from Marie:
- Why storytelling is a powerful technique for pitching
- How you can tell a great story in a business setting
- How to condense a long story so that it is short and to the point
- How to weave your credibility into a story
- Why most demos fail – hint: it’s because they fail to walk an audience through a story
- How to incorporate an ASK into your pitch
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
Episode Transcript
Poornima: Hey, guys. I'm back today talking about pitching. In the last segment, I covered a lot of the mistakes that people make when pitching. If you missed out, I highly recommend you check it out. The link to the video is below this one. Today I'm gonna dive into how to pitch in a way that resonates with your personality.
Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of a series of conversations I host with innovators, and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Today we're gonna continue the conversation around pitching, and I'm joined by Marie Perruchet, who is the author of the latest book, *One Perfect Pitch*. Thanks again for joining us today, Marie.
Marie: Great to be here.
Why storytelling is a powerful technique for pitching
Poornima: Last week we were talking about a number of mistakes people make when it comes to pitching. Now I want to shift gears and talk about how we can pitch in a way that resonates with our personality so that we feel effective as people who are pitching. I know one of the techniques that you talk about in your book is storytelling. But a lot of people have an aversion to starting a pitch with a story, because they're not sure how to craft one. They worry about whether it's too long or too short, and they want to make sure that it really resonates with the audience. So let's just start by talking about why storytelling is an effective technique to start your pitch with.
Marie Perruchet: I love storytelling. You're born and then your parents, your family, reads you stories. I grew up with stories from Charles Perrault, from Brothers Grimm. You know Cinderella...the first story of Cinderella was found in the fifth century in China. And since then you have more than 1,400 versions of Cinderella. Take Japan, the Japanese telling stories using animation. Think about in China there was this guy who would hang around and sell candies and actually would tell stories to sell more candies. And so if you're thinking about the story of immigration in the U.S., the show and tell that kids learn how to do at school, the kids would talk about their fluffy toy. That was a great way to have kids from immigrants who wouldn't speak the same language unite around a story. And when you think of what storytelling is today for technology companies, which is the main industry here in Silicon Valley but also blossoming in other countries, storytelling talks about transformation, and that's what technology companies are doing, transforming a certain industry.
How you can tell a great story in a business setting
So storytelling is a very powerful technique because it's something that people know already, they grew up with that. Every weekend you're telling your friends stories, how you got away from a parking ticket, or how, in my case, I have lost my passports, or how the toast you did for your friend's wedding didn't go so well. So we all know how to tell stories, except in a business perspective, in a business setting, it has to be very short because we can not spend hours telling stories.
So how do you tell a great story? First, think of the pitch meet being a mini story that creates emotion. So stories are a way to start and that's the method I describe in my book. You start with the problem, talk about the solution, and then finish with an ask that is the transformation.
A great image to remember is the image of the rainbow. There's the rainbow, there's the storm, that's the problem. The rainbow, talk about the solution, and then supposedly there's a pot of gold, which is the transformation. So whenever you want to tell a story, there should be a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you know the James Bond movies, they all start with something that grips you to your seat. Think about the Cinderella story, at the end there's a transformation. That's what storytelling is about. There's a problem, there's tension in the beginning, there's a resolution. That's what we want to hear because it creates a tension, it creates an emotion, and we want to follow up.
Poornima: OK, so for our audience out there, start with the problem, and that will present a good tension point to hook the audience right from the beginning.
Marie Perruchet: Absolutely.
Poornima: Now, I know another concern is having the story be too long or too short. How do you recommend it being just the right length for the pitch that you're doing?
Marie Perruchet: People shouldn't worry so much because a story takes time to craft and to refine. Anyone is able to tell a story for an hour, for two hours, but it takes a lot of practice to chop it to maybe a minute. And there's so much you can tell in a minute. The radio pieces I used to tell would be a minute long, and there's so much you can tell in structure. So people shouldn't be worried about that because the story changes over time and you should practice it.
How to condense a long story so that it is short and to the point
Poornima: So how do you condense that hour-long story down to a minute? Do you have an example?
Marie Perruchet: I advise founders, engineers, and designers to take a page, write their story, look at it, and then eliminate two thirds. And those two thirds should be anything that's not relevant or that's not gonna interest their audience. Anything that's not precise, that doesn't have data or numbers, you should get rid of it. Any personal opinions shouldn't be there. That's the first step.
The second step, when you want to know about your story you should focus on different parts like they're LEGO parts, because each part should be breakable. Imagine yourself at a cocktail party, you start pitching and somebody comes and interrupts you. So you should be able to tell those parts very separately and if you put them together they work very well. So think about what's your hook, how do you start your story? How do you differentiate yourself? How do you bring up the solution? Talk about your team.
So each segment should be a minute long. And it's very easy. If you're taking your Word document, there's a word count. It should be between, I believe, 150 words per minute. You can use your calculator in the toolkit for the Word document to calculate it. And then you practice it and you should be very slow, very articulate, especially if, like me, you're non-native English speakers, so that people can get used to your accent.
How to weave your credibility into a story
Poornima: Nice. Now, I know another thing you talk about is credibility and leading with it. How do you recommend people lead with that credibility?
Marie Perruchet: I'm gonna give you an example. When I meet people and they don't know me or they want to question my expertise, I tell them that I'm an award-winning journalist, worked for the BBC in three countries. I've also written a book at McGraw-Hill on the art of writing your pitch called *One Perfect Pitch*. You are establishing credibility giving examples or giving awards or giving achievements to people about what you've been doing in the past so that you can create trust.
Poornima: Right. Now, I meet a lot of people who often will tell me their credibility and they'll mention things that maybe happened 5 or 10 years ago that may not be relevant to the work that they're doing now. So how do you create credibility when you're just getting something off the ground?
Marie Perruchet: I worked with engineers, with founders and designers to create credibility from the ground, and when you think that nothing happened in the past 10 years, yes, something did happen. But you need to really look into it and work and find out, what you're doing today, you didn't get up in the morning and start it. It comes from somewhere and I want to know that. I want to know why you and why not somebody else. One great way to do it is ask your friends, "Why do you think I'm so passionate? Why do you think I'm working every day for 12 hours a day and building and developing my product or my startup?" Ask people you've met with or you've worked with, "This is what I'm doing right now, but I'm unsure, I have doubts. What would be the reason why I should pursue it? Could you help me and shed some light?" Understanding what is your path, your passion, for me, writing a book has been very transformative because I could find out why I was so passionate about storytelling and that storytelling has been with me my entire life.
Why most product demos given during pitches fail
Poornima: Now, I know another technique is the proof is in the product. Especially for those of us who are engineers and designers, we like to have something tangible to show. Can you talk about demoing a product? I'll admit, I've done a lot of terrible demos in my past. How would you recommend people have an effective demo of their product?
Marie Perruchet: Yes, people tend to overlook their demo. They work on their questions, they work at telling what they're good at, sometimes telling about the problem if it's great, but they think, "OK, I'm just gonna do the demo on the fly." But the demo should be extremely prepared because if you need Wi-Fi, you don't know any technical issues. I lived in India, I know about electricity cuts happening all the time. So you never know and you want to be prepared. So don't depend first on your demo to explain your product.
The second thing would be have somebody else handling all the technicalities so that you don't have to worry about that. And the third thing would be, of course, practicing your demo. We worked with a client who was presenting a product to Samsung, and what we did is that we took it from...it's like a journey or taking a trip from A to Z. From the moment you have to click on the button to get into the software to the moment you have to scroll down the menu, you have to show all that. Maybe you have to spend 20 minutes or 30 minutes, keep it maybe under 10 minutes. A couple of minutes is great, but you have to go step by step so that the person understands from their user's perspective what they have to do to get to the product.
Poornima: Yeah, I like what you said about the user's perspective, and I know in your book you talk about even presenting a scenario. Not just like, "Oh, let me show you my product, and here's how you sign up, and here's how you get started," but having a very directed workflow maybe based on a specific use case.
Marie Perruchet: Yes, so you can also do that. If you can show the product, people always like to see something tangible. When you're bargaining in certain countries, you want to show the dollars, the euros, the money that you have. What you can do if you don't have the product with you, you can pick a name. This is Kate, this is Andrew, this is Jane. Jane starts her morning that way. This is what her journey looks like. This is her problem, this is the problem she faced, and this is how our solution helps her transform her day.
Poornima: Nice, so yeah, that's very relatable and that comes back to incorporating storytelling into your demo.
Marie Perruchet: Yes, because behind every product there's a team, there's a leader, and we want to know the struggles your team are going through to give birth to that product.
How to incorporate an ASK into your pitch
Poornima: And finally, there's the ask, which you talk about incorporating into your pitch. But again, depending on backgrounds, you both feel like that can be really sales-y or sleazy. So walk us through why it's important to have an ask at the end of your pitch and how to craft one.
Marie Perruchet: To me, a sales-y pitch is a pitch where people have it rehearsed, and they don't really connect and they only talk about themselves. So an ask at the end of the pitch is another great way to reconnect with the person if by any chance you've lost her or him during your presentation.
So why finishing by an ask? Because every story has an end. And you're telling this story, imagine you've created a tension, you've got people very excited about the problem because they felt, "Oh, they're relating to my own problem, they brought us a solution." But then, nothing happens at the end of your story. You leave them in a state of anxiety. So people, if they've been seduced and excited by your idea, they want to help. So you have to give them clear directions.
For example, "Hey, I'd like to have an intro to that person to support my project. I need more resources. What can you do to help me fund that project?" Be extremely clear, and I know in American English it's much easier. In certain countries, you don't want to be so direct, but find a way to have your team or the person or your subject act on something. Just don't leave it like this because people want to help. They want you to be successful, so what can you give them so that they can help you?
Poornima: That's fantastic. Thank you, Marie. This has been really helpful.
Now Marie and I want to learn from you. What additional techniques have you tried that have worked as you've been pitching your ideas? Let us know in the comments below and the first three people to respond are gonna receive an autographed copy of *One Perfect Pitch* from Marie.
That's it for this segment. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next and final segment on this topic of pitching, where we'll talk about the various types of pitches you need to prepare. Ciao for now!
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
Have you ever had an idea for something, like a process or product that you wanted to improve? But instead of sharing your idea with others like your friends or co-workers, you just kept it to yourself because the thought of having to “pitch it” felt icky and salesy?
Many of us who are creative problem solvers feel this way.
Since pitching doesn’t come naturally to us, we just leave it up to CEOs, founders, and sales people.
However, pitching is a really valuable skill that all of us need to hone, because only if we pitch our ideas will people hear us out, adopt them, and believe in our solutions.
In today’s episode of Build, we’re going to tackle a number of misconceptions people have about pitching as well as the common mistakes people make while delivering them.
In future episodes, we’ll talk about how you can pitch in a way that resonates with your personality and the various types of pitches you need to prepare because it turns out that an elevator pitch isn’t enough!
To help us out, I've invited Marie Perruchet (http://www.oneperfectpitch.com/about-us), who is the author of the latest book, One Perfect Pitch: How to Sell Your Idea, Your Product, Your Business or Yourself (https://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Pitch-Business-Yourself/dp/0071837590).
Even if you don’t plan on pitching anything in the near future, chances are someone is going to pitch something to you: a project or a product, and you need to be able to filter the best from the worst!
So I highly recommend you watch this episode to learn:
- Why no one is a natural when it comes to pitching
- How to get over the discomfort of pitching
- Why you can’t stop at the first NO
You’ll also learn the 3 most common mistakes people make while pitching and how to avoid them such as:
- Not taking the time to make people care enough about your idea.
- Not realizing that most pitches are shared.
- Overwhelming people with data.
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).
Episode Transcript
Poornima: Pitching an idea feels icky and salesy and for those of us who are creative problem solvers; it doesn't come naturally to us. So, we just end up not doing it all together, leaving it up instead to founders, CEOs, and sales people. However, pitching is a really valuable skill that all of us need to hone, because only if we pitch our ideas will people hear us out, adopt them, and believe in our solutions. Today, we're going to tackle a number of misconceptions and mistakes that people make when it comes to pitching and in future segments, we're going to talk about how you can pitch in a way that resonates with your personality and the various types of pitches you need to have prepared.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of a series of conversations I host with innovators and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Today we're going to be diving into the misconceptions around pitching and to help us out, I've invited Marie Perruchet, who is the author of the latest book, *One Perfect Pitch: How to Sell Your Idea, Your Product, Your Business or Yourself*. Thanks for joining us, Marie.
Marie Perruchet: Thanks for having me, Poornima.
Poornima: We met at a conference earlier this year, and as I recall it, your background is not in tech. So, walk us through your background and what lured you into tech.
Marie Perruchet: My name's Marie. I grew up in Normandy, originally from South Korea, born there and was adopted to French parents. Because I always loved traveling, my first career was actually being a journalist.
Poornima: OK.
Marie Perruchet: I was a radio journalist and I started out from Brussels, then I decided to move further and I worked for the French National Radio from New Delhi in India covering politics, earthquake, and two years later I thought it would be great to also work from one of larger clients in Asia, so I moved to Shanghai where I worked for the BBC. And then after, that was my big turning point, because I moved to Silicon Valley. In the beginning, I was covering some tech, but mainly it was for the Presidential elections for former President Obama, end of 2008. You know, when you arrive here, you realize that first you don't have to use VPN to get access to information coming from China. But also that everybody is embracing entrepreneurship and that means that you have a laptop, you have a Wifi connection, and you have an idea, and you want to see if you can put it through and then push it to the market.
I thought it was very exciting, so I thought, "OK, what's going on here? What can I do?" I always loved helping people tell their own story through the media, but at the time, it was a big explosion about the platforms. How do you communicate your company's story, how you can communicate about yourself, how do you go for funding? And I started helping entrepreneurs and startup founders communicate that story to the world and also to investors here, but also users and partners. I mentored at different incubators, including 500 startups, mentored at Japanese, Korean, Chinese incubators here and then starting having my own clients helping them communicate their idea for funding, but also on their website, on social media. And I'm going to corporate training where I brought these large companies here, because you know internally you also need to be able to present your ideas effectively in very short formats, because people they have very short attention spans.
Poornima: Yeah. That's a lot of great work that you've done around pitching. What then inspired you to go from doing that work to writing the book, *One Perfect Pitch*?
Marie Perruchet: So, you know when you're a journalist, you think that down the road you're going to write a book at some point.
Poornima: OK.
Marie Perruchet: But I was not a journalist anymore. And what happened is that I was featured in the *Wall Street Journal* for my work and McGraw-Hill they actually pitched the book idea to me.
Poornima: Oh, that's great.
Marie Perruchet: Yes. And I said yes, even without knowing what it means to write a book.
Why People Find Pitching Uncomfortable
Poornima: So, I know a lot of people don't enjoy pitching, they don't feel like they're good at it, they're not a natural, they might be shy or introverted. How do you help people get over those situations?
Marie Perruchet: First of all, people should think about why they're so uncomfortable pitching. And it has to do with...you know, think about your business ahead. So, it takes a lot of time to think about it and it takes a lot of preparation knowing your user, what your business does, your brand identity, your identity. So, that's why it's very important to think ahead about what you're trying to convey. And then when you're confident about your idea, it makes it much easier to be able to pitch your idea. The second thing is also practice. Don't wait for the last minute for people to feed you questions to pitch, because here it's very competitive. People are coming from all over the world to go for funding, look for funding, but also trying to get and acquire users and customers. And I would say the sort of thing that I tell people who feel shy, “OK, maybe you're doing this presentation, maybe you're pitching, maybe it doesn't go so well as you think, but you have to keep going back to the stage in the room and keep pitching until your idea goes through.” So, you can't stop at the first “no.” You have to keep doing it.
Poornima: Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point.
Marie Perruchet: Of course, if you're looking on the internet, if you're looking at great speakers, think about in 1988 at the Democratic Convention, there was the Arkansas governor called Bill Clinton. He was a very, very bad presenter at the time, but you know how much money he makes today while speaking. So, nobody's ever a natural. There are techniques and you need to acquire those techniques to feel more comfortable and manage your anxiety.
Pitching Mistake #1: Not taking the time to make people care about your idea.
Poornima: There's also a number of mistakes that people make when they are pitching and you cover some of them in your book. The first one is not taking the time to make people care about what it is you're talking about. So, what exactly does that mean, and how do you make people care?
Marie Perruchet: How do you make people care when you're trying to convey an idea? You have to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. So it means that you have to have empathy because maybe you got that idea from the closet of your room or from your garage or from your basement if you're living on the East Coast or in any other countries, but you know you have to understand how your product, your service is solving a problem for the person who may buy that product from you. And that's why when you're a founder because you're so entrenched in the work, you need to take some perspective and really put yourself in the shoes of your audience.
Pitching Mistake #2: Not realizing that pitches are shared.
Poornima: We also have people in our audience who are very technical, and a lot of times when they are presenting an idea, the get really bogged down in that jargon, which may not be comprehendible by somebody who is not technical or on the business side or has some other expertise. So, how would you explain to them how to manage that?
Marie Perruchet: So, they should think about how to make their pitch simple, because whoever they're going to pitch it to, that person is going to pitch the idea to somebody else. So that's why they have to make it simple. For many founders, their biggest problem is knowing where to start their pitch. And in my book, I describe three ways to start your pitch. The first one is telling how you're solving your tech problem. No, the first one is telling about the problem that you're trying to solve. So putting yourself in the shoes of the person. Another way to start your technical pitch is talking about the breaking news. What's the latest about your product or your idea? Maybe you've just debugged something in your software or you've just released a new product. Something that makes it exciting for people. And the third way to start your pitch, when it's a technical pitch as well, is talking about all the achievements that your team has achieved in the past week or in the past month, so that's a great way to grab the attention of your audience.
Poornima: Yeah. Now, I know another thing you mention in the book is having a universal story, right? And this is something you can start your pitch with. So, walk us through, what exactly is a universal story?
Marie Perruchet: I recommend founders to start with a universal story, because that's how they find something that they can have related to what they're doing, meaning that founders think that what they are doing is very unique and very special, but if you're looking around, you realize that maybe 10 companies are doing the same thing as you're doing.
Poornima: Sure. Yep.
Marie Perruchet: And when you're thinking about the people who are going to buy your product or your service, they cannot just be your family or your close friends. You have to understand that hey, this product could be used in that country in that segment, in that market and make it relevant for everyone.
Poornima: Do you have an example of a reader or somebody that you coached to come up with a universal story that you could share with us?
Marie Perruchet: Yes. I've coached a company that were developing sensors and those sensors were actually bees and those bees were able to detect some substance, illegal substances for example, and what we found out is that the founder, his grandpa was actually the largest exporter of honey from Turkey. And so everybody understand honey, everybody understand bees, so that's where universal, because it's a common in plain English in English language that people can use to convey their ideas.
Poornima: Got it. So you started with that, and then talked about the sensors rather than starting with sensors, which people may or may not understand anyway.
Marie Perruchet: Exactly. Because you always have to think that people are going to pitch for you, as I'm pitching about himself today. I need to be able to understand and the more simple you make it, the easier it travels.
Pitching Mistake #3: Overwhelming people with data.
Poornima: Yep. So simplicity's important, but I know a lot of us in tech love information and data. One of the things that you talk about in your book is sometimes we don't present enough information or the data that we share isn't the most relevant or can be confusing. How do you recommend people decide on how much information is enough and how to present data that's valuable?
Marie Perruchet: Well, I love data. Most of the time, people they tend to overwhelm people with data, so you have to maybe—for example, if you're thinking about a slide presentation—just maybe one data per slide, that's enough. Not 50 data per slide.
Poornima: Yeah.
Marie Perruchet: And also, when they're saying, "Oh, not enough data," what they mean is that they're not precise enough. Sounds like high level or it's too much jargon, but we don't really picture in our mind what it means, so the more precise you are with your data, the better it is. For example, in a span of three weeks, our traffic increased by 50%. So that's very precise, instead of saying that, "We've got great traction in developing our product." That doesn't mean anything.
Poornima: Got it. And so showing kind of the growth trend could be one way of representing it. Are there other techniques that you talk about?
Marie Perruchet: To talk about traction?
Poornima: Mm-hmm.
Marie Perruchet: You can say traction in a short amount of time, saying like in a month, required X number of users. That could be another way to show it, so growth, but also, “Our application has been number one for six consecutive weeks or six consecutive months at the Apple Store in three countries.” And you're not bragging but you're just stating the facts and it gives context to people because imagine what you're pitching, other companies are also pitching. So how do we get the right context to make a decision about should we have the next meeting?
Poornima: Got it. Well, thank you so much Marie. This has been fantastic. Now Marie and I want to know, are there mistakes that we haven't covered in this segment, that you're worried about making? Let us know what they are in the comments below and we'll be sure to address them.
OK, that's it for this segment. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next segment where we'll continue the conversation and dive into how to create a pitch that resonates with your personality. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
What Is Tech Debt And How Do You Manage It
It’s crunch time! You’ve got eager customers who are waiting for you to ship product, your teammates are eager to complete the release and move on, and you don’t want to be the bottleneck. So what to do you? You rush through writing your code and put in a quick fix.
It’s good enough to pass tests and a quick code review.
Unfortunately, crunch time doesn’t come around once in a blue moon. It happens more often than we’d like. And sadly it gets heralded by sayings like: “Move fast!” “Break things!” And, “Ship code!”
As designers, product managers, and developers we are eager to share what we’ve built with customers. However, constantly operating by the seat of our pants comes at a price and that price is tech debt.
Whether you have or haven’t heard of tech debt, I’m pretty sure you’ve experienced its effects. If you’ve been on product teams that seems to constantly be putting out fires, you’ve probably noticed that over time all those quick fixes add up. And when it comes time to build something brand new, what would normally take a few hours or days, suddenly takes weeks or months.
The reason it takes so long is because there’s a lot of cruft built up in the code base. Continuing to layer on quick fixes will only destabilize the code and impact its quality.
If you’ve struggled to deal with tech debt on your product team, or want to educate new teammates on how to manage it, then today’s Build Tip is for you!
I’m joined by Jay Hum who is a Product Manager and Pivotal, and together we’re going to be sharing:
Be sure to share the episode with your teammates to help them understand the importance of tech debt!
Want more resources on tech debt? Here's a link to the post Jay mentioned in the episode: Introduction to the Technical Debt Concept https://www.agilealliance.org/introduction-to-the-technical-debt-concept/
Transcript
Poornima: When your product has a nasty bug that's impacting a lot of users, your first priority is to put a fix in that's going to help resolve it. You might hear your developers say something like...
Developer: Yeah, I'll just put in a quick fix.
Poornima: A week may go by, maybe possibly a month, and you've got another nasty bug on your hand. Your developer might tell you...
Developer: No problem, I'll have that bug resolved by the end of the day.
Poornima: Later on, you might ask them to put in a new feature, and they may respond with...
Developer: Yeah, it's going to take a while.
Poornima: How long?
Developer: Weeks, possibly months.
Poornima: “Weeks, possibly months!?” Why so long?
Developer: Tech debt.
What is tech debt
Poornima: Wondering what's tech debt, how to avoid it, and prevent it before it gets too unwieldy? I'm going to answer these questions and many more, in today's quick *Build* tip.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Today, I've got a *Build* tip for you. I'm joined by Jay Hum, who is a product manager at Pivotal. Jay, tell me what's tech debt?
Jay Hum: Tech debt is the effort that builds up when a team makes a conscience decision to implement code that's easy, instead of building out a best solution.
Poornima: OK, so what does that actually...
Jay Hum: The easy-to-implement, quick, messy code, is the debt. Like any type of debt, it accrues interest over time, and so the additional effort that is built up that could either be time, money, or resources, is the technical debt that builds up that makes it much more difficult in the long run to implement a better solution.
How to avoid tech debt
Jay Hum: Here is the interesting thing. Tech debt is usually thought of as a bad thing, something that needs to be paid down very quickly, or avoided as much as possible, or all together. However, tech debt is actually unavoidable. Much like financial debt, there is not necessarily good technical debt, but there is technical debt that you can deal with.
An example is, in the mortgage or student loan, where the principle plus the interest that you accrue could be lower than what you actually yield in terms of the investment. Any experienced or seasoned developer are always wanting to create the best possible solution that there is out there. However, sometimes you need to incur technical debt in order to get a product out to market quicker. Generally, the time to market, or the time pressure, is what makes technical debt unavoidable.
How to manage tech debt
Poornima: OK, it's unavoidable. How can we manage it, while continuing to meet customer needs and pushing features out?
Jay Hum: Here's the thing about technical debt that makes this sort of the analogy to financial debt a little dissimilar. You don't actually have to pay down technical debt. For instance, when you're building out a product or service, there could be parts of the code that aren't used very often, or are not touched, that don't need to be changed. The RY on actually paying down that debt, or refactoring doesn't get you much, or doesn't get you anything there.
One of the other ways to really look at it and approach it is build in technical debt into the product role map, or how you plan out your releases. When you think about it, you should be thinking about it in terms of what's the upside potential versus the downside risk of either paying down technical debt, or not paying down technical debt, and relate that, to again, getting a product or service out to the market quicker, or spending more time and writing more cleaner quality code.
Poornima: All right, that's great that we don't have to always have to pay down tech debt, and that it's OK to accumulate it, but how do we know when to make the trade off of paying it down, versus just letting it exist?
Jay Hum: Right, so one of the things that you want to look at, is what is the probability of the occurrence of something bad happening, or the probability of the occurrence of you having to do a major refactor because the technical debt has just gotten so big. Coupled with that, you also want to look at what is the impact.
Again, there is smaller technical debt, where the impact of paying it down is not very big. Again, there's other parts where the technical debt can be very big, could lead to a big regression, and what is the impact on the delay to the market, or the impact to the customers that are actually using your product that's in the market right now.
When you don’t need to pay down tech debt
Poornima: Do you have a example of a situation where you don't need to pay down the tech debt, versus one where you do?
Jay Hum: Sure, yeah. I think a really good example would be if you take a look at an app through your analytics, and you're looking at one of the features that you've implemented is not being used very often. This is a good example of, you probably don't want to pay down technical debt on that feature, because again, it's not a lot of people that are using it.
Versus the flip side, so if you see that there is a feature that's being used very heavily by your users, and that they're clamoring for a feature that is sort of an add on to that feature, this is an instance where you would want to pay down technical debt quickly, so that you can build out that new feature that is an add on to the existing feature.
Is it ever too late to pay down tech debt?
Poornima: What happens if you leave tech debt around for too long? Is there ever a point where it's too late to pay it down?
Jay Hum: There are instances where it is too late. Usually what that manifests itself is that you have to do a big rewrite, which not a lot of people enjoy doing, both from a customer perspective, as well as the development team. If you go back to what I said earlier, if you realize that tech debt is unavoidable, and you build it into your product strategy, and your product roadmap, then there's ways of being able to manage that tech debt at a good pace, so that you never have to end up with having to do a big rewrite.
Poornima: Thanks, Jay. This has been really helpful. Do you have any other resources for our audiences to check out?
Jay Hum: Yes, they should check out this article written by the Agile Alliance. It is called “Introduction to Technical Debt Concept,” and it goes much more deeper into some of the concepts that I discussed here around technical debt.
Poornima: Now, Jay and I want to know, how do you guys handle tech debt at your company. Let us know in the comments below this video. OK, that's it for today ‘s *Build* tip. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more great episodes of *Build*, and *Build* tips like today's. Special thanks to our sponsor Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing today's episode. Ciao for now.
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).
There’s been a lot of debate and controversy around the lack of women and minorities being represented in tech companies from entry-level to the C-suite and board room.
However, what isn’t showcased is how there is sisterhood within tech, where women are helping each other out, and enacting change at every level from schools to the board room.
To talk about how women are investing and encouraging each other, I’ve invited Samantha Walravens who is the co-author of the new book Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech.
If you’re a woman, minority, or male ally you’ll learn from Samantha how:
This is the last episode of FemgineerTV but don’t worry it’s not the end...
After hosting FemgineerTV and listening to audience members like you for the past 2 ½ years, myself and my sponsor Pivotal Tracker decided it was time for a fun format!
Starting next month, I’m going to be launching a new show called Build. I think you’ll enjoy the new format for Build. Each week you’ll receive a short video on a topic to help you build a product, company, and career in tech. So stay tuned for the launch of Build :)
Want to help us get the word out about Build?
Please take a moment to leave a review on iTunes here.
If you’ve never left a review, here is a quick tutorial on how to do.
--
Poornima: Welcome to another episode of *Femgineer TV*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker, I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer.
In this show, I invite innovators in tech, and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building tech products and companies.
One of the most heated topics today is the lack of women and minorities represented in tech; from entry level, to the C suite, to the board room. While we all know this is already a problem, in today's episode, we're going to be talking about some of the solutions, and showing how there are companies and organizations enacting these solutions.
And to help us out, I've invited Samantha Walravens, who is the coauthor of the latest book, *Geek Girl Rising: Inside The Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech*. Thanks so much for joining us today, Samantha.
Samantha: Thanks for having me!
Poornima: Yeah, it's wonderful.
Let's start by talking about why you and your coauthor, Heather Cabot, decided to write this book.
Sharing The Unspoken Narrative of Women In Technology
Samantha: The inspiration for this book was a conversation I had about three years ago with a friend of mine, who's been in Silicon Valley for 20 years. She's a woman, she's the VP of sales in business development, and she's worked in a number of tech startups, and we were having coffee, and she said, "Sam, I cannot tell you what just happened in my performance group review, it was last week, and my manager commented on what I was wearing, the color of my dresses, the jewelry I wore, and he told me that I was too aggressive, and too bossy, and I needed to tone it down a bit." Meanwhile, she is the head of sales, and she was rocking her number out of the park. So she said, "Sam, you've got to write something." She knew I was a journalist. She said, "You've got to write something and you have to talk about this kind of discrimination and this kind of sexism in Silicon Valley."
Mind you this is before the *Newsweek* article came out, "What does Silicon Valley really think of women," people were discussing women in technology, but it really was not a top of mind—and so I started to do a little digging, and researching and interviewing women. And what I found was, yes, there's sexism, there is harassment, there's discrimination, there's unconscious bias, it's there, it's a problem we need to talk about it and deal with it.
But there was another narrative, another discussion that wasn't being told, which was: these women want to talk about the companies they were building, the technologies they were creating, the women who are supporting them and helping them along the way in their careers. There was this whole other narrative that was missing from the conversation that was happening in the national news media about sexism in Silicon Valley.
And I thought, "we have to discuss this." So, Heather Cabot, who's my coauthor, was in New York, I'm in San Francisco, we talked, and she said, "Sam, I've been researching this topic," it was kind of a coincidence, it was like one of those weird moments of weird fate. And she said, "I've been researching this topic, let's work together." So we put our heads together and we just started digging into the topic, and it's been three years now, and finally the book is coming out!
The Sisterhood That Is Supporting Women In Tech in Silicon Valley And Beyond
Poornima: So one thing I experienced early on in my career, and it keeps me motivated, is the women who inspired me. So, early on, when I was a college student in engineering school, I had a professor, and she had twins, and she was doing her research, and she was teaching, and she was leading the department, and I thought, "If she could do it, I could do it." And as I was reading the book, I noticed the theme of the sisterhood kind of coming up again and again.
Tell us how you discovered this theme as you started writing or as you were doing your research.
Samantha: Of course. Well, I too had a mentor back in my Silicon Valley days when I worked for a software startup during the dotcom boom in 1998 to about 2003, so I saw the dotcom boom and the bust happen, I was living through it, our company went public, stock went to 130, then went down to two, so I lived and breathed the dotcom boom and bust.
My manager/boss at that point was Carol Carpenter, who has since gone on to become—she was the CEO, actually CMO of ClearSlide and then CEO of ElasticBox, so she's a prominent woman in Silicon Valley, and she really pulled me up. She really, when I was lacking confidence, and I thought, "I can't do this," I'd just had my baby, my first baby, we were going public, and I thought, "I can't do this, this is crazy." We're working 24/7 and I have a newborn at home. She was the one who said, "Sam, you can do it, you can do it." And having that kind of mentorship and that kind of woman who was going through it herself pulling me up, really encouraged me.
So as we were researching the book, we started noticing these pockets around the startup universe, women who were supporting each other, investing in each other, encouraging each other in their careers and inspiring the next generation of girls and young women to pursue technology and continue their careers in technology.
Encouraging The Next Generation of Women To Consider Careers In Tech
Poornima: Yeah, that's great. I think you're absolutely right, that is a narrative that's missing from the media and more women need to know that that's out there as well, so that they don't feel like all there is is just what the media portrays.
Now, the first place that you write about change happening is at the primary school up to the high school level, so walk us through what that looks like.
Samantha: Well, fortunately, before Obama left office, he did create an initiative, a $4 billion initiative called "Computer Science for All" that is encouraging and putting funds towards creating computer science curriculum in schools throughout the country. I was so excited to read about Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, in the Chicago public schools now, computer science is a requirement for all high schools in Chicago. So I think we're going to see more of that.
When you look at the numbers, though, we still have a long way to go, cause 25% of high schools in the U.S. offer computer science, I think it's like 22% of girls, of students taking the computer science AP exam are girls, so we still have a long way to go.
What we noticed, though, it's sort of this grassroots movement of women who are encouraging the younger generations to start building, to start creating, to start coding. For example, we start our book talking about Debbie Sterling, who's the founder and the CEO of Goldie Blocks, and she's got this great—I have two little girls, we have it at home, it's a great toy that encourages girls to build, and there's a really fun, positive role model, Goldie, who builds a spinning machine and she has all these sorts of engineering—you wouldn't even know it's engineering, it's really just building Ferris wheels and building merry-go-rounds and all these fun things, along with the story, talking about Goldie and her friends, and how she's building these different fun games and amusement park rides. We have that in our household.
These are the kinds of things that women are doing to try to inspire the next generation. There is a woman in our book who started a company called Bitcode, she's actually working with the public schools to get them to use video to teach girls how to code. So if you have kids you know that they're on video, they're on YouTube, and they're really tech savvy. I have four kids, they can get around YouTube, and iMovie, and they're all over it. So, this tool is used in the public schools, to teach coding, using videos, to make it fun.
How Colleges Are Changing The Ratio Of Women Graduating With Computer Science Degrees
Poornima: It's great, yeah, it's good to see these grassroots efforts, so that even if there is kind of a gap in terms of change for public schools or the school system in general, there's ways in which parents and teachers can supplement that.
So, the next place in which a lot of women and minorities drop off is at the college level, tell us who's working on changing that.
Samantha: Well, we had the most amazing experience at Grace Hopper in 2015. I believe you were there, and Heather and I, my coauthor and I went, and just to see, I think it was 12,000 women there in computing, and it is a true celebration. And to see the enthusiasm and the excitement and the bonding between these young women, it was so encouraging.
When you look at specific colleges, there's a lot being done to encourage more women in to pursue technology and computer science. I met with Maria Klawe, who's the president of Harvey Mudd, and wow! What a firecracker she is, she skateboards around campus, she's just a really fun, wonderful woman, and she implemented a program along with her colleagues a few years ago, where there are two tracks for computer science, so as a freshman you can take the gold track or the black track.
The gold track is for students who have not had any computer science experience in high school; the black track is for students who've had some experience. So, by doing this, the students who have not had experience don't feel so impostered, they don't have the confidence cause no one's had this experience, so they get through this year and I spoke to a couple of students who have taken these classes, and they say that by the end of the year, everyone's pretty much at the same level.
So, she, Maria Klawe, and her team has tripled the number of women graduating with computer science degrees at Harvey Mudd in the past ten years, and the number is, I hate to throw in all these numbers, cause they get little mind boggling at times, but 55% of the computer science graduates at Harvey Mudd are now women.
Poornima: That's great, it's a nice change to—the numbers go up.
Samantha: There's also Stanford. Another example of what's going on to encourage women to pursue computer science is Stanford University, of course a top institution, but they have a Women in Tech group called She++, which was started by Ayna Agarwal, and who was not even a computer science major by the way, but she started this group to encourage women and they had a Gala, every year, which gathers all the women in technology, not just Stanford. What they do is they go out into the communities and they take on high school students in different communities around the country and they support these young high school girls to start programs in their communities. For example, I live out in Marin County, and there is a girl who started a robotics happy schooler box program in Marin City, which is an underserved community in Marin County, and she runs this afterschool program in Marin City.
So all of these girls around the country who are starting these programs through She++ gather together for this gala, and I am telling you, if you could be there to see these college women, these high school girls who came, they were dressed to the nines, they were glamorous, I mean, talk about debunking the myths and breaking stereotypes about what a woman in tech looks like, I mean, we could have been in an LA nightclub, not to sound like—but they were so beautiful and wonderful and smart and excited to talk about their programs, and they were so excited to be in technology. And again, this is why Heather and I said, "This is a story that no one sees," you don't see this kind of enthusiasm around technology, you see, "Oh, it's so hard, numbers are dropping, it's all doom and gloom." And so we really wanted to tell that other story.
The Angel Investors And Others Who Are Supporting Female Founders
Poornima: OK. That brings us back to industry, and I know there's a lot going on at the corporate level, as well as startups. I'm of course partial to startups, so let's start there and talk about how the ecosystem is changing for women and minorities.
Samantha: There's a lot of momentum behind supporting female founders. For example, there are accelerator programs like the Women Startup Lab, which is down here at Menlo Park; there's MergeLane, which is in Colorado; there's The Refinery in Connecticut. These programs focus on female founders, and really giving them the tools, the skills they need to grow their company into a venture, fundable company. And they give the tools to learn how to pitch venture capitalists, and we all know the venture capital world is very male dominated.
Poornima: Yeah, it is a challenge. I know I've had my fair share of doing the fundraising.
So, there's a very common problem around women and minorities getting up and pitching their business to VCs, either male VCs not getting their idea, or they don't think it's a big enough market, or there's a lot of unconscious bias around it, so how are women getting their training to get over all of that?
Samantha: Well, you've started a company, so you know what it's like. The founders that we've met, that I've met in my journey with this book, are so passionate about their idea. But you can have an idea, and it's not going to go anywhere—you have to have the product market fit, you have to test the idea, you have to build your team out—and so these programs are really teaching women what they need to do to get to that level, to actually pitch to investors. But when you look at the numbers, I think it's 10% of the venture funding, globally, goes to female founders—it's still a really small percentage.
We've also noticed that there's women who are angels. So angel investors who fund companies at the early stages—for example, Joanne Wilson, aka Gotham Gal, who has a tremendous momentum in New York City, who has invested in a number of really great companies; Caren Maio, Nestio, Shanna Tellerman, Modsy—she finds these women, who have ideas that are big, that are scalable, and she nurtures them, and she's like the fairy godmother to these women. And there are other women that we talk about, we'd had to read the book to learn about all of them, but there are women who really take these female founders under their wing and support them on their journey.
Poornima: I think it's great that there are women like Joanne Wilson out there. Do you have a sense of how many companies she's invested in?
Samantha: Joanne Wilson has invested in around a hundred companies, and they're doing fantastic. One of them, Shanna Tellerman, started the company Modsy, which is an immersive, 3D environment for home décor, home design, and she told us that she created this project called “The Pinnacle Project,” at Park City, Utah, and it was Wednesday through Sunday, I think. And she invited Joanne, and Susan Lyne, and a bunch of angel investors, as well as a number of female founders, to come gather, network, ski, and have fun, and she said it was funny, because all the women were thinking, "We should be home, we should be working, we should be with the kids, we have so much to do," and she said she had to tell and remind people that, "This is what the guys do. They have a boys call and they pick off and it's all about business, whereas women don't have that sense of, “Let's go out to ski, or golf,” and that kind of networking, so it was an example of this pinnacle project, which is going to happen recurring every year, of, "OK, women, we can get together, have fun together, network, introduce each other to investors and influencers, and have fun while we're doing it. It's OK."
Poornima: Yeah. That's fantastic. And I think another thing you had mentioned pipeline ventures, or pipeline angels?
Samantha: Pipeline angels, yes, yes. Natalia Oberti Noguera is a force of nature and she started this angel investing group for women and I went through it and Heather went through it. I did it in San Francisco, Heather did it in New York, and basically it's a training, it's a bootcamp or a training program for women who are credited investors, to learn how to invest in female and minority-led companies. So it walked us through the process of how do you set evaluation on a company, what do you look for in a startup that you're investing in, what kind of traits you want to look for in the team, what's going to make this a good investment. So it trains women to invest as angels, and then you actually make an investment at the end.
We made an investment in a great startup—which I believe is still hush hush, underground at this point—but I believe we made a great investment and we're following the course of these early stage female founders, and it's really her goal to change the face of angel investing, to increase the amount of money going towards these early stage female founders.
Poornima: As we were doing research for your book and when I was reading it, I noticed that there was some astonishing findings, like only 11 companies that were founded by African-American women have received funding over a million dollars. So walk us through who is working to change this.
Samantha: Well, that number has actually increased, it's now 13 companies that have received more than a million dollars, but the numbers are still really low. One woman who is really on top of this problem is Kathryn Finney, who is the founder of DigitalUndivided, which is an organization whose main purpose is to increase the number of women, minorities in the tech world, latino women, and black women founders, and she just recently launched an accelerator, in Atlanta, Georgia, called the Big Innovation Center, and I think their first cohort is gathering this year to help skill up and prepare these minority founders to raise money.
How Tech Companies Are Growing Up And Changing How The Nature of Work
Poornima: So let's switch gears, and talk about corporations. We previously had Lisen Stromberg on the show, talking about the changes that were happening for parents—what have you seen?
Samantha: Well, what we've noticed is that Silicon Valley is growing up. They are trading in their ping-pong tables and foosball tables for nursing rooms, which is inspiring to see. When I started out, I had my Medela Pump in Style in a cold bathroom out of the courtyard of our startup, so it wasn't pretty, but we spent a day at Eventbrite not too long ago, and Julia Hartz, who's now the CEO of Eventbrite, it's very focused on woman, developing women in leadership positions and allowing for work-life balance. And I say that word, “work-life balance,” a term that is loaded, what she's trying to do with that company is focus on the whole person, not just the employee self.
For example, they have a program called “Take the time you need.” So if you need time to care for a child or to care for an adult, you can work from home, you can take time off, so she's really interested in her employees, and telling her employees, "You can do what you need to do, so you can live a life and you can be an employee."
And she also tells the women who are having babies at her company, she says, "You know what? You can get through the first six to nine months," it gets a lot easier, because a lot of women when they have their babies early on, they think, “I can't leave this poor creature alone with a daycare with a babysitter,” and she says, “If you can just get through that”—she's got two little girls herself—”If you can just get through that time, stick with it, come back, and we will support you while you're doing it,” which is fantastic.
Poornima: You also showcase companies like Power to Fly. Walk us through what Power to Fly is.
Samantha: Yeah, Power to Fly was started by Milena Berry and Katharine Zaleski. Katharine actually wrote an article apologizing to all the mothers out there. Before she had children, she was a little bit judgemental of mothers taking time off and having to leave work early, and then she had her first baby and she thought, "Oh, my gosh, this is really hard," so she and Milena got together and started this company, Power to Fly, which connects women with remote and flexible job positions, so they can actually care for their family and pursue careers in technology. The great thing about technology is that it can be done remotely. Especially if you're in coding, you don't have to be in an office 24/7, so Power to Fly works on that.
Another great program is Tina Lee started a program called MotherCoders, and she's based in San Francisco, a fabulous woman, her program retrains mothers in tech skills, so they can go off and they can—either they've taken time off or they have background in some other field, they can skill up in technology, and go out and get the tremendous amount of jobs that are available in technology as they get back to work.
Disrupting The Boardroom
Poornima: Well, that brings us to the boardroom, so walk us through what changes are happening there.
Samantha: The number of women holding board seats in our country is still very, very low, I think the number is 18% of board seats at Fortune 500 companies are held by women. So we still have a long way to go.
One real pioneer in this area is a woman, her name is Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, she's fabulous, she is the CEO and founder of a company called Joyus, a tech company, and she, a few years ago penned an article called "Tech Women Choose Possibility." And she really wanted to profile the women in Silicon Valley, in the startup world, who are doing great things, just founding great companies. There was a lot of positive response to that article, and so she created an organization called #choosepossibility.
Part of that organization is a group called, or an initiative called "The Boardlist." And basically it's a matchmaking tool that matches qualified, board-ready women with startup, tech companies, looking to fill board seats with women, so she made that happen, and they placed three women on the board, which it seems like it's very low, but what they're doing is they're connecting the VCs and the startup companies with these women, and a lot more placements have been made not directly through the platform, but just through the connections that have been made on this platform.
Poornima: OK, great, so it's good to know that there is some change happening at the board level as well.
Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Samantha, I know our viewers out there are going to enjoy reading your book, *Geek Girl Rising*. And for our viewers who are women, minority, and allies, is there anything else you would like to share with them in terms of resources?
Samantha: Yeah. I would love to see everybody come to our website. We have a gazillion resources
on how you can join the digital revolution, just take a peek.
Poornima: Thanks for tuning in today and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode of *Femgineer TV*. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please be sure to share it with your friends, your teammates, your boss, and everyone so that they get to benefit from all the great resources, and subscribe to our channel to receive the next episode.
Ciao for now!
--
FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
There are a lot of people who want to change their career later in life. They want to do more challenging work, earn more money, and have a better lifestyle. Given the growing need of technical talent in the US, it would see like a technical career would be a great choice, right?
Unfortunately despite the dearth of technical talent, many people are wary because of the misconception that transitioning into a technical career later in life is just too hard. Another is, as you start to fall behind on your technical skills, it’s hard to play catch up!
Hence, a lot of people struggle to stay relevant.
Piling on career pauses like parenthood make it even harder!
However, the growing number of retraining programs, bootcamps, and online education options are looking to cater to busy people who are eager to transition into a technical position.
In today’s episode we’ll talk to Tina Lee, who is actively is working to change these misconceptions with her nonprofit MotherCoders, which helps moms on-ramp to technical careers in the new economy.
You’ll learn from Tina:
Show Notes
Check out MotherCoders at http://www.mothercoders.org/
FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).
Full Transcript
Poornima: Welcome to another episode of *Femgineer TV*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer. In this show, I host innovators in tech and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building tech products and companies. One common misconception I come across a lot is how challenging it can be to pursue a technical career midway through your career.
Another is that it's really hard once you've lost track of your technical skills, or they've gotten rusty, to get back on track. One woman, Tina Lee, is working to change this misconception. She is the founder of MotherCoders, a nonprofit, that helps moms on ramp to technical careers in the new economy. Thanks for joining us, Tina.
Tina Lee: Thanks for having me.
Poornima: Yeah. So, I know you and I met about a year ago at a conference, but I'm not too familiar with your background. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about how you got started.
Tina Lee: So, I started this journey towards having a technical career when I became a management consultant coming out of college. I helped implement large, enterprise-level IT systems and from there I kind of had this epiphany that tech was going to play a major role in business, and it was just a matter of time before the rest of the world was going to be transformed by it as well, and then after that I did technical recruiting. I spent some time in grad school studying education technology, and then ended up working on behalf of nonprofits and government and helping them use technology better to meet their goals.
Poornima: So that's great that you've had all this exposure to technology in your career. What ultimately inspired you to start MotherCoders?
Tina Lee: Well, like a lot of people who are inspired to make change, it came from a deep place of pain.
Poornima: Yeah, what was your pain?
Tina Lee: So, I had been trained to do simple things, build simple things: HTML, CSS, a little bit of JavaScript. I even tried learning Ruby for a while. And it was fine until I had my second child, right? The programs that are available to beginners usually happen on the evenings or on the weekend or online. And I felt like because I had just had a baby, my second one, I felt very isolated. So, doing it online felt very lonely and I couldn't make these in-person classes anymore, so out of that I had this vision of like, you know what? I cannot be the only mother, a new mother, who’s experiencing this. I should just organize kind of an informal meet up because my grandmother had met me.
I had envisioned maybe some grandmas here on the corner and then we'd be doing our thing here. And ultimately what happened was I had so many women that filled out this informal Google Poll that I had about their interest level that I said, "OK. There's enough there to do something more organized." So I ran a pilot out of a co-working space that was empty on Saturdays and just happened to be next to an onsite child care facility center.
Poornima: Wow.
Tina Lee: Yeah. So that we were able to run the classes in the conference rooms and then have the kids be cared for by professional caregivers in a setting that was set up for them.
Poornima: That's awesome. So you really saw the opportunity. One as like a personal pain point that you experienced but then after you do this experiment there were a number of women who were interested. And then from that point, how did you transition into making it the nonprofit that it is today?
Tina Lee: So, I'm all about failing fast and rocket prototyping. So that was kind of my way of experimenting with this model. And because so many women had reached out, ones who could not participate in the pilot for one reason or another, I knew that there were moms out there that were hungry. And once you dig deeper into the numbers it collaborates that, right? I know you had Lisen Stromberg on the show recently and you look at the numbers about how many millennia women are about to become mothers, right? A million a year for the next 10 years or so. And then you look at how millennia women are going to be the largest and the most educated demographic ever, right? And then you look at who’s already a mom now.
There's just tremendous opportunity to help moms who are either stuck on the sidelines and they want to get into tech but can't. Or they're in a job where they're not touching it and they want to move up. This is a great way to activate them and give them a skill set that will help them stay competitive. And we even have entrepreneurs who feel like they need a bigger tool set. They want like a wider understanding of how the ecosystem’s working so they can really launch their ventures. They come to us for that understanding and then also the community, too. That's a big part of what we do is the community because like I said being a mom is very isolating.
Poornima: Yeah that's fantastic. I'm sure some of our viewers out there who are entrepreneurs will be interested to learn a little bit more. So it’s great that there are going to be all these millennial women who are becoming mothers but I know there's still a problem when it comes to leadership, and as you and I have noticed, within tech itself only 26% of women hold computing jobs. So, how do you think MotherCoders is helping with that?
Tina Lee: Well, couple of things. One, we've kind of discussed this a lot which is a pipeline issue. Yes. We could be graduating more women with degrees in computer science or engineering but we also do a terrible job as a society of helping women thrive once they become mothers, right? No one ever says the term “working dad.” We just assume that—
Poornima: That's true.
Tina Lee: —you're going to be working.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: But for mothers, I think as a society, culturally, we're still very ambivalent about how we feel about women working outside the home once they become mothers, but if you think about it, mothers are the people that you work with, right? They're the people sitting around you and they're your cohort next to you that's going to be taking over this role. It’s just the workplace is not set up to help women succeed, right? The IT worker is all in, all the time.
Poornima: Right.
Tina Lee: And if you have caregiving responsibilities, that's impossible, right? And women are kind of pressured to make a choice because there are not...there just aren't the social support systems, right? School lets out at 3.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: There's no paid parental leave, right? And a lot of companies are just starting to experiment with flexible work hours, right? So all these things make it very difficult for women who feel like they want to prioritize their families and of course at the same time they're made to choose.
Poornima: Yep. I do remember in Lisen Stromberg's interview we talked about this caregiving bias. So it’s great that you touched upon it. I think you also mentioned in a talk earlier the mommy tax versus the fatherhood bonus. Walk us through why this disparity exists.
Tina Lee: Oh man, we're going to get sad. OK. So, because of this ideal worker model, right? You're expected to go in all the time. Once you become a mother, everyone knows what that means and what that looks like, right? Based on our certain circumstances. Our current set of circumstances. So, automatically men and women will think, "OK. So this person is either going to be downshifting their careers or they're going to drop out altogether." Right? "And if they do stay they're probably not going to go all in. So let’s put them on the mommy track." So, women aren't left with that many choices right? So the way I frame the mommy tax is that automatically you're considered less valuable.
Right? And that will represent...that will manifest itself in salary negotiations, in having projects that will help you reach the next level, in helping you maybe make connections or professional development that will bring you to the next level. So there's a tax not only in real terms in salary but also a tax in terms of the opportunity cost.
Poornima: Right.
Tina Lee: Of what you could have done if you didn't become a mother in the eyes of the employer. Now it’s such a powerful bias that women who aren't even mothers get hit by it right? I mean how many stories have we heard of women walking in to pitch their companies or trying to get a job and they say, “Are you going to be pregnant?” Or, “You're married, do you plan to have kids anytime soon?” Not only is that illegal.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: That automatically kind of primes everyone in the room to think like, "Oh, right. You're a woman. There's a high chance that you'll become a mother and you're just going to peace out at some point and why should we invest in you." Right? So that's the motherhood penalty. On the flip side, the opposite is happening to men. "Oh! You're going to become a dad? This means you're going to be...you're going to be going in even harder because now you're responsible for caring for a family, right? You should be given the best projects because you really need to get to the next level. And you really should get a salary bump because now you're responsible for all these people."
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: So it’s just a very unfair situation where women are getting hit by this mommy tax and dads are not. And women are already a lot of times behind because of the gender pay gap that they came into before all this even happened.
Poornima: Right.
Tina Lee: Oh and for every child that you have, additional child, you get hit a little bit more.
Poornima: What can we do to sort of alleviate this? Or what...what can people do to sort of empower themselves?
Tina Lee: Well, I think we need to talk about it in several levels, right? One is the individual level. One may be at the company level. And then one at a society level. So I'm going to start personal. Personally, I think one of the strategies that I've employed is you really have to take stock of your own capacity.
Poornima: Mm-hmm.
Tina Lee: What are my goals? What are my passions? What do I want to do? What capacity do I have in terms of caregiving? Do I have family to help me out? Do I have friends? Do I live in a community where there's support systems? So all of these things have to be taken into consideration. And I specifically stayed in a neighborhood in San Francisco that has a high density of in-home child care providers, and preschools, and great elementary schools to kind of situate myself where I would have these resources available to me. Other people move in, their parents.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: Other people move closer to their parents. Everyone has a different situation, right? And I'm lucky in that I have a great partner. So all of these things help me succeed. But on a company level, what would make it even better, as I mentioned earlier, some flexible schedules. If I have a role where I pretty much can do work without being physically in the office, I should be allowed to do that, right?
Poornima: Yep.
Tina Lee: And if I happen to work with other people who are caregiving, not just kids but for their parents, or they happen to do other things in the community, they should be given that right, too. So having this flexibility actually benefits everyone in the company.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: Paid parental leave is huge, right? And also really thinking about how to combat that implicit bias against women and mothers, right? And that kind of speaks to the larger problem of the societal expectation that women are expected to provide caregiving and men are not, that women should stay home after they have kids, right?
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: And the reality is that our society's changing, women are more educated, they're working. Forty-five percent of families with kids under 18 now have two working parents working full time to stay afloat, right? And so the reality is that we need to change some policies around how we support parents in general, caregivers in general. And I'm really glad that people like Sheryl Sandberg through *Lean In*, Emily Slaughter through her books, and then Lisa, too, are really tackling this societal piece because we can't change. We're not going to see change until we have culture change and I think that's a long-term thing that needs to happen.
Poornima: So let’s bring it back to the struggle to stay relevant, right? You take a pause for parenthood, or you downshift, or maybe you don't even downshift, but there's this perception that you are downshifting. So I think it’s great that there are retraining programs like yours. How do you see these programs evolving overtime?
Tina Lee: I don't know.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: That's the honest answer.
Poornima: OK.
Tina Lee: I don't know, because—
Poornima: But you see people embracing them?
Tina Lee: Yes, people are embracing them, but I think we're at the beginning stages of just having this consciousness that tech is moving really fast.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: We live in this world where you have to continuously learn in order to stay relevant whether you're a caregiver or not, right?
Poornima: Right.
Tina Lee: That's why companies invest in professional development budgets and provide access to online training courses or learning plans. So I think we as a society know that people need to stay fresh on top of the skills and understand how fast things are changing in the industries, right? And that's why they invest in the professional development piece, but they also will have to come up with new ways of providing those to people who may not have the capacity to go to the one-week conference.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: Or the “take three months off to learn how to become a full-stack web developer” type of programs, right? Those all-in programs are going to be very challenging for people with caregiving responsibilities and that's why you don't see an influx of caregivers in those types of boot camps or in online learning, right?
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: Because as I spent time in ED School, I know that learning is very social and I'm a big believer that context is important. It’s great if you learn how to speak French by yourself, at home, in front of a computer but if—
Poornima: No, I tried that. I have a terrible accent.
Tina Lee: But yeah it would be better if you had actually visited France.
Poornima: Right.
Tina Lee: If you understood French culture and maybe even had some French friends and had a French meal. So it brings it all together and that's kind of the experience that we aim for because it’s not just the skills. It has to happen in context.
Poornima: Yeah. So why teach these technical skills? Why not just get people to get better at management skills or some of the other softer skills? Why do you want to focus on tech skills?
Tina Lee: I think tech is transforming our economy. It’s just going to be one of those things that we take for granted, right? And having that literacy is going to empower you to think about your own industry differently. And it’s going to impact the way you approach a problem differently. And I think once moms gain that level of tech literacy, it just gives them a level of confidence to approach this new phase in their life differently because a world of opportunity will open up, right? I think before in the beginning, when things were still very technical to the point where you had to have a bachelor’s or a master’s degree to understand it, then it was less accessible.
But now we're at the point where we've automated a lot of these things and made it a little bit more friendly. And I think if you're really going to innovate, it's just as important to understand the problems in the industry and then figure out the technical piece that goes along with that. And I think there's enough room for everyone to participate in that exercise.
Poornima: So why don't we talk a little bit about the type of people you see coming to your program, other coders—are these people that are outside of tech? Or are they people within tech who maybe were on the business side and then wanted to transition into the technical side?
Tina Lee: So, after running five cohorts now, some patterns are emerging, right? We mainly see women who are working moms and they want to get technical but can't find a solution that works with them because of scheduling or child care issues. They know that their path to career advancement requires them to gain this new skill set, right? So they want access to it and we provide that for them. Another group of moms who come to us, like you mentioned earlier, they may have stepped out for a little bit. A year, six months, some even 10 years, right? And they're just looking for a refresh. To figure out a way to connect their passions to a path forward.
And then the last group, these are entrepreneurs who have an idea for an app or they are already on their way to building a company and they just realize, like, "Hey, I'm kind of stuck now and I can't proceed without a grander understanding of what it is I'm trying to do and how to go about it." And so they come to us. So those are kind of the three groups that we see. In terms of industry background, they just run across the gamut. We have moms who worked in a startup only on the operations side. So they wanted to get closer to moms who were scientists, who are working in a lab. And they're like you know what? I actually want to do something else because it enables me to be more creative. So just really all over the map in terms of industry background.
Poornima: And how do you go about doing the teaching?
Tina Lee: So, we have a three-pronged approach. As I mentioned before, it’s not just the technical skills.
Poornima: Sure.
Tina Lee: So, we teach a little bit of code. All the moms are taught HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build a basic website and how to launch it, but the goal of that really is to give them a taste of it, to see how it feels to build something and put it out into the world, and to really check themselves. “Do I like this enough to keep going?”
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: Right? Or, “Is this enough? Or do I pivot?” The second piece that goes along with that is the community piece. So we bring in women from the field, like yourself, and we create this community not only of people who could mentor them, but people who provide access to job opportunities. And then of course they have each other.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: Right? They can go to conferences together. They can just go to a café and help each other. And having that nerd mom comradery is really essential to success because, sometimes in the middle of the night and there's no one else there, you can feel like you can ping someone.
Poornima: Right.
Tina Lee: And then the last piece that we do, right, technical, community, and the last piece is the childcare piece, right? And that childcare piece really helps moms figure out in a safe space if this is something they want to go further. Right? And I would also argue that another piece of it is context. Although it’s hard to explain to people what I mean by that. What I mean by that is all of this is happening within context of what we see in everyday life and that piece of context is provided by the community, right? You come in and explain we use agile and that's what it means in our shop.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: Or we believe in rapid prototyping and design thinking and that's how it works in our shop. Right? So all of these things are relevant. Not just the building part or not just the hanging-out-with-your-people part.
Poornima: So that's great. So how do you pick a cohort?
Tina Lee: We pick a cohort the way I would build a team.
Poornima: OK.
Tina Lee: So because...before I used to be a technical rep, I spent some time being a recruiter, and having that safe space for learning is really important. And I realize how hard it is to do this when you are a mother as well. So I work with my board and we have several steps to our application process, the last one of which is an in-person interview.
Poornima: OK.
Tina Lee: Where we really talk to the moms. “Are we right for you? Are you ready for this?” Because a lot of learning will have to happen outside of the classroom too, right? So they have to have capacity and they have to be really clear about why they're doing it because otherwise you're not going to stick to it and it's not going to feel like you achieved something at the end, right? So we walk them through that. And it’s worked out pretty well. All the moms come together and I think because being a mother is such a democratizing experience they all show up as people who are there to support each other, and want to learn together, and move forward together.
Poornima: So walk us through what a day in the life of MotherCoders looks like.
Tina Lee: Sure.
Poornima: For your students.
Tina Lee: So, Saturday only classes right? You would go...you would drop off your baby. So we have a half an hour transition time. It takes a while to explain have they eaten, have they slept, all that stuff.
Poornima: Right.
Tina Lee: So you hand off to the caregiver and you're in your seat by 10:00 right?
And then you learn until noon. And then we have lunch together. We always have lunch catered because it's such a special time and they have to bond. And a lot of times we'll have speakers there too, right, who will stay and hang out with them. So it’s a great time to just kind of network and talk. And then after lunch they learn some more. And then around 3, we leave half an hour for reflection. So I'm big on you learn, but at the end of the day, you have to pause and really connect what happened to how you're feeling about it and how it connects to your own understanding of the work, OK? And then after that they pick up their kid and then they go.
Poornima: OK.
Tina Lee: In terms of content, it will vary by day. We have specific build days where people just get together and they build and we help you work through your wireframes and your issues. There are days when we have lectures. We don't really have a lot of lectures. We have “discussions,” I should call them. And then there are other days when we have guest speakers who come in and they talk about a topic that they want to talk about, or they do a workshop, or something I've been doing is I've been pairing a cyber security info sec expert with data scientists.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: So on one side you have data scientists who want like all the data, and then the other side you have people who are in charge of the data or making sure they're following the rules about data and saying, "Whoa." So that's been a very illuminating conversation, too. So we've been doing stuff like that.
Poornima: That sounds great. So how many people have you graduated? You mentioned you have
five cohorts coming who have gone through the program?
Tina Lee: Thirty-four so far.
Poornima: Great. OK.
Tina Lee: Yeah we're really delighted because 34 moms represents families, right?
Tina Lee: And there is over 50 kids. And another way to think about this is we've placed 34 stem role models.
Poornima: Oh, great.
Tina Lee: Right? Into homes. They are inspiring our next generation of kids. Right? So not only are these women changing the trajectory of their own family like right now, their kids are going to be impacted, too. So we're really looking at this from a multi-generational perspective.
Poornima: Yeah. That's fantastic. So what are some immediate outcomes that you see from them graduating in the program?
Tina Lee: Jobs!
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: They're getting jobs.
Poornima: Good. OK.
Tina Lee: They're getting jobs in tech, right?
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: So we have moms who have become front end engineers. We have moms who have become mobile app developers. We have moms who have become user experience designers. Some have been promoted, of course, because now they have this new tool kit. And then we have other moms who are proceeding with their startup dreams. So potentially, right, we have entrepreneurs out there. So, this has been really exciting to see them grow.
Poornima: That's great. So it’s a lot of variety of outcomes but all pretty positive.
Tina Lee: Mm-hmm.
Poornima: So how do you measure success for MotherCoders?
Tina Lee: Right now the way we're measuring success is completion.
We're also looking at how diverse we are in terms of the people that we have in our classes. Right? I'm an intersectional feminist.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: Eighty-one percent of women become moms and if companies are really worried about diversity? I'm like, “Come to me, because we have queer moms, we have moms that emigrated from other countries, like just everybody.” We just think about it racially, religiously, geographically, right? So the way we measure success—there's a piece of the diversity piece, and then there's a completion piece, and then we're starting to track not only who got jobs or who got promoted, but how much did they increase their income?
Poornima: Oh, great.
Tina Lee: Or earning potential? Right?
And that's been tricky because we've been running cohorts and it takes time. And different moms have different capacities, as I mentioned. And some of them have kids, again.
Poornima: Sure.
Tina Lee: Because moms do. So, we're trying to figure out a way to tell that story better but just anecdotally because there are only 34 moms, I keep pretty close tabs on them.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: I know that they are making more money because some are buying new homes.
Poornima: OK.
Tina Lee: Some are buying new other things.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: And they're updating their LinkedIn profiles and LinkedIn tells me that, right?
Poornima: Sure.
Tina Lee: So we know that they're getting skills, getting new jobs, buying homes, and on top of that, starting businesses.
Poornima: So I love that you care about this diversity piece, and I do, too. So I'm going to ask you this question: What about Father Coders? You know there's a lot of stay-at-home dads that's becoming less and less of a stigma, but would you ever be open to allowing men to come in and participate in your program?
Tina Lee: Not in the foreseeable future.
Poornima: OK.
Tina Lee: And here’s why, right? The reason why we don't do Father Coders is exactly the same reasons why we do MotherCoders, right?
Poornima: OK.
Tina Lee: Think about it from a kind of a cultural perspective.
I have actually gone to meetups and programs. They're very friendly. Not that they're not friendly to women, but in terms of belonging, I think women have a harder time feeling a sense of belonging in those spaces, right? And you walk into a room and you don't see anyone who looks like you...it's very intimidating and there's a lot of trepidation around going back again.
So we create this safe space where we know that women will find inviting, right? And I think mothers specifically have a very unique set of challenges, right? That go beyond just being a woman, right? The scheduling, the feeling of pressure to be the perfect mom, and the perfect spouse, and the perfect worker, all the perfect things, right? And then on top of that picking up skills and working in an industry that's predominantly men is very intimidating, right?
Poornima: OK.
Tina Lee: So all of that comes together in MotherCoders. And I understand that fathers have the same challenges with scheduling, but I bet you they would feel less trepidation walking into a space that was designed more for someone without the challenges that moms have.
And we actually have had conversations with women who come up to me and say, "I'm not a mother but I care for a family member. Can I come?"
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: So I can see at some point that we rethink our structure.
Poornima: Oh I see. Right.
Tina Lee: But we exist for the same reason that Hackbright exists and Women's Colleges exist.
I graduated out of a Women's College. So all of those things still stand and until we kind of break apart some of those barriers to women I think I need to keep doing what I'm doing now.
Poornima: Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we end?
Tina Lee: Yes, I would love to share with you kind of my pie-in-the-sky kind of vision that I'm working towards, right? Women from all all over the U.S. and the world reach out to me and ask when we're coming to their communities.
Poornima: OK. Yeah.
Tina Lee: So I know there's a desire for this type of training program all over and we're trying to figure out a way to get there. And we envision ourselves being in any community that wants to have a MotherCoders but, because, you'd know, technology varies by geography, and industry, and all these different things. We want to design a program that's thoughtful enough and flexible enough where they can design it to fit their local conditions, right? To fit the needs of their local employers so that moms will have a place to move to. So we are moving towards that. We are actively fundraising towards that.
And the reason that we're a nonprofit is because we're committed to helping women who cannot afford to pay $10,000 for Bootcamp or they're not sure if they want to invest in that even before having tried out something more preliminary. So we are working towards a vision where we're all across America, if not the world, so that we could help women everywhere as they transition into being moms and thrive in the workplace.
Poornima: Great. So how can we help you with that?
Tina Lee: Well, help us get our word out. This is great, right?
Help us send moms who are interested in taking our program to us. I would also love it if employers who are worried about retaining moms that they have to provide professional development for them through us. And then also figure out a way to maybe work with us to develop programs or return ships where women who may have stepped off want to get a refresh and then go back.
Poornima: Yeah.
Tina Lee: So those are great ways. And then of course, we're always looking for donations, always looking for sponsorships. So many ways to partner with us and everything can be found on our website.
Poornima: Wonderful. Well we'll be sure to include the link to it.
Tina Lee: Thank you.
Poornima: Thank you again for joining us, Tina. Thank you for tuning in today and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode of *Femgineer TV*. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please be sure to share it with your friends, your team, your employer, and of course, all the mothers that you know to get the word out. And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode of *Femgineer TV*. Ciao for now.
Many of us think of a career as the period between college graduation and retirement. We’ve bought into the myth that taking a pause is considered a career killer because to truly be successful we have to keep working!
As a result, many companies both large and small have developed a work-first culture that operates 24/7.
But what if we want more from life than just work?
I’m not talking about work and life balance.
I mean taking a REAL pause that is longer than a weekend or a month vacation and isn’t tied to work taking a sabbatical from work to write a book, travel, start a company, or go back to school.
I mean pausing just for a life goal, like pausing for parenthood.
Is it even possible and can we do it without killing our careers?
Well to help us answer this question, I’ve invited Lisen Stromberg who is the CEO & Founder of Prism Work, a culture innovation consultancy. She and her team partner with companies, leaders, and advocates to innovate the workplace so the next generation isn’t forced to choose between work and family. Lisen is also the author of the new book Work Pause Thrive: How to Pause for Parenthood Without Killing Your Career.
In this episode you’ll learn the following from Lisen:
Why we should consider planning a pause in our career
Why one of the reasons we don’t pause for parenthood is the stigma behind caregiving
How our current work culture puts a strain on fathers
Why pausing isn’t a career killer and many go on to thrive after their pause
It’s the start of a new year, and you’re probably really excited to run some experiments for your startup or company.
Since you’re keen on trying a lot of things, you’re probably going to be saying yes a lot!
Saying yes is a great way to show others that we’re open to trying new things, taking in feedback, and making time for them.
However, when we say yes over and over we start to lose our focus. If we do it too many times, it can be disastrous, especially when time is of the essence and we are trying to get something off the ground, like a startup!
So today we’re going to flip things around learn a simple and tactical way to say NO.
And to teach us how to say NO the right way, I’ve invited Steli Efti: https://twitter.com/Steli, who is the CEO & Co-Founder of Close.io: https://close.io/.
While Steli and I dig into best practices for people who are in startups, this episode also contains valuable nuggets for individuals out there who have struggled to say no to a boss, teammate or customer effectively.
Don’t miss watching this episode and learning the following from Steli:
- Why saying NO is really hard, and receiving a NO is even harder
- What you need to say NO to
- How to say NO politely and effectively, especially to influential people like customers, teammates, and bosses
- How to help others from over-promising and getting comfortable saying NO
- What we should be saying YES to
Listen to the episode on iTunes!
You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/femgineertv/id1032969327?mt=2.
Please take a moment to leave us a review. Your positive review will help us get featured in the News & Noteworthy and bring more exposure to the work we’re doing as well as the talented guests we feature!
—
FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).
There has been a lot of conversation in the tech community about how to build a pipeline of computer scientists for the next generation, bring awareness to groups that aren’t current represented and improve diversity numbers.
While there’s been a lot of work and initiatives that have cropped up over the years, there’s still a lot to be done.
Whether you believe in diversity or are skeptical about it, at some point your organization is going to want to scale its recruiting efforts.
In today’s episode, Jessica McKellar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_McKellar) and I are going to skip past the usual complaints, and get down and dirty into what is and isn’t working and why.
Jessica is currently an engineering manager at Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/) and was previously the Director of the Python Software Foundation (https://www.python.org/psf/). Jessica has also co-authored two books about computer programming (Twisted Network Programming Essentials - https://www.amazon.com/Twisted-Network-Programming-Essentials-Event-driven-ebook/dp/B00BT0IEJE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481592423&sr=1-1&keywords=jessica+mckellar and Introduction to Python - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/110000448.do), and was previously an early engineer at Ksplice (http://www.ksplice.com/) and founded Zulip (https://zulip.org/) which was eventually acquired by Dropbox.
Given how challenging the recruiting environment is in tech, you’ll want to watch this episode and learn from Jessica:
-Why interviews are a terrible proxy for determining if a technical candidate will be successful in your organization
- How to perform an audit to measure who you’re attracting, how effective you are at retaining them, and how to scale your efforts as your organization grows
- The steps people often overlook that prevent them from building sustainable engineering organizations
This was our final episode for season two of FemgineerTV. You can watch previous episodes from this season on our YouTube Channel, and be sure to subscribe to our channel to receive episode for season three starting in January 2017.
—
FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).
I’m a HUGE proponent of working for an early stage startup, having already done it three times in my career.
I even did a series a couple years ago to showcase the benefits of being an early stage startup employee, which you can watch here.
However, early stage isn’t the only stage.
It would be unfair of me to or anyone else to lead you astray based on what has worked for us.
You’ve got to find a stage that fits your needs.
To help you out, in today’s episode, I’ve invited a guest who has oodles of experience working at growth stage technology companies, Pedram Keyani.
Pedram is currently the Director of Global Growth Engineering at Uber. He’s grown the engineering team from around 20 to 250 engineers in the past couple of years. Prior to Uber, Pedram was the director at Facebook and began working there when it was a 200 person company, and was there during the IPO. Pedram began his career working at Google as a software engineer right around the time it was IPO’ing.
This was a really fun episode to do with Pedram because of his fun, goofy, and creative energy, but it’s also super valuable. No matter what stage company you decide to work at, in the episode you’ll learn the following from Pedram:
Working on teams is great because we get to share our skill sets and learn from one another as we build.
However, there are moments that prove to be challenging like…
… when you think you’re in agreement with your team, get to work, then days later the decision gets shot down. All that wasted time, energy, and effort!
Or…
… when you’re excited to try something new, but you can’t because you have to get approval from multiple people, some who don’t even know who you are!
Dealing with the all the drama can be demotivating and stifle innovation.
So how do you get groups people out of their own way in order to make decisions, deliver on innovations, expose weaknesses in strategy, and is it even possible?
Yes, it is and my goal in today’s episode is to show you how!
I’ve invited Janice Fraser who is the Director on the People Team at Pivotal Labs. Janice has a rich 16-year career with notable accomplishments such as being the CEO and Founder of Luxr, CEO of Adaptive Path, and more.
We’ll be focusing the conversation on showing how to govern teams that are self-governing through a concept known as balanced teams, and much of what we’re going to be showcasing is based on the principles and practices of Extreme Programming by Kent Beck.
While much of what we’ll cover applies to building software products, Janice has also applied it to creating policies and processes for enterprises and the Obama administration.
This is a really meaty episode, where we’ll be getting into the weeds and covering:
If you’ve been wondering how to make a shift in your organization, and have struggled to get people onboard, then you’ll want to watch this episode!
One of my favorite quotes from Janice from the episode is the following:
“Agreement happens when people agree to stop talking. People stop talking when they feel understood. Understanding happens between individual pairs of brains.”
FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.