In last week’s episode of Build, we dove into the benefits and best practices around recruiting remote workers. But as you’ve learned from last month’s Build episodes, it’s not enough to hire talent, you also need to onboard new hires by training them!
Training someone to be on a remote team might seem like a challenge since they aren’t sitting next to you. Those who are new to setting up a remote team think that training face-to-face is just easier because you can answer questions as they come up. And it may seem easier when it training multiple hires. But rest assured you can train remote workers, and in a way that scales as you hire multiple people at once.
In today’s episode, we’re going to share a number of proven strategies that have worked across job roles.
Once you’ve trained your remote workers, you might be wondering how to hold them accountable and retain them long term. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered ;)
We’ll be share fool-proof techniques for holding remote workers accountable and how to retain them long-term.
One last thing to keep in mind—there is a difference between a remote-first versus a remote-friendly company. If you’re not familiar with the difference, we’re going to dive into it and talk about how it can impact long-term retention of your remote workers.
Holly Cardew the Founder of Pixc is back to help us out. Holly has grown and scaled her team across Australia and Asia. And has done so in a number of job functions spanning both the business side with roles such as virtual assistants and marketers, to the technical side hiring software developers and designers to build the product.
As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn:
Check out these additional resources on remote working:
If you have a remote team, how do you train, retain, and hold your employees accountable? Let us know in the comments below.
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Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
## Proven Strategies For Training And Retaining Remote Workers Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: In the previous *Build* episode, we shared a number of strategies for recruiting remote workers. If you missed the episode, I've included the link to it below. Now, it's not enough to just recruit employees. You've also got to train them, hold them accountable, and retain them. In today's episode, we'll dive into how to do this, 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. As an employer, once you've recruited remote workers, you need to train them, you need to hold them accountable, and of course figure out ways to retain them. If you're wondering how, Holly Cardew, who's the CEO and Founder of Pixc, is back. Today we're going to be sharing a number of strategies on how to do this. Thanks for coming back, Holly.
Holly Cardew: Thanks for having me again.
Remote-first versus remote-friendly
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. OK, Holly, one of the biggest misconceptions around retaining remote workers is this idea of remote-first versus remote-friendly. Maybe you can explain what each of these are and how they impact retention.
Holly Cardew: Sure, so the difference...Well, what remote-first is means that everybody is remote. There is no head office. There is no main office. Everybody can work from home. They could work in a coworking space or a café.
Remote-friendly is that there is essentially an office, and then the office allows you to be at home or at the office when you would like. We've never had remote-friendly. We've always been remote-first.
Why remote working doesn’t work: communication and collaboration breaks down with remote-friendly
But the issue I see with remote-friendly is that there is a lot of miscommunication, because everybody is...You can either choose to be involved in the culture and be at the office, or you can be at home. It's kind of a little bit warped, whereas remote-first, because we were remote-first, we had to build a really strong culture from the beginning. There's no thing that I was at the office, or I was at wherever, a space, with three employees and not the other 20. That's where I think in terms of retaining, it's just really important to build a strong culture either way, but there is a little bit of miscommunication in the remote-friendly one.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Do you think people feel left out maybe?
Holly Cardew: Yes, definitely. Well, they may or they may just not want to get involved, which therefore impacts the team because the team feel like...The team who are in the office feel like they're doing more, and the person at home may not be.
What you need in place before you train remote workers
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. OK. We also know that in any company, in order to retain employees, you have to train them, but it can be a challenge to train people when they're not right in front of you. What are some best practices when it comes to training remote workers?
Holly Cardew: It's so important to document. At the beginning, I didn't document. I would get on Skype or Google Hangouts, and I would tell the same person the same thing. I realized that I was repeating myself.
Our best practice is really to document, but also make everybody responsible for documenting.
It's not my job to write everybody's roles. I always tell the next person I hire that they're going to be responsible for the next team member that joins. They need to keep their own documentation.
We've also started Google Sites, so we have Google Sites which also connects to Google Drive and Google Documents, but that place is like...Google Sites is really the place for us where we can talk about the culture, the values, and the missions of the company, but then have all the documentation in there. It's a one, sort of essential portal.
Best practices for training remote workers
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice. Then what about when it comes to actually training people?
Holly Cardew: It depends on what team they're in. We usually have an onboarding process with their team lead, whether it's marketing or customer service or engineering. Then we have a weekly team meeting. They'll have an onboarding session, but we have check-ins, more check-ins I would say at the beginning than further on down the track.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Mm-hmm. A couple things that we do at Femgineer are I record all the videos, because like yourself, I got tired of saying the same thing over and over again. The other is I have screencasts, and I also have an employee handbook, and much like yourself, have people update that once a quarter. As we scale my training efforts, do you have any that you recommend?
Record training sessions
Holly Cardew: We actually do a lot of what you do. I think that you made a really good point. We do a lot of screencasts as well. I think we try and implement the philosophy that even if you're just doing a quick call...They may have been in the job for six months, but if you're doing a call with somebody via Google Hangouts, record it. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just put it in the folder with that question or showing that person how it's done, so the next person who comes along doesn't have to ask the same question.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I also do it for our meetings, because sometimes people get sick.
Holly Cardew: Yeah, definitely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Instead of having one person type up all the notes or play phone tag, it's easier to just say, "Hey, watch the recording. If you want, watch it, double the speed." It's a great way to stay efficient and keep everybody in sync.
Holly Cardew: Do you record every week or every meeting?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yes, we do record all of our all-hands. Then if it's a particularly training meeting, if I'm walking somebody through it, then I'll also do the recording. Zoom has been great for us to do the recordings. It just automatically records it. Then I'll upload it to Google Drive and label it whatever the training was about.
Holly Cardew: Cool. Where do you put all your documentation?
Poornima Vijayashanker: In Google Drive.
Holly Cardew: OK.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Holly Cardew: Sorry.
How to hold remote workers accountable
Poornima Vijayashanker: Similar. Yeah. On the flip side, there's also accountability. I know a lot of times managers feel like if somebody's just sitting right next to them or in the cubicle farm somewhere, they're a lot more present and they're getting work done. But I've been in environments where people spent that eight hours in their cube surfing the internet. How do you hold people accountable in a remote team when they're not even near you, you can't see them?
Holly Cardew: For us, it's really about the goal and the work that they achieve. We could be counting hours and minutes and what they're doing. Some days, I do get a little slightly frustrated, because I want the person to be...I expect them to be there and they're not, but at the same time, we're flexible with time. It's about getting the work done. If people have never hired online before, I actually suggest for them to use a time tracker. I know that platforms like Upwork have...What they do is they take a screenshot of the screen every 10 minutes, and you can check a work diary of what the person's doing.
How to divvy up tasks and set goals with remote workers
For us, it's really about trusting the person at the end of the day. I don't want to sit there and look over their shoulder every single minute on what they're doing online. I just want them to deliver high-quality output of their work and their goals for the month or for the quarter. What we've done is we've set up team goals. Instead of me setting goals for the team, we agree on them. They can say, "Holly, that's not achievable," or, "Yes, that is achievable," or, "That's a push goal," but we both agree before moving forward. Then they can't come back and say, "That was too much work," because they also agreed to it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, but what about some of those nitty-gritty tasks like, "Oh, I thought so-and-so was going to write this blog post, but then they didn't, so it didn't get it done"?
Holly Cardew: No, we have everything documented in spreadsheets.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Good.
Holly Cardew: Like the task at hand and the person responsible and the due date.
Remote working and collaboration
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yup. Yeah, we actually do that as well at the beginning of the week when we do our all-hands. People are supposed to come in with their Trello already filled out—
Holly Cardew: Oh, that's interesting.
Poornima Vijayashanker: —on what the tasks are going to be. It's also a great way to then, if somebody can't do a task, to hand it off. The checklists and all the documentation is in there, and that way, if for whatever reason it doesn't get done, someone else can pick it up and run with it. We're still flexible within that. If it's really like, "Oh, this person had five tasks, and it was unreasonable that week," then it's OK, but if you look and see that none of the five tasks were done, then clearly something is up. I feel like the tools have evolved to a point now where it becomes very transparent on who's getting stuff done and who isn't.
Holly Cardew: Definitely. We have all the tasks listed out. We have used Trello depending on what the role is, again, so we're doing some new feature builds. It involves having the UX and the front-end engineer and the back-end, so we want to keep it all on track. We do use JIRA, too. We probably use one too many tools, but I think everything's well-documented, so we know who's doing what and if it's being achieved.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, and then just going back and kind of grooming that periodically to see if things are no longer a priority or aligned to your goals.
Holly Cardew: Yeah, definitely.
Why you need a communication escalation framework to keep your remote workers productive
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yes. As your team scales, communication obviously becomes a bottleneck. What would you recommend to keeping people in sync?
Holly Cardew: What we do is we've actually broken up in the teams into mini-teams, so tech and product, and then marketing and customer service, and then internal operations. The reason for that is we don't...The tech don't really need to know some of the details, and I don't want to confuse everybody. We have weekly meetings but in those sort of mini-meetings. Then it means that there's no miscommunication. It's quite easy for a small team of four to get together rather than a team of 23.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure, that makes sense. Another best practice that I have kind of discovered over time is communication escalation, because it's very easy for people to think that texting has to happen no matter what. I actually over time came up with a framework where, for example, email was for reference. Using a tool like Slack is great for daily communication, archiving messages, kind of going back and taking a look. You could even have a water cooler. Do you have anything like this in terms of communication escalation?
Holly Cardew: We do. I haven't put in a proper framework, but I think over time it's evolved that people do understand that, yeah, Slack is for daily chat. Email, we still quite like email, because it is a bit like to-do. For me personally, it's like a to-do list. Then if it's an ultimate emergency, WhatsApp. WhatsApp's the place.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
Holly Cardew: No matter where you are, it's handy. We actually have our groups on WhatsApp, so we have our tech and product, our marketing and customer service broken down, so when there is an issue, they can go to a different group. It's a little bit like Slack in that way.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, but it's good to have that breakdown. Otherwise, people feel like, "Why are you texting me all the time?"
Holly Cardew: Exactly.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Or, "why are you emailing me all the time?" Having that, I think, is important and figuring out what works for your team versus another team.
How to coach remote workers to be more resourceful
Holly Cardew: I think also as the leader, it's important that if somebody does email you something, and there is information out there, rather than giving them the answer, in a nice and polite way point them in the direction to say, "You didn't need to email me this for this question. You could have figured it out."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. Exactly. This is great advice, Holly. I know our audience out there is going to benefit from all this.
Holly Cardew: Thanks for having me again here.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Holly and I want to know. If you have a remote team, how do you train, retain, and hold your employees accountable? Let us know in the comments below this video. That's it for this week's episode. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where we're going to talk about how a number of these processes will change depending on the nature of work, whether you've got a high-stakes project or just daily tasks. Ciao for now. This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
Remember our fun live pilot episode back in January 2015? In case you forgot about it or missed it, it was on How To Build A Happy And Productive Remote Team with Ben Congleton the CEO and Co-Founder of Olark. In it, we debunked a number of remote working myths such as:
It was great for teams, but then we got questions from individuals who wanted to know how they could get started. So last December, we revisited remote working and focused the conversation around How to Succeed In Your First Remote Working Position with Femgineer’s very own Community Manager: Meghan Burgain.
And it seems like we have only scratched the surface because we still get a lot of questions and concerns on the topic from startup founders and hiring managers.
Most recently, we’ve received questions and concerns are around the hiring process like:
So this month we decided to revisit the theme and created three more episodes on the topic, focused on recruiting, training, retaining, and managing remote workers.
To help us out, I’ve invited a pro on the topic: Holly Cardew the CEO and Founder of Pixc. Holly has grown and scaled her team across Australia and Asia. And has done so in a number of job functions spanning both the business side with roles such as virtual assistants and marketers, to the technical side hiring software developers and designers to build the product.
As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
## How To Recruit Remote Workers Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: We've covered a number of benefits when it comes to remote working in previous episodes. If you've missed any of them, I've included links below. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how to actually go about recruiting for your remote team, 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.
Remote working is becoming the way of the future, and employers who have started embracing it are starting to see the competitive advantages. It's very attractive for employees. In today's episode, we're going to dive into the numerous benefits that employers and employees face when it comes to remote working, and we're going to talk about some of the best practices when it comes to recruiting and retaining employees. And to help us out, I've invited Holly Cardew, who is the CEO and founder of Pixc. Thanks for joining us.
Holly Cardew: Thanks for having me.
Remote working benefits for employers
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, thanks for joining us. You and I have experienced a number of benefits when it comes to running a remote team. For our audience out there, maybe you can share some of the benefits as an employer.
Holly Cardew: Running a company, a remote company, has been beneficial for us, or beneficial for any employer, because what you can do is, you can scale up and scale down depending on what task you need done. You can also hire from a remote pool...Sorry, global pool of talent, rather than a local one. We can also provide customer support 24/7, and in other languages, which is amazing. It's also great because as a company, we're flexible. If something goes down or something happens on the weekend, the employees or the team members can also jump online. They're not so constricted to a specific time.
Remote working benefits for employees
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, and I'm sure there's a number of benefits for the employees, so let's jump into those.
Holly Cardew: I think, for the employees, they love it because it is flexible. At the end of the day, they can live and travel and be wherever they want to. They can work the hours that they want to work. I don't expect someone to be there 9-5. I didn't want to build a company and be in an office 9-5. The employees don't have to necessarily spend an hour and a half in traffic each way every day. So, they can spend that time really focusing on their task at hand.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Another thing I learned recently was that people who are disabled, or an elderly population, can stay in the workforce longer because of having the ability to work remotely. So, I think that's another great thing, if we can keep maintaining the size of the workforce.
Holly Cardew: Definitely, fantastic. I've also seen that with mothers. We've hired content writers, proofreaders. They're mothers in middle America, or the Philippines. It doesn't matter where they are, they're now able to be with their children before and after school, be really flexible at home.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, we've got one, Meghan, who's been on an episode before. So, yeah, I think it's great for motherhood as well. These are great benefits. Let's talk about the types of roles that are conducive to remote work.
Types of roles for remote workers
Holly Cardew: I actually think anything can be remote. I mean, there are definitely times when you need to be on the ground with the customer, or you need to build a physical product, if you're in hardware or other industries. But really, we have, I don't like to use the word "outsourced," but we have people doing legal, accounting, bookkeeping, engineering tasks, design tasks, customer service, marketing. You name it, it's been done with us. So, I think you can actually use a remote or distributed team for any job.
Poornima Vijayashanker: But I'm sure there's some employees who are better suited for remote work versus others, so tell us what somebody should be looking for in an employee.
Holly Cardew: Yeah, definitely. I find that the people who are most proactive and take initiative are the ones who are better off when they're remote, because they don't need the guidance or the team around them to keep them motivated. I also find that someone who is slightly entrepreneurial, like they may...I had someone who was in the Philippines, and I said, "What do you do in your free time?" And she said, "I import things from America and I sell them at the market on the weekend." And doing that, it makes them think outside the box, as well. You don't have to train them as much.
What to watch out for when recruiting remote workers
Poornima Vijayashanker: That makes sense. And are there signs that you want to watch out for?
Holly Cardew: The signs I would watch out for are people who do need to be around others, and they do need that guidance and training, and they're waiting for you to tell them the next thing to do.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, people who maybe aren't as self-directed, or possess some of the self-leadership qualities.
Holly Cardew: Definitely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Which I think is necessary for any employee, but...
Holly Cardew: Definitely, but there are people who are starting out, and they're not used to taking the initiative to go find something. They're used to turning to the person next to them at the office, or university, or wherever they're starting out, and finding the answer.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that's a good point. So, being proactive about being resourceful, and getting the answers that you need on your own.
Holly Cardew: Especially if they're remote, and I'm sleeping, and another team member's not awake, so they can't get help that way.
Criteria for sourcing and filtering remote working candidates
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that's a good point. So, do you have a set of criteria for sourcing candidates that fit?
Holly Cardew: We have quite a, I wouldn't say strict, but a process that we follow every single time. Essentially, we always hire contractors straight away. The reason for that is that we don't have to onboard them for every single task.
So, what we do is, we put out simple things when we put out the job. People, nowadays, they're applying for absolutely everything. They just click the apply button. So, we'll put some sneaky question inside the job, even it's "start your cover letter with a smiley emoji."
And then you can clearly filter out the people who have read the job description. Because when you're remote, there's a lot of reading, rather than face-to-face conversation. So, that filters down some people.
Interview process for remote workers
And then we make a short list, and we interview, and just have a Skype call, about 10-15 minutes. In 10-15 minutes, you can figure out if you're going to...if they culturally fit with the company. I think that's really important. They may be the most amazing person on paper, but if they don't fit with your remote culture, it won't work. And then we give them a trial task, and then after that, if they're successful, we hire them for approximately two weeks to a month to figure out how it works with the company, and then we scale up from there.
How to setup a trial project to test candidates
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. The trial task is one that I do, too. I call it a "task project," and I time box it to about 5-10 hours. I limit it to maybe the two people that I feel have gone through the interview and done a good job, and I actually end up paying them for that trial time.
Holly Cardew: Yeah, that's exactly what we do. Exactly the same. We also do a trial task, about 5-10, depending on the role. If it's a social media thing, it might be, give me 20 posts that you would post up, or some advice on what you would change on our current social media. But if it's an engineering project, yeah, it would be 5-10 hours, maybe a page, and pay for that task, and then decide from there.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. And how do you communicate that to them? Because I know some people are immediately like, "I'm not doing this," and then some people actually take the effort, and I can tell just based on that, who's going to be a good employee versus, OK, clearly you're not interested. So, do you start to see signals like that?
Holly Cardew: We've definitely had the same thing.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah? OK.
Why a trial project helps filter candidates
Holly Cardew: It's sort of like a self-filtering mechanism for us. I think most people who have already...If they're local and they haven't had a remote job yet, they're probably a bit standoffish. But most people who are freelance, or have worked remote, they are used to that.
Poornima Vijayashanker: And then there are some people that think remote working is for them, even though they've never done it before. Like you said, someone who is new to remote working, and they might not know the criteria. Do you have any filters, or ways in which you recruit them?
How you can spot signs that a remote worker can be self-directed and resourceful
Holly Cardew: I think, what we have looked at is that if people are entrepreneurial, they usually have done some small task by themselves. The other one is, I've asked if they've done any side projects, and I ask them to show me their side projects. Like, what do they do in their free time on the weekend? If they don't do something that is slightly work-related...engineers may build something. Marketing people might start their own website to self-promote. So, I look for those things before hiring someone who hasn't had a remote job.
If they have started, it's really about trial and error, and talking to them, talking through. I have friends who are definitely, they say straight up, "I need to be around people." The other option is, you can actually provide them with co-working space.
How to provide remote workers opportunities to be around other people
In some situations, I've either provided them with co-working space, or there was another situation where I had someone in Manila, and I knew the people at the Uber office in Manila, so I made a connection for her to go meet with the community manager at Manila, so she could learn from them. And then, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have to have the people in your company around them, they just need inspiration from other people.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice. Yeah. And that's a good point, because it does get lonesome, and coffee shops don't always have the best internet. The co-working could be great. Hiring sight unseen can be challenging. I know, when I initially did it, I wasn't as good, but over the years, I've gotten better. How have you managed to get the best candidates out of the pool?
What to watch out for—red flags to spot early on when hiring remote workers
Holly Cardew: I think, going back to my previous answer, is that really it's about the cultural fit of the person. If your values and the culture doesn't fit, it won't work. I had someone who I was interviewing, and they were so good. I really wanted them. They were an early employee at a huge company that's IPOed. They would have been...It would have been really beneficial to the company, but we didn't see eye-to-eye on hiring, growing the team. We discussed how we would grow the team, and how we would go about it, and it did not fit. Even though it wasn't an issue then and there, I could foresee, going forward, that it would be a huge issue when we wanted to expand the team. So, it was really about the values.
The other thing is that you really need to trust your gut. At the beginning, you're early on, you're starry-eyed. You think everything is amazing, and you just want to get these people on board, but deep down, if you know that it's not going to work, don't do it.
Crucial conversations to have with candidates
Poornima Vijayashanker: One nugget in there was having these crucial conversations, right? You said that you had the conversation about how they were going to approach hiring, and you didn't start to see eye-to-eye. So, maybe when it comes to the tasks, or whatever the next milestone is, have those conversations, and that way, you start to uncover what their philosophy is, to see if there's alignment and a good fit.
Holly Cardew: Yeah, definitely. I think, it's like any relationship. You need to be able to have a hard conversation. And sometimes, you don't...As a CEO, what's really challenging is, you don't actually get along with everyone perfectly. But as long as you can have a hard conversation, and come to a conclusion, then it's OK. But if something really doesn't fit in your values...
Poornima Vijayashanker: Better to expose that early on.
Holly Cardew: Yeah, exactly. Move on, rather than try and make it fit at the beginning.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, these are great practices, Holly. Thanks for sharing them with us.
Holly Cardew: Thanks for having me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, now, Holly and I want to know, if you have put a remote team in place, what was your process for recruiting? Let us know in the comments below. And 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 talk about how to hold employees accountable and retain them. 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 on-boarding techniques for your new software engineering hires. We started out by talking about why on-boarding is important, and then moved on to showcase how pair and mob programming can help ramp up a lot of hires at once.
The next step is to give them a project!
Giving a new hire a meaty project can seem like a big risk. Seems easier to have them fix bugs while they ramp up on the code base.
But endlessly fixing bugs can be demotivating.
If you’re not sure when the right time is to give your new hires a meatier project, then you’ll definitely want to watch today’s Build Tip.
Chris Jobst who is a senior software engineer at Pivotal Labs is back to share some tips on how to balance bug fixes with meatier projects.
As you watch the episode you’ll learn:
Why bug fixing is often a priority, and how to motivate new hires through it
Why new hires are in the best position to spot technical debt and tackle it
When does it make sense to transition from bug fixes to a project
How to structure the project, when new hires are unfamiliar with the code base
Why pairing more experienced software engineers on a project with new hires can help new hires level up faster
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
Episode Transcript: When Does It Make Sense To Give A Newly Hired Software Engineer A Meaty Project
Poornima Vijayashanker: Hey Ronan, how are you doing, how's your team?
Ronan Dunlop: They're doing great, they're doing really good. In fact, I'm concerned, they're almost through the entire backlog of bugs and I'm not too sure what to give them next?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Maybe a project?
Ronan Dunlop: I don't know, I was really hoping to keep them on bugs for another six months.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Six months? You've got to give them something else, maybe like features, infrastructure work. You've got to mix it up or they're going to burn out.
Ronan Dunlop: I'm not sure they're ready. I'm nervous.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, I think that we're going to need to talk about the importance of balancing bug fixes with projects in today's *Build* tip.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker.
In the previous two *Build* episodes, we talked about the importance of onboarding new hires and shared how you compare or mod a program. In today's episode, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper and share why you want to not just give new hires bug fixes, but also transition to have them work on some meaty projects.
And to help us out, we're back with Chris Jobst, who is a Senior Software Engineer at Pivotal Labs. Thanks for joining today, Chris.
Chris Jobst: Great to be back. Thanks for having me, Poornima.
When To Move Past Fixes And Give Newly Hired Software Engineers A Project
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, Chris, you and I have been in the trenches, and you know a lot of times in generating leads and some companies, we won't name any, will start new hires out with a lot of bug fixes, some menial projects. It's no fun, but they do this, why?
Chris Jobst: I think they don't trust them, ultimately, but it's such a great way to get people to not care about the product.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, at some places they do this for six months, bug fixes and stuff, when does it make sense to actually move past this and give someone a meaty project?
Chris Jobst: I think it's great to get them innovated as soon as possible. Fixing bugs can be a great way to learn about the code, but you want to give them a mix. Get them on features. That's how they're really gonna enjoy their job.
How To Structure A Project For A Newly Hired Software Engineer
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, I assume there's some way you want structure a project, because a lot of them won't know their complaint code base. There's gonna be reset a technical debt or other issues that come up, so what's a good way to set them up for success?
Chris Jobst: I think that using pair programming is an excellent way to both onboard them, and get them into the code.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Chris Jobst: You can have somebody more senior help them along as they're developing their first features. At the same time, doing some bug fixes, can get them to learn more about how the code really works at a deep level.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, and so what do you think the benefit is of doing that peer programming with a senior person?
Chris Jobst: Well, they're gonna ramp up a lot faster, and they'll probably learn a ton from a senior person. It's a great way to have your Junior Developers become Senior, very quickly.
How To Train Newly Hired Software Engineers To Handle Technical Debt
Poornima Vijayashanker: So they're probably gonna come across some technical debt and make it stock, not knowing what decision to take or how one thing will impact another module. What are your recommendations?
Chris Jobst: I think new team members are the best positioned to see technical debt, where others may have just put it off to the side for later. So, what they can do, is they can bring fresh eyes, and talk about it with their leads. Then, their leads can help them understand what are the priorities right now, and how to prioritize those things.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Chris Jobst: It just makes them feel heard, and it lets them understand what are priorities of the project.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, how do we gauge the success of a project, because there's gonna a lot of learning and ramping up to do, so it's not like somebody can do a release every week?
Chris Jobst: Right, well I think it's really subjective, but a successful project, to me, is one that satisfies the users. If the users are happy, then that's success.
How To Motivate Newly Hired Software Engineers To Fix Bugs
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now, I know there comes a time for every software engineer where you've got to hunker down, do some bug fixes, do some menial work, clean out that technical debt, but how can you, as an engineering lead message that, especially to your new hires?
Chris Jobst: We have a weekly meeting to talk about the features coming up. You can make that a meeting, actually, about the chores, and the bugs that need to get done. This involves a PM, and gives the team a sense of unity. It can also give them a direction to go, so they don't feel like its' just gonna go on and on forever, and finally, make sure they understand why they are doing this. It's all for the user's benefit, and for their own. The code is gonna look cleaner by doing the tours and refactoring, and the bugs are gonna solve user problems.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Should there be a carrot at the end of the stick?
Chris Jobst: Absolutely. I'm a huge proponent of celebrating success, so have the team go out to lunch, or have a hackathon that gets them to take their minds off of it, do something else for a bit. In addition, if you have that weekly meeting, then you can setup your next feature, and get them excited about it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, Chris, you've shared a lot of great tips when it comes to onboarding new hire. Any final words of wisdom for us?
Chris Jobst: Well, this is a process that can always improve, and I think companies really do themselves a service by iterating and continuing to improve that. A healthy team always has new members joining, because you're rotating you're teams. You're getting new hires. So, make that an enjoyable process for them.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Chris. This has been great.
Chris Jobst: Thank you for having me again. It's been really fun talking with you.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more great episodes like this one, and be sure you share it with your teammates, and your boss, and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode. Ciao for now.
Speaker 3: This episode of *Build* has been brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
In last week’s Build Tip, we dove into the importance of onboarding new hires, and the benefits your team and company will experience if you invest the time into doing it.
Next, you might be wondering, what do you do if you have more than one hire? Or you have a hire that isn’t familiar with the language or framework your team uses and you want to ramp them up quickly?
Have you heard of techniques like pair programming or mob programming, but aren’t sure if they efficient and effective?
Well in today’s Build Tip, we’ll be sharing why pair programming and mob programming can be beneficial to getting new hires up to speed quickly on a new language or framework, and help you scale your efforts efficiently and effectively.
Chris Jobst, who is a senior software engineer at Pivotal Labs is back to help us out!
As you listen to the episode you’ll learn the following:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
Check out these additional resources on programming methodologies:
How Pair Programming And Mob Programming Help Quickly Onboard New Software Engineers Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: Hey Ronan, how's it going with your new hires?
Ronan Dunlop: Great. I did everything that you and Chris suggested and...but I've run into a small snag.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, what's your snag?
Ronan Dunlop: Most of my new developers don't know RAILS.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, well just peer program with them.
Ronan Dunlop: There's just one of me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, that's right. And five of them. Well, have you considered Mob programming?
Ronan Dunlop: That sounds dangerous. What's that?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Don't worry, it's not. In fact, why don't we cover the benefits of pair and mob programming in today's *Build* tip?
Ronan Dunlop: That sounds cool.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In the last *Build* episode, I shared some tips for onboarding new hires.
In today's episode, we're gonna dive in and give you some more tips around how you can onboard engineers, get them up to speed on a code base or a programming language they may not be familiar with really quickly. And to help us out, Chris Jobst is back. You'll recall Chris is a senior software engineer at Pivotal Labs. Thanks for joining us again, Chris.
Chris Jobst: It's great to be back, Poornima. Thanks again for having me.
What Is Pair Programming In Software Engineering
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, wonderful. So let's dive right in. What's Pair programming?
Chris Jobst: Pairing is when you have two people sitting at one computer. We often have two monitors and two keyboards and two mics, and they're literally working on the same code at the same time.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's gotta be really time consuming to have two people doing the exact same task at the same time. What's the benefit?
When To Use Pair Programming
Chris Jobst: It sounds really daunting, but it's actually very efficient. You're basically doing code review a hundred percent of the time.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Chris Jobst: And you get to refactor together, so you avoid a lot of these common things that you'll see in other code bases.
Pair Programming and Refactoring
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK, so maybe for some folks that don't know code reviews or refactoring, maybe we could share what those are as well?
Chris Jobst: Sure. Oftentimes before something gets committed or accepted into the code base, you'll have somebody review it and make suggestions and then the original committer has to go back and change it, and then it goes back to the code review and gets accepted.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Chris Jobst: That's a feedback loop that we completely avoid with Pair programming.
Poornima Vijayashanker: And with refactoring?
Chris Jobst: Refactoring is simply where you take code and change the implementation without changing the functionality.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Chris Jobst: To improve the readability and maintainability of the code.
How Pair Programming Really Works
Poornima Vijayashanker: So in pairing, since you've got two sets of eyes checking each other's work, it probably moves a lot faster as a result?
Chris Jobst: I think so. There's code review going on, you're refactoring together, you're always talking about the best way to solve a problem and if you don't know what to do, instead of having to go ask someone or stop and email, you've got your pair right there.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Which is probably the benefit for new hires?
Chris Jobst: Absolutely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: For our audience out there who may be new to pair programming, how can they get started?
Chris Jobst: Well, you know one computer and another monitor, and you need two keyboards and mics. Most people already have that on hand.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, and are there any rules, I'm guessing?
Chris Jobst: Absolutely. The biggest one is have empathy, and just be kind to your pair. You're both working together, it's pretty intimate, but it's a lot of fun too.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Now are both people writing code at the exact same time?
Chris Jobst: No. You decide who's going to drive at a certain time and type on the keyboard and the other person will navigate and maybe suggest, "Hey, what if we went over here and did this thing?"
Poornima Vijayashanker: So it's like a pilot/co-pilot and maybe you trade off?
Chris Jobst: Yeah, that's a great way of describing it.
Mob Programming Versus Pair Programming
Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome. There are some situations where you can't Pair program, like in Ronan's case where he's got five engineering hires and they don't know RAILS so how can you work with a bigger group?
Chris Jobst: Well, you can do what's called Mobbing.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
What Is Mob Programming
Chris Jobst: You get one computer and often a TV screen or projector and you have a bunch of people, five or more, look at the code. One person is typing and you're generally more teaching or gathering suggestions about how to best achieve a goal.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. I'm sure somebody who's looking on from the outside is gonna be like, "Why are five people sitting around one machine and writing a single line of code?" What are some of the benefits? Why we would wanna do this?
Benefits of Mob Programming
Chris Jobst: As you pointed out, it's great for onboarding new people.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Chris Jobst: And what you'll have is people asking questions, oftentimes they'll ask a question somebody else didn't think of but it's a question that they need answered.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. And I'm sure it also helps with the bus factor, right? Everyone's gonna know something, or know the same thing.
Chris Jobst: Definitely, you want everybody on the same page. You want them all knowing how the code works and if you've got a bunch of new people, it's actually more time-consuming to go and teach every person individually than to get them in a room and help them learn from each other and from the person who's the expert.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it.
Resources On Pair Programming And Mob Programming
This was a great primer on pairing and mobbing. For our audiences out there who maybe want to dive a little deeper, do you have recommendations on resources?
Chris Jobst: Definitely. There are two great books that I love. *Extreme Programming* and *Extreme Programming Explained*, both by Kent Beck. I recommend the former for engineers. It really talks about these practices and the process in more detail. *Extreme Programming Explained* is a great resource for PMs. It talks about it on a higher level and how a whole project can benefit.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Thanks for sharing these great resources and tips for us. I know our audience is gonna get a lot out of this.
Chris Jobst: Thank you for having me. I'm a huge proponent of pair programming.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, for all of you out there, Chris and I wanna know, have you done pair or mob programming with your teams as you onboard new hires? If so, what are the benefits you've experienced? Let us know in the comments below.
That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more episode like today's 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.
Have you recently hired a software engineer or maybe a few? Congratulations!
Are you starting to worry that they haven’t shipped any code yet?
Maybe they’re a bad hire...
Seems kinda harsh to think someone is a bad hire if they haven’t shipped code in their first day or week, especially if they haven’t been ramped up on the code base.
But who has time to train a new hire?!
Unfortunately the lack of onboarding new hires, and seeing it as unnecessary is becoming a pervasive misconception. Instead, teams and companies fault the new hire by thinking the new hire just isn’t self-sufficient if they need to be onboarded.
But how could someone (even a very seasoned software engineer) possibly review hundreds, thousands, or possibly millions of lines of code on their own? And be expected to know the nuances and decisions that went into writing all of it? Not to mention those notorious monkey patches that lead to bugs that only veterans on the team are aware of!
In today’s Build Tip, we’re going to explore why onboarding new software engineers on your team is important, and provide you with some techniques for doing it.
To help us out, I’ve invited Chris Jobst, who is a senior software engineer at Pivotal Labs.
As you listen to the episode you’ll learn the following:
Wondering what to do if you have more than one hire? Well, stay tuned, because in next week’s Build Tip we’re going to be sharing some best practices for ramping up more than one new hire at a time!
Why You Need To Invest In Onboarding A New Software Engineer And Not Expect Them To Ship Code On Their First Day Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: Hey Ronan, congratulations.
Ronan Dunlop: Oh yeah, we just hired five engineers.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that's awesome. Are you going to start onboarding them soon?
Ronan Dunlop: Onboard them?
Poornima Vijayashanker: You know, walk them through the architecture, maybe do some peer programming.
Ronan Dunlop: I don't have time for that. That's why I hired five engineers.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So you're just going to let them sink or swim?
Ronan Dunlop: How else does one know if they're good or not?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh boy. I think we're going to need to cover the importance of onboarding in today's *Build* Tip.
Why Onboard Your New Software Engineers
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.
While hiring engineers is half the battle, the other half is ramping them up quickly. Today, I'm joined by Chris Jobst, who is a senior software engineer at Pivotal Labs. Thanks for joining us today Chris.
Chris Jobst: Thank you so much for having me Poornima.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So Chris, a lot of people would say if you hire an engineer and they're not productive on the first day shipping code, they were probably a bad hire. What do you think?
Chris Jobst: Unfortunately, that's a really common misconception.
Software Engineer Onboarding Checklist For Managers
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, what should a typical first day look like?
Chris Jobst: Well my first tip would be to have them meet the team and really make them feel part of that team.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Then what's the next thing you should do?
Chris Jobst: Well start off by talking about the product.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Chris Jobst: What are they building? Who are they building it for?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. After that what would you do?
Chris Jobst: Well then maybe dive into the code a bit. Talk about the architecture.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice and what should you do as your talking about the architecture, because some people could have really big code bases?
Chris Jobst: Absolutely. I like to start at a really high level and then dive down bit by bit.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Chris Jobst: You don't want to overwhelm them on the first day.
How To Train Software Engineers
Poornima Vijayashanker: It's great that you mention architecture review. Again, some contrarians might think, "Well they should just set themselves up and dive into the code base. Don't make it too easy, we want them to sink or swim." What do you think?
Chris Jobst: I think the easier that it could be to set them up, the better they're going to be set up for success at the company.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, why do you think we should make set up a cinch?
Chris Jobst: Well if you really do want to get them involved in the product and the code, then make it easy for them to do that.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, so getting them ramped up and being able to download the code. Not have to install a whole bunch of jazz and this and that.
Chris Jobst: Have a setup script.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Chris Jobst: We have a few different ways of doing that for the computers that we use and it makes it so much easier.
Examples Of Onboarding Newly HIred Software Engineers
Poornima Vijayashanker: What's an example that you guys use?
Chris Jobst: We'll start with a base image and then we just have a workstation script that literally just installs a bunch of software.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What are the expectations for the new hire at the end of the first day? I know you mentioned they should meet the team, we should do an architecture review and make set-up a cinch, but what can somebody expect at the end?
Chris Jobst: I think that it's really important that they feel part of the team, but also that they feel connected to the user base and have empathy for the user.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, so getting a sense of who the user is and walking them through some use cases. Sharing some new testimonials.
Chris Jobst: Absolutely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Usually it's an engineering lead driving the process like Ronan Dunlop, so I'm assuming they should maybe do some check-ins, either during that first day or during that first week? What's the benefit of doing a check-in?
Benefit To Onboarding Newly Hired Software Engineer
Chris Jobst: Absolutely. You want to make them feel part of the team and when they feel part of the team, they're going to stay at the company longer.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that's a clear benefit to having a good onboarding process.
Chris Jobst: Definitely.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well thank you so much Chris, these tips have been very helpful and I know they're going to help our audience as they onboard their new hires.
Chris Jobst: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure. That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more *Build* tips like today's and 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.
We began this month with a Build episode where we exposed all the aftershocks of using current product management methodologies to estimate user stories. Then in last week’s episode, we dove into Hiten Shah’s new EAT approach which boils down to doing hourly estimates.
Don’t worry if you thought Hiten was crazy, you aren’t alone!
We received a lot of questions, concerns, and objections, so in today’s episode we’re going to dive into the top 3 we heard again and again:
Objection #1: My team is still healing from our previous approach.
“My team adopted agile five years ago and experienced a number of problems that you talked about in the first episode. So, six months ago we took the plunge and decided on no estimates and, of course you can imagine, we're still recovering from it. The wounds are raw. So, how am I going to get my team to try something new especially since this is going to be another investment in terms of time?" — Product Manager from Palo Alto
Objection #2: This won’t for our customers who want quick fixes!
“I hate to play the blame game, but a big source of our problems is our customers. Many want quick fixes, so we end up at their mercy and boy, do they hate eating their vegetables. How do I get them to come around?" — New Product Manager from NYC
Objection #3: My team is eager to adopt a new process but how will this help them follow through?
"Hiten and Poornima, thanks again for this series. Unlike some of your other audience members, I have the opposite problem. My teammates are eager to adopt a new process, but when they hit a snag they are quick to punt and just do whatever they think they need to do to get the job done. What is the one thing you would advise them to have them stick through when implementing the process and practice of hourly estimates?" — Team Lead from Tulsa
Do any of these sound familiar?
Listen to the episode to hear Hiten's response to each!
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
Check out these additional resources on estimating stories for your product:
## Why Hourly Estimates For User Stories And Technical Tasks May Seem Crazy But You Need To Do Them Anyway Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: Hiten, last week we instigated our audience by telling them your EAT approach on how they're going to get rid of their old methods and instead embrace doing hourly estimates. A lot of them have written in with their questions, their concerns, one even said you're totally crazy. I hope you're ready to deal with this pushback and address our audience's concerns.
Hiten Shah: Yeah, it's not the first time I've been called crazy. It's because I just want everyone to do better. I've heard everything from “there's no way I'm going to be able to get my team to do this, there's no way I can use this approach,” all the way to, “the approach I'm using today, whatever it is, works just fine.” Yet, those same people say they can't ship on time. Also, “we just can't estimate accurately, we've tried it before, and it's impossible.” I've heard everything.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome. I hope you're ready. Let's just dive right into it.
Hiten Shah: Let's do it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode of *Build*, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
Hourly Engineering Estimates Is Crazy
Over the last couple episodes, we've been talking about estimates, and you'll recall in the last episode we unveiled the EAT method and talked about how this is all about hourly estimates. I'm sure, for those of you out there, you were thinking, "This is crazy, people will never adopt this on my team." In today's episode, we're going to address a number of these concerns. To help us out, I have invited back Hiten Shah who is the founder of multiple products, and his most recent project is called Product Habits.
Hiten, we put out your EAT approach, your EAT method, and we got a lot of feedback. I want to start by throwing some questions out there from our audience and, hopefully, you'll be able to answer them.
Hiten Shah: Rock and roll.
Adopting A New Product Management Process Is A Big Investment For A Modern Software Team
Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome. Here's the first question, this is from a product manager and they wrote in saying, "Hiten, my team adopted agile five years ago and experienced a number of problems that you talked about in the first episode. So, six months ago we took the plunge and decided on no estimates and, of course you can imagine, we're still recovering from it. The wounds are raw. So, how am I going to get my team to try something new especially since this is going to be another investment in terms of time?" What are your thoughts?
Hiten Shah: Every time you do a process improvement and it involves product people and engineers, they do like process; if they don't then they're probably working at a really early stage startup and spending a lot of time just probably working 18 hours a day just coding and things like that. That's a whole different story, but in this case it sounds like a larger organization to some extent and a bigger team. In those teams, the best advice I have is don't think it's going to take time. I'm not saying you rush into anything or anything like that, but you can start with the E part of the EAT method and really focus in on understanding how to have your team as engineers and the product team learn to explore and learn to really figure out what the communication differences are between the teams. That technical research outline really helps you do that.
If you were to implement one piece, start at the top and start with creating that technical outline on the next project you do. This isn't a whole big process improvement, system changes, and take everybody and regroup them, and all this stuff—
Explore: Before You Do Product Estimates Do Your Technical Research
Poornima Vijayashanker: Call in change management.
Hiten Shah: Yeah, none of that. No, we don't like that. I don't like that. Anything I suggest wouldn't fall in line with that. Can you just start with starting with the explore aspect of it? Then, playing it out on the next initiative you're going to do, however small or large you think it is? You'll already start seeing improvements.
Again, seen that happen, heard this objection. Part of it is because of exactly what the person was saying, "I've done this before. It didn't work. The thing we went to is still causing us all these problems, hence why we started with the problems and most of the states people are in." I kept hearing that over and over again. The simple solution is start with this one document and create, what I call, a technical research outline, and use that to communicate with engineers.
The two main components—again just to repeat this—are the evidence, the reasoning, the customer feedback, anything you have there as to why you're building it so that your engineers and rest of the product team can get close to the customer. My favorite part still is the open questions because you're going to have questions about what you're building that might've never previously been answered in your process. Just that and then having communications while engineering solves this problem, but don't think it's going to take forever.
Customers Want Quick Fixes
Poornima Vijayashanker: The next question is, "Hiten, I hate to play the blame game, but a big source of our problems is our customers. Many want quick fixes, so we end up at their mercy and boy, do they hate eating their vegetables. How do I get them to come around?"
Hiten Shah: The good news is you're not asking the customers to eat any vegetable. You want to create that dessert for them, if you want to put it that way, but what you're looking to do is get your team to eat their vegetables. What I would suggest is that you take away this idea that you're ruled by your customers in terms of you have to do what they say and instead start taking a bunch of the items that they're giving you and start going through the whole EAT method process and getting actual estimates because then you'll actually be aligned with them. What they want to see is that you're improving the product based on what their needs are. What you want to do want to do is improve the product based on their needs.
Tell Your Customers What You Can And Can’t Deliver On
Just by applying the method itself on a high level and starting to go through the process with your team, you can go all the way to the explore aspect and the adjust aspect and you don't have to get to task yet as long as you can have an idea of comparing one thing they want versus another. Then, you can apply the idea that, "Well, we now have an idea that this thing we can do for them is going to take a week, this other thing is going to take a few days," which is probably a process you're not going through right now. Then, you can pick based on that.
Usually, I pick the thing that's going to happen quickest most of the time just to get all those knocked out and keep customers happy. Over time, you would create a balance of both types of things.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I'm sensing from this audience person that they probably have some customers that expect things done right away. Maybe like in the next day, week, or month, they have some deadline in their head that they want the team to meet.
You’re Probably Not Delivering A Product Fast Enough For Customer Right Now
Hiten Shah: This whole process you can add criteria, such as “our goal is to release this by this date,” and then the discussions happen. The whole idea of the process is that you can start setting certain criteria and, to me, what I've done before is put that as an open question. This is the most important thing customers want and we'd like to deliver it within, whatever the criteria is. Then, you get to have the discussions with engineering.
Here's the funny thing: even though a customer might have demanded it that fast, that doesn't mean today you're delivering it fast enough for them anyway. This is the most common thing. It's like if you have a faulty process or a process that's not delivering it; it's a circular kind of logic. For me, it's being deliberate and actually getting the estimates will help you get to a place where you can deliver something at the speed that your customers want it. Usually, the customers want the communication and they want accuracy just like you want more than they actually care that it's going to be delivered when they want it. If you tell them, "Hey, we can't do it in a day, but we guarantee it'll be done in three," and you get it done in two or you get it done in three they're happy.
How To Get Your Team To Follow Through On Providing Hourly Estimates For User Stories
Poornima Vijayashanker: Last question for you, "Hiten and Poornima, thanks again for this series. Unlike some of your other audience members, I have the opposite problem. My teammates are eager to adopt a new process, but when they hit a snag they are quick to punt and just do whatever they think they need to do to get the job done. What is the one thing you would advise them to have them stick through when implementing the process and practice of hourly estimates?"
Hiten Shah: This is great. It's great to have a team that's motivated to try new things. The best thing you can do for a team like that is give them the outlet to communicate at every step about how the process is working because then you can remind them that we're convicted, we need a better process. We're convicted that we want hourly engineering estimates on things, and so we are going to keep doing this process until it works. Thus we're going to include feedback from you, the people who are doing it into the process, and we're going to make improvements over time.
A technical research outline is created, let's say, and then the engineers work on it, and before you move on to the next step of the EAT method of adjusting, you would take a quick five minutes and let everyone give feedback on the outline itself. Was it effective? Did we miss anything? Are there things that we could've done better? Questions like that.
Collect Feedback From Your Engineering Team
I think, for me, if you're running a team, your job is to get feedback from them. Even with any kind of process that you want to change or improve, you want to sit there and say, "OK, how can I make sure that the team is aligned on it?" This is what I would call an alignment tool across the board, so that you're getting their inputs as well, and they don't have this fear or this reason to fall back to old practices that screw up the whole process.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That is the discipline, the getting the feedback and doing the adaptations as you go through.
Hiten Shah: You can't improve without feedback.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, got it. Thank you so much for taking the time to address a number of these concerns and objections that our audience has, Hiten. Any final words for our audience?
Hiten Shah: Yeah, absolutely. I'm super happy that all of you have watched this. This specific subject was the most controversial subject I've written about, ever in my life. I write about these things on my newsletter, Product Habits, you can sign up at producthabits.com, and I'll be talking more about things like this that are there to help you out all in emails though, no videos, so thank you for having me on video.
Poornima Vijayashanker: You're welcome. We'll be sure to share the link to Product Habits with our audience.
Hiten Shah: Thank you.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's it for this series and today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to share it with your teammates, your boss, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode of *Build*. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
I don’t know about you but I HATE kale… That stupid leafy green vegetable with the ANDI score of 1000. It’s really hard to chew, and any time I see it on a menu, I skip it! But I get there are a lot of kale converts who go around saying, “Eat your veggies, especially kale!”
OK, I know what you’re thinking, “What does this have to do with building software products and product estimates?”
Everything.
Just like we have to buckle down and eat our veggies (including kale) to stay healthy, there are a number of things we need to do in order to have accurate estimates that will ensure shipping a product consistently.
In the last episode of Build, we mentioned how a number of the current approach fall short. If you were left wondering what to do next, don’t fret, because in, today’s episode, Hiten Shah is back. He’ll be introducing a new approach to coming up with product estimates, and it’s coincidentally called the EAT method.
As you watch the episode you’ll learn:
OK I know what you’re thinking… “Ugh not another approach!” OR, “This is never gonna fly at my company!”
Well that’s why after you’ve watched the episode, we want you to let us know what your concerns are tweet to us: @poornima @hnshah. We’ll be addressing a number of them in next week’s episode!
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Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
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Check out these additional resources on estimating stories for your product:
## What We Need To Do To Produce An "Accurate" Ship Date For Our Product
Poornima Vijayashanker: In the last episode of *Build*, we explored a number of approaches to estimating work, and shared some of the shortfalls when it comes to over-, under-, or just not estimating altogether. If you missed the episode, I've included a link to it below. In today's episode, we're going to suggest an altered approach to estimating that you can adopt and adapt for your team, so stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayshanker. In each episode of *Build*, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Now one of the most elusive processes is coming up with estimates for a project or for a task. You'll remember in the last episode, we shared some of the shortfalls of the current approaches. In today's episode, we're going to suggest an alternate approach that you can adopt and adapt to fit your team and your product's needs.
To help us out in today's episode, Hiten Shah is back. You'll recall he has built a number of products. His most recent project is called Product Habits. Thanks for joining us again, Hiten.
Hiten Shah: Happy to be here.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, so let's go ahead and dive right in. I know we talked about a number of approaches last time, but I'm curious to hear what's your approach for estimates?
Estimating User Stories Is Like Eating Your Veggies
Hiten Shah: Well first, I have to say it's like eating your veggies.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Hiten Shah: With veggies, everyone knows they should eat them.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Hiten Shah: Many of us are not very good at eating them. We all know the reasons why. It's for health reasons and to prevent certain diseases and things like that. To me, the idea of getting accurate estimates is exactly like that. Nobody really wants to do it, but everyone knows they need to.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well some of us need to buckle down and eat our veggies.
What You CANNOT Do With Hiten Shah’s EAT Method
Hiten Shah: Yeah, of course, but first let me talk about what you can't do with this approach that I'm going to share because what you can't do sometimes is more important than what you can do.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure.
Hiten Shah: What typically happens is that you have no estimates, or you have agile with points, or you have some kind of waterfall process, or you have some kind of build, measure, learn, lean startup process going on. If you're not actually doing accurate estimates, you end up running into all these issues. My method will make it so that you don't have to run into these issues. The issues are more issues of what I would call interpersonal communications between team members and teams. They involve things like, believe it or not I've seen this, engineers getting yelled at for not doing their job, so to speak, which would be actually creating the software.
Another example would be we end up sort of like scapegoating and saying that it's this person's fault, or that person's fault, or this team's fault. You can't do that with your engineers if you take this approach. I think partially most importantly of all, if you're actually able to be deliberate and take the approach I'm going to share, you're just going to make it so that you don't have this lack of clarity across the board. I think that's the most important thing. When there's a level of ambiguity on a team about what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, all that kind of stuff, it leads to all these problems of culture, leadership, management. So you're actually preventing a ton of problems if you can do this method.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK, so what's the approach?
EAT (Explore, Adjust, and Task) Method For Providing Hourly Estimates
Hiten Shah: Yeah, so the approach is called the EAT method. The whole idea behind it is to do this three step process. It's an acronym for each of the three steps. The first step is explore, second step is adjust, and third step is task. The thing is, the whole goal behind it, is to get 100% accurate estimates. That means that you're down to 15 minute blocks, or hourly blocks, of estimates from engineers.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Wow, so people who normally can't estimate are suddenly going to be able to give you an hourly estimate of how long something is going to take?
Hiten Shah: Yeah, it's like magic.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, it sounds like that.
Hiten Shah: Like eating your veggies over your lifetime right, and being a healthy person.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, I think you're going to have a dive in a little deeper.
Explore: Do Technical Research To Uncover What It’s Going To Take To Build A Software Product
Hiten Shah: OK, sure. The first step is explore. In that step, there's one sort of piece of that step that's most important. What I named it is technical research. The reason for that is product people are used to doing user research, they're used to doing customer research, and so research is a word that they're used to, and it's something that the nonengineers start. What that involves is creating essentially a technical research outline. There's many different ways you can do it, but a high level of it is you're explaining exactly what you want to build, and you're also including the reasons you want to build it. Majority of time, depending on your organization, the reason you want to build something should be because there's a customer need, customer paying, or a business problem you're trying to solve, or a combination of both. Then from there you're actually going all the way down to if you have mock-ups, if you have any kind of sketches, you're putting it together.
Then my favorite part of it is when at the bottom you would write this whole idea, or this section, called open questions. These are questions you might have. You can already kind of figure out, you might have already figured out some of the things that might be tough or not tough. Then what you're doing is you're not just keeping that to yourself, you're not just keeping that on your team with your close folks who helped you write it, you're actually providing that to your engineers before they build anything, and before they even think too much about the problem ideally. That's their opportunity to evaluate it. So, that's the first step.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Adjust: List Out Open Questions That Need To Be Answered
Hiten Shah: Then the second step, which is sort of the adjust period, involves after they've taken a look at it, made comments, often times they add their own open questions because they have questions for you too, and so it's just a way to get this communication very deliberate instead of making it all happen in conversations that are either not recorded or just not setup in a way where people can look back at it. From the commenting and the open questions, you're able to adjust what you're going to build. This is the critical piece because if that middle piece of adjusting doesn't happen, that's where estimates completely fall down and that's where you run into all the problems we mentioned earlier in the previous episode about scope creep, and padding. All these things are a result of actually not communicating, and not adjusting what you want to build based on what the engineers tell you is going to be difficult, hard, easy hopefully.
A lot of times even the most seasoned product person and the most seasoned engineers don't generally have an idea of what's easy or hard, what's going to hypothetically take a long time or not, without actually diving into the details. This gets everyone on the same page about that. After that process, sometimes it takes multiple back and forth to get a really good document that outlines a technical research, ideally anyone on the engineering team that could work on this is able to take that and start tasking it. Actually it's engineering tasks in sort of your task management tool, or whatever the tool engineers are using, Pivotal Tracker for example. Then instead of putting points, that's the time when engineers are able to put in minutes and hours. I like 15-minute chunks is what I've found to be most valuable for my teams as part of this process.
Iterate As You Go Along To Avoid Misconceptions And Miscommunications
This is one of the things that's more of like what we would call a process improvement. When you do process improvement, it takes iterations to get it right. But what I've noticed is when the teams are deliberate and the product people really bought in to sort of wanting to do better and same with the engineers, this process completely reduces all that ambiguity and misconceptions, and miscommunications that happen when people are just assuming things about what to build and how long things are going to take. By then, the engineers are very comfortable providing very detailed estimate on tasks.
Poornima Vijayashanker: This is pretty novel, and I know that if I'm hearing this for the first time, I sure as heck am going to be opposed to it because I'm thinking I've got to get my whole team to buy in, there's new things I've got to do, all this technical research. I'm not sure I'm going to adopt this in the next week or even month. I think I'm going to have to slowly unveil it. I think our audience is going to have a lot of concerns for the two of us, but I think we should just stop right here.
Hiten Shah: Yeah, I have good news. I've heard it all before, so I'd love to hear it from them.
Tell Us Your Concerns Or Objections To EAT Method
Poornima Vijayashanker: Awesome. Well, Hiten and I now want to know what are your concerns with the EAT approach and doing estimates in this 15-minute interval with overall hourly estimates. Let us know what they are in the comments below. That's it for this week's episode. Be sure to subscribe at our YouTube channel to receive next week's episode, where we're going to dive into these concerns and hopefully address a lot of the objections that you're going to get from your teammates and your boss. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
What’s probably the MOST popular and frustrating question you’ve come across when building a product: “How long do you think it will take to do task X?”
It’s frustrating on so many levels…
First, we need to produce an “accurate” estimate. If it’s off, there goes our ship date!
Next, we need to give a response that seems “realistic”, i.e. is going to meet the expectations or deadlines set by someone else.
Third, we need to be a fortune teller and anticipate things that come up in the course of completing task X.
Finally, we have to do it the moment we’re asked because we’re expected to know how long any task will take.
I don’t know about you, but despite building and launching a number of software products over the past 14 years, I still struggle with estimating how long a task will take to complete.
There are a number of approaches and methodologies that have sprung up over the years such as Waterfall, Agile and Lean whose goal is to provide a framework that helps engineers, designers, and product managers to estimate how long something will take to build and ship. However, as you’ve probably experienced, each one of these misses the mark.
In today’s episode we’ll dive into the aftershocks you may experience when it comes to following one of these approaches and providing product estimates.
Next week we’ll tackle an alternate approach that may seem too good to be true…
To help us out, I’ve invited Hiten Shah, who is the founder of a number of software products such as Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, and his most recent project is called Product Habits.
As you listen to the episode you’ll learn the following:
Check out these additional resources on estimating stories for your product:
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Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
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## Why It’s Hard to Provide Accurate Product Estimates Under Most Popular Product Management Methodologies Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode of *Build*, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. One of the most elusive processes has to be estimating how long a project or a task is going to take. And no matter how many times we do it, we somehow just always miss the mark because things come up. Well, in today's episode, we're going to share some of the aftershocks you may experience despite what approach you take when it comes to estimating. In a future episode, we'll dive into an alternate approach in how your team can adopt and adapt it to fit your needs.
To help us out in this episode, I've invited Hiten Shah, who is a founder of many products. His most recent project is called Product Habits. Thanks for joining us today, Hiten.
Hiten Shah: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.
What Happens When We Don’t Accurately Estimate Stories Or Tasks
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. You and I have been building products for a number of years. We've built a lot of different ones. And I know myself being an engineer and a product owner, no matter how many years I put in, I just constantly miss the mark no matter what. I either end up underestimating or overestimating. Let's dive right in and talk about what are some of the problems that happen when we don't accurately estimate.
Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think, when we're building products, we don't generally think about how long it's going to take to build them even though we pretend we do. We end up creating a road map with a bunch of timelines and we don't actually talk amongst the team, because, usually, a product can't be built by a single person. If it could have been built by a single person, then you don't have to worry about it as much because that single person has all the answers. One thing that ends up happening is you end up having surprises that come up that you didn't think of. You're thinking about using a certain technology, let's say such as Twilio or SendGrid or an API and the engineer has never used it before. They get in the weeds of it and they realize it's going to take longer than they think. And then your estimate is blown up and you're off. That's a very common problem.
What Causes Scope Creep In Product Management
There's a few others, too. One other one that I've seen people hit continuously is this idea of scope creep. We're both product people. You happen to be an engineer. I happen to be more a marketer. But we love product and building them and teaching other people how to do it, too. One of the aspects of that is we might still be learning and doing research as the product is being built, and we all of a sudden have this great idea we want to add. We go in and kind of blow up the whole process and expect that the timeline is not going to change or don't even think about the timeline and say, "Hey, we're going to build this new thing on top of the thing we're doing." Or, "Can you add this little tweak?" And not realizing how disruptive that is to the process of building the product itself.
What Happens When Communication On A Modern Software Team Breaks Down
Another thing that's very common is that if you aren't communicating very well with your team, especially the engineers when you decide that you're going to build something, what ends up happening is the best thing that they can do if you haven't spent enough time communicating early and often is they end up padding. They end up actually adding a whole day—or worse yet—a week or months to a rough estimate. We call it a rough estimate because it's rough.
Those are some of the more kind of common problems that come up when you're building something and trying to get estimates and actually think you have the right great estimates, which is the most common thing. And then all of a sudden all these things happen that you are probably are not conscious to about what kind of problems they cause in terms of being able to ship something on time.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. I think two other things I'm curious to hear your take on are large tasks. How do you actually divide them up and then the follow through? You think you're 80% way there and then you discover actually you just finished 50%.
What Causes Scope Creep? Large Tasks That Aren’t Broken Down.
Hiten Shah: Yeah. I see companies creating, even in my own companies, so much work that is not actually broken down enough. You might think that it's easy to add a button somewhere, so you say, "OK. This is a button." You think it's a small task. Maybe you're not the engineer, because often times you're the product person, or even if you are the engineer. Then the engineer, whether you decided to do it as an engineer or the product person, you get into the task and all of a sudden you're like, "I have to add the button." There's all these other things that need to change whether it's the user interface, or you're missing a certain component, or what that button does is more complicated than you thought. What ends up happening is this seemingly small task is actually a large task. It's usually because you haven't thought through all the things that you need to think through when you add something like that. And I'm talking about a button. Imagine a whole feature. Right? And considering that to be a small task when it really turns into a large one. I think the most common thing I see is that these things you consider small are actually large.
What Causes Scope Creep? Thinking That Tasks Are ‘Simple’ Or ‘Small’
Another common thing is not realizing that what you're asking for is actually a large task. Right. Like adding a messaging feature or things like that. Even a lot of times, I've had emails come in to me from people who are customers saying, "You can send me SMS as notifications. It will take one hour using Twilio, another two hours through your database and you're done."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Great. Come on down and write it for us.
Hiten Shah: You want to do it for me? I'll hold you to the three hours, because it's never as long as people say it is.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. There's a lot of different approaches we also like to take when it does come to estimating. Even though we know all these problems, we still continue to take an approach. Right? Let's dive into the approaches.
Well-Intentioned Product Methodologies: Waterfall, Agile, and Lean Startup
Hiten Shah: Yeah. I think one of the most common approaches that is very still operated by in a lot companies is what we call waterfall, which is one task happens after another task, after another task. A lot of times people are waiting on these things. This is actually the reason another process was invented called agile, which I know both of us are familiar with. Where you're essentially—the way I would describe it is you're trying to do things much more efficiently by basically having more regular meetings and having, I guess, smaller batches of work. What ends up happening there is you create this sort of system that works almost on a weekly basis at best. It means that you have a cadence of following up on all the tasks, we call it agile because you're supposed to be more agile with it and it's more nimble than waterfall and that's completely true, but you lose a lot in the process. Those are the two common ways that I'm most familiar with.
Then there's a third way, which I think is more inspired by things like *Lean Startup*, which again I like to say that we both probably grew up with that so to speak, around us. That's where you are even more hyper—I would call that more hyper agile than anything else, where you're adding in the component of much more customer feedback in the process, because agile wasn't necessarily invented at a time when customer feedback was a popular thing.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. What are some of the painful after effects of using agile?
How To Estimate Stories In Agile
Hiten Shah: What ends up happening with agile—one of my favorites, and there's a lot of tools out there that facilitate this—is the idea of adding points to an agile process. What you end up doing is you're officiating time. You're saying that something that would take one to three hours is like one point. Or something that would take three to six hours is two points or three points. And they have all these things like Fibonacci sequences. There's a lot of fanciness around points, when you're really trying to understand time not points. The reason that points exist is because—and not that I think this is necessarily bad, it's better than other methods—but some engineers decided that they wanted a metric that wasn't time.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Hiten Shah: They literally said, "It can't be time, because we cannot estimate."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Because they basically didn't want somebody to know that something was going to take only 15 minutes or five hours.
Hiten Shah: Exactly. Your minimum there is an hour at best. Often times it's much more. The thing is every team that I've seen implement agile with points in different ways. Their whole buckets around the number of points something takes is all different. What ends up happening is that engineers now feel great because they have a velocity score. And they can talk about how many more points they're doing every week or how many points they're doing every week as a total. And that's really hiding what I would call the truth, which is how long did something actually take.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I know one of the alternatives is to just get rid of estimates all together, but you've probably experienced what that's like. Talk about what results when you get rid of estimates.
What Happens When You Get Rid of Estimating Stories
Hiten Shah: Sure. If you get tired of agile for whatever reason—and usually this happens because somebody that's a non-engineer is really not into it, because they don't understand what a point is even though it has timings and stuff. Then estimates are completely removed, which means points are removed and then there's just tasks. Then you run into some of the problems from earlier. Is it a small task? Is it a big task ? What it really boils down to...if you have no ability to understand how long something’s going to take or even how many points, let's say, then you end up not knowing how to prioritize what you work on. If there's just 10 tasks and all of a sudden the engineer's working on one and then you ask the engineer, "Oh. How are you doing?" They're like, "Oh, it's going to take another week." Well, if I had known that task you took was going to take another week or two weeks or whatever, I probably would have told you to work on something different because our customers are waiting for things. Right.
And that tends to be one of the bigger problems that happens, which is this communication breakdown because nothing is estimated, whether it's points or hours or whatever way people want to do it. And you end up having a massive communication issue and then you have these fiefdoms that get created. You have engineering not against, but against product, against sales, against marketing. And everyone's just waiting for product, everyone's just waiting for things to ship so you can make customers happy.
What Happens When You Pad Your Estimates
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. One of the alternatives to both these is to create a buffer. Let's pad the system so that as an engineer I don't look bad and as a product person you feel like, oh, OK, there's some wiggle room. But we know that that has its shortfalls. Let's talk about those.
Hiten Shah: Yeah. Of course. I think padding is probably one of the worst practices, and you might as well have no estimate or no points or anything like that, because you're essentially saying that whatever estimate I give you, I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to pad it. Then you get in this padding mentality and then you still end up with the same problem that you actually didn't have a real estimate, and things are such a moving target that you failed to ship, you failed to actually do proper planning. You end up having a business where you're actually not getting the product you need in your customers’ hands fast enough so you can actually grow the business. I think padding leads to a whole different set of issues, because what ends up happening in the worst way I can say to you—and I've already said it in pretty aggressive ways—is that everyone's lying to everyone else. That doesn't help with prioritization or getting anything done either.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, thank you for taking the time today to share the shortfalls of these three approaches. I can't wait til next time when you unveil your approach for estimates.
Hiten Shah: Yeah. Can't help but share solutions with problems.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Thank you.
How Do You Estimate Stories And Tasks?
Now, Hiten and I want to know, have you tried one of these three approaches and how have they fell short for you? Let us know in the comments below. And that's it for this week's episode. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where Hiten is going to dive into his approach for doing estimates. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
We’re probably all aware of the famous proverb: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
I think it’s very apropos when it comes to diversity and inclusion efforts. Too many of us think that having a diversity and inclusion initiative within our company will produce the change we want to see in the world.
Yes, it’s a necessary step, but sadly many initiatives and programs have failed to get off the ground and make a mark.
Why?
The first culprit is stopping at intentions and not really thinking through what is needed in terms of budget, resources, and timing.
The second culprit is not being realistic about expectations. Really asking the question what do you expect to see at the end of a year from a program and is that achievable?
Just like we build a business case around running an experience when it comes to our product, process, or policies, the same rigor needs to be applied to diversity and inclusion initiatives.
In today’s Build episode, Melinda Epler and Wayne Sutton, who are the founders of Change Catalyst and Tech Inclusion are back.
We’re going to talk about best practices and what to look for if you are interested in starting a program at your company or participating in one outside.
So if you’re thinking about starting an employee resource group or another program, or want to know how you can improve an existing program, you’ll want to watch this episode to learn:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).
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## Diversity and Inclusion: Why You Need To Rethink Your Approach to Diversity And Inclusion Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: In the last episode of *Build*, we talked about how diversity and inclusion initiatives are impacting tech, and how to navigate conversations with teammates and peers. If you missed that episode, I've included a link to it below. In today's episode, we're going to dive a little bit deeper and talk about some of the best practices that you can use to kickstart a diversity and inclusion effort at your company, or if you want to go and contribute somewhere else, what to look out for, so stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode of *Build*, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
We're continuing our conversation with Melinda Epler and Wayne Sutton, who are the founders of Change Catalyst and Tech Inclusion. In today's episode, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into some of the best practices that you can use to kickstart a diversity and inclusion effort in your organization, as well as get others to help you out. Wayne and Melinda, thanks for coming back on the show.
Melinda Epler: Absolutely.
How To Measure Success For Diversity And Inclusion Initiatives
Poornima Vijayashanker: Before we jump into the best practices, I want to just remind our viewers and our listeners out there how can we measure success before we start to pursue any sort of tech practice?
Melinda Epler: It gets to our number one—the most important thing to start with is measuring where you are now, really benchmarking where you are now in terms of diversity and inclusion. That means doing—if it hasn't been done already—looking at the demographics from race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, veterans, people with disabilities, people all across diverse backgrounds, and then also looking at engagement, and inclusion, and really measuring those as well. There are some surveys out there that you can take internally in a company to really gauge where you are. Before you start, you need to know where you are.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, yeah. Of course.
Melinda Epler: That ranges from obviously looking at the demographics, but also looking at how do people feel? Do they belong? Are they supported? Are they able to really thrive in the company? Are they allowed to rise in the company? Are they supported in growing as a leader in the company? All those things you want to know before you really dive in to programs.
Under-Resourced Diversity And Inclusion Programs Are Rampant
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Now, I know one issue that I run into, and you've probably experienced the same, I think we touched upon this on the last episode, is people come with a lot of great intentions, and a lot of times when you come into these internal groups though, they haven't really thought beyond those intentions. When I ask them questions like, "Who's going to be working with me?" or, "What are the meetings going to look like on the calendar? Is there a budget?" Just the basic logistics, it's like, "Oh, I guess there's some more work to be done," right? Because they haven't thought through what's budget, what's a roll out, what sort of opposition. How can we get around that initially, and what's the homework you would recommend after doing what you said about the benchmarking?
Melinda Epler: Yeah, I think you need...if you're going to start an employee resource group, an ERG, or an affinity group, or something like that in your company, you need to know what are your objectives? What are your goals? What does it look like at the end of the year? What have you accomplished at the end of the year, and how do you design a program that's really going to get to those outcomes, because we see that as well. We see a lot of affinity groups, and it's important to find a safe space for people to get together, and then the next step is how do we go further? How do we do more? How do we start to develop each other as leaders? How do we grow as an organization? How do we help the company change its processes and systems? How do we get to the next level?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
How To Set Expectations Around Diversity And Inclusion Efforts
Wayne Sutton: Yeah. I believe, also, in setting realistic expectations around what the goals and outcomes could be. Often people come to us like, well, they put resources towards this, they made this type of investment, they hired this person, they did this event, and they expected magic to happen. They expected the doors open where all the other underrepresented categories is gonna come apply to the company. They expect their brand to change. They expect some heat from the press to take off. It's like, "No, you did one thing."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Wayne Sutton: It's like you send one tweet, you don't expect the world to follow you, right?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Wayne Sutton: There's certain expectations around diversity and inclusion, as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I think a lot of the product analogies apply here, as well. Like you said, you don't do one marketing campaign hoping that you're gonna 10x your revenue, so why would it be any different with a lot of these efforts?
Wayne Sutton: Exactly.
Melinda Epler: Yeah, and also you need to use agile design, as well, like really think. If it's not working, change it. If something is not effective, do something different.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Let's get onto the first best practice that you would recommend to our audience out there who wants to kickstart an effort.
Connect Diversity And Inclusion Programs To A Business Case
Wayne Sutton: Yeah. I'd probably say the first best practice is one where we need to identify who our core audience is, right?
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Wayne Sutton: If you are someone in HR, or is in a role of heading diversity inclusion, or even in product, it's like Melinda articulated, you do need a measure, right? You need to start with see where we are. See what our numbers look like. Or, it could be, "Let's talk with executive leadership about how creating inclusive culture, having a focus on diversity and inclusion is connected to our core values and our business goals."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that's great.
Wayne Sutton: Let's start right there.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yep.
Wayne Sutton: Right? Not “let's just run with it, or we're gonna do diversity and inclusion,” because in a day what we've seen, and what has been happening is people say they're working on diversity and inclusion, they put resources behind it, it's not connected to the business goals, and they haven't set the benchmarks around measuring success.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Why Diversity And Inclusion Programs Fail
Wayne Sutton: It's like end of year, what do you have to show for it, or at the end of a program, what do you have to show for it?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, and there's a huge disconnect, and then people feel like, "Oh, nothing's changing."
Wayne Sutton: Exactly.
Poornima Vijayashanker: "All these programs are useless. Let's just go back to the way things were." Yeah, yeah.
Wayne Sutton: Yeah, exactly.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I like that you mentioned tying it back to business goals, so do you have an example or a case study you can share of either a company that you worked with that was really good at doing this, or even took a first step?
Wayne Sutton: We have several companies that we worked with, but it goes back to what we were saying earlier. It's like the reason why we pause is because there's not a single company we can point to to say that it's doing it well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure.
Wayne Sutton: In doing this work what Melinda and I have learned is that there's also this opportunity of shaming.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Wayne Sutton: Right? We can say we work with Asana, right? We work with Reddit, also. We work B Corp. That's just in some of the consulting training or workshops. We also worked with Capital One. We did a workshop for their network of startups on how to create inclusive cultures from the start with. That was about 20 startups from the size of five to 200, and we could name...there's some well-known name companies in that area, as well.
At the same time, we can say that some of the impact at those companies, we can give an example saying that we worked with them, they completed X, but that's not necessarily an endorsement that those companies have it all figured out.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Wayne Sutton: It's almost I'd like to say a disclaimer on that. We're not saying that, "Oh, here's an example that Asana's doing, or Reddit is doing, and everybody should copy it."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Wayne Sutton: That's not saying that they have everything figured out, not saying that they don't have everything figured out.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.
Wayne Sutton: It's just the state of the narrative around this industry, and around the conversation about diversity and inclusion. It gets emotional fast.
Why Immediate Results For Diversity And Inclusion Efforts Are Unlikely
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK, so maybe a best practice is to not expect immediate results, but to say, "OK, you did one thing. Let's see if that's replicable, and then maybe in five or ten months, years, whatever your benchmark for time is, then take a look back."
Wayne Sutton: Yes, yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right, so don't call it an early success until you've really seen a number of dots lining up.
Wayne Sutton: Yeah, but we have—
Melinda Epler: Yeah. You can celebrate incremental successes, but it's not fundamentally shifting yet.
Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. OK. Do you have—
Wayne Sutton: But one example is we did work with Asana around their recruitment process. Melinda and I, we held a workshop training on mapping out the entire recruitment flow, and identified areas where they can make some improvement on sourcing differently, and how they can do some of their screening and their in-person interviews better, and they implemented some of those changes, and we're also communicating with their head diversity officer around how did that affect their goals around increasing their numbers around diverse employees or underrepresented employees.
That is one example, but was that a success?
Define What Success Looks Like For Your Company
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Wayne Sutton: We know change was made. We know that there was a learning window created. We know that some process was changed, and people grew from that session, but they're still measuring numbers, and there's also these other quantified elements that goes into play when you're talking about success, so yeah. It could've made success from us working with them to help change culture, mindset, and the process, but for the company in itself it is yet to determine in these other variables. Well, if the goal is to hire us to do that to help them increase those numbers, well, what other factors went into play around them increasing their numbers that's outside of our control, and that's where this work we do, we've been doing it now for a long time, and we feel like people need to broaden their mindset, or understand the impact of measuring success on diversity and inclusion. Success could be one thing, or success could be 1% or 2%.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right. What's another best practice, then, if we're thinking a little bit more broader?
Melinda Epler: Yeah, I'm thinking a lot of people come to us who aren't necessarily in a position to go to leadership, or they've gone to leadership and leadership has said, "No." What do you do there?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Melinda Epler: Do you just give up, or do you think about other things that you can do outside of that, and I think one of the big things that you can do regardless is lead with empathy, and whether that's leading teams, that's leading products, that's just being a leader in your life and modeling inclusion and empathy, it starts with listening, and really understanding people for who they are and what they bring to the conversation, understanding the perspectives that people bring, and the unique issues that they're dealing with in their work life. It's also listening to your customers. Really, if you don't have a diverse team, you can't change that, listen to your customers, go out and learn from diverse people who are using your product.
If you are leading a team, you can change the way you're leading you team. You can change who you bring on in your team, you can change how inclusive that team is. You can change a lot of things about your team, and really make a difference.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So there's a lot of those micro changes that you can implement, like we were talking about in the last episode, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, that are eventually gonna add up. Like you said, start with your team, your customers, your leadership, and then go from there, rather than always wanting to enact change top-down.
Wayne Sutton: Yeah.
Melinda Epler: Right, exactly. Exactly. There are a lot of things that underrepresented...that you can do as an ally, as well. There are a lot of really amazing things that you can do that make a big difference in somebody's life.
How To Be An Ally For Diversity And Inclusion
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's talk about what an ally is first.
Melinda Epler: Yeah, so an ally can really be anyone. It can be you, it can be me, it can be Wayne. Pretty much anybody can be an ally to someone who has less privilege, or someone who has equal privilege, quite frankly, and really looking at the little things you can do to help support others. If you're in a position of greater power or leadership you can bring others up with you that are underrepresented. You can disrupt little biases and microaggressions that come to play in daily meetings. For example, you see somebody who's consistently, their ideas are being shot down, or taken over, or they're never able to get a word out, then you can do something to disrupt that.
You can do something to disrupt...I mean, if you see harassment or something like that, there's definitely something you can do about it. It's really hard for an underrepresented person to come out against their own suppression, and so there are lots of things that allies can do, little things that can make a big difference in somebody's life. There's also mentorship, and sponsorship. Mentoring somebody who is underrepresented and really helping them grow their career, giving them advice about how to take the next step and become a leader. Sponsorship is more around, again, that if you're in a position of power, really helping sponsor somebody else to be there, as well.
It also could be, as an ally, maybe you're a part of a dominant group being asked to speak on a panel, and it's the same group of people. It's all white men, or it's all white women on a panel. Part of ally-ship is actually taking a step back and allowing somebody else to speak, and allowing other perspectives.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Take a break for a while.
Melinda Epler: Yeah.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Rest your voice. Let someone else have a turn.
Why It’s Important To Be Proactive When It Comes To Diversity And Inclusion
Wayne Sutton: When I think about the tech industry, and this conversation around diversity and inclusion, and everything that is bundled up in that, there's been a constant theme that most tech companies and individuals have been reactive instead of proactive, and that is disheartening. It's like, "Let's wait for something bad to happen," someone to leave and write a leaving article, a sexual harassment situation, or some shaming to happen online, then let's talk about diversity and inclusion. I would say that if there's an individual on the inside of an organization, and they're working in tech, and they want to create change, don't wait.
Don't wait until something negative happened before looking at creating change. That could be, yes, talk with an executive, talk with a manager, talk with the CEO. Set up a meeting, track it, let them know that, "I'm taking note that I had this conversation."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Wayne Sutton: Look at the values of the company and speak up. That's kind of more like, "Hey, go straight to the top. Go to the manager," but it also could be just in meetings, right? Just in meetings say, it could be me saying, "I don't feel like my voice, my opinion was heard," or are you thinking about a program or a product and saying, "Well, are you thinking about black women, are you thinking about LGBTQ community, are you thinking about vets? Are we really looking at a targeted customer base from a global and inclusive scale, or a mindset?"
Melinda Epler: And also accessibility, really looking at accessibility from the beginning rather than a reaction to, "Oh, wait. It didn't work. We have to do that now."
Poornima Vijayashanker: People are dropping off, yeah. Why is that?
Wayne Sutton: If people want to create change, and they want to implement a diversity and inclusion strategy, or just get started, just speak up. Speak up, and there's tons of articles, I mean tons of research. We have a blog, we have plenty of resources online, and some of it is finding the allies Melinda was articulating, and knowing that you're not alone, and speak up.
Melinda Epler: Yeah, and take some of those daily steps like taking your vitamins every day, eating your veggies.
How You Can Get Involved With Change Catalyst
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's end with this note of how can our audience get involved with you two and your company?
Melinda Epler: Yeah, a few different ways. One thing is as an organization focused on diversity and inclusion, we need funding. We always do, and so if you have the ability in your company to support us, we have sponsorship. We also can do training and consulting with your company, as well. That's one. Another is we always need volunteers, and we cannot do this work without volunteers. They're amazing. They are part of our team, and they really help make our events, in particular, happen, so volunteer. What are some others?
Wayne Sutton: Yeah. What I say to people who want to get involved is just if you're working on diversity and inclusion, be successful, or often have a conversation with other underrepresented individuals and saying that if you're working in tech, don't forget to open the door for someone else.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Wayne Sutton: The tech industry, we know the numbers. We also know the numbers of our growing global population, how diverse it is, and if you can get in the door, we can do the best of our ability to help consult, train organizations to create inclusive culture, but if you get in the door and you need help, we're here to help.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Melinda Epler: Yeah, and I just want to end with, I firmly believe that if we change tech, we can change the world, because tech is so much a part of the world, and it's increasingly so. Almost every company is becoming a tech company, and we have the power to really make a difference, whether it's in your startup, whether it's in your team, whether it's in your company, whether it's in tech as a whole, the entire industry. If you can affect change in any one of those areas, even if it's you becoming a successful entrepreneur, that in itself, as an underrepresented entrepreneur, that can make a big difference.
You have the power to create change. Do it.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, thank you so much for ending on that inspiring note, and to all of you audience out there, thank you for tuning in today. Be sure to share this episode with your teammates and your boss, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more great episodes like this one. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
I’m sure you’re aware of the talk and debate around the topic of diversity and inclusion. Maybe it’s left you feeling frustrated, tired, or downright apathetic…
I get it.
Much of the emotional rollercoaster stems from the challenges of navigating conversations with your teammates and peers on top of your day-to-day responsibilities.
Plus you’re probably wondering: Are these programs actually working?
You know how much I love busting myths! So in today’s Build episode, we’re going to talk about the issues specific to tech and provide you with some strategies for navigating those tricky conversations with your teammates and your peers. We’ll also dive into what isn’t working and why.
If you're curious about starting a diversity and inclusion initiative at your company or participating in another organization, then keep an eye out for the next episode where we'll do a deeper dive into a number of best practices.
To help us out I’ve invited Melinda Epler and Wayne Sutton, who are the founders of Change Catalyst and Tech Inclusion.
As you listen to this episode, you’ll learn the following:
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
## Diversity and Inclusion: How To Navigate Conversations About Diversity And Inclusion in Tech Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: There's been a lot of talk and debate around the topic of diversity and inclusion. And regardless of what side you are on, in today's episode, we're going to talk about the issues pertaining to tech, as well as how to navigate conversations with your teammates and peers. So stay tuned.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode of *Build*, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.
Now, as you can imagine, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions around diversity and inclusion. Conversations can be really hard to navigate. And that's why in today's episode, we're going to talk about the issues that pertain specifically to tech and help you navigate those conversations with teammates and peers. And if you're curious about starting a diversity and inclusion initiative at your company or participating in another organization, then stick around for the next episode where we'll do a deeper dive into those practices.
In today's episode, I invited Melinda Epler and Wayne Sutton, who are the founders of Change Catalyst and Tech Inclusion. Thanks you guys for joining us today.
Melinda Epler: Thanks. Thanks for having us.
Wayne Sutton: Thanks for having us.
What does diversity and inclusion mean?
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So, let's start by talking about what exactly is diversity and inclusion?
Melinda Epler: I'd like to say that diversity is about bringing diverse people to the table and inclusion is about inviting them to speak, encouraging them to lead, and supporting them in leadership. Diversity is really about the demographics and inclusion is about how people show up, how people thrive, and how people feel that they belong in their culture.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. And how do you think it pertains to tech?
Wayne Sutton: I like to say diversity includes everything, how it pertains to tech. Tech impacts the world, it impacts everything we do in our daily lives, from the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep. Tech creates wealth. Tech creates innovation. You look at all the products. They got some of the products living on your shelf. We're thinking about the customers. We're thinking about the followers. We're thinking about the equity or the inequity and all the opportunities that is connected to tech. And without diversity, right, you see problems being built by a homogeneous culture. You see solutions not brought to the table because it's being built by one or two mindsets.
You see a lot of disparity gaps in terms of access and wealth. So, without diversity, really, the tech industry is not as thriving as it should be or could be. And the impact is having, in a positive and a negative way, is not where it could be as a whole, as well.
Why Diversity And Inclusion Are Important
At the same time, if the tech industry were more inclusive, I could imagine more innovative products. I can imagine an industry that is really identifying or being held accountable to its actions as current culture, where we wouldn't have issues that existed in the ‘60s, ‘70s, in terms of not having equal pay, not having women or other representative groups, African Americans in leadership positions, cultural and sexual harassment. If we had inclusion, these negative issues that is in the face of our society right now, in tech, wouldn't exist.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, let's talk about what drew you to focus on diversity and inclusion, because you both had different backgrounds before you were working on this.
Melinda Epler: Yeah. My background actually started back in cultural anthropology and really looking at how individuals create change in societies, how culture changes. Then, I moved into the documentary filmmaking. I was a documentary filmmaker for about 10 years, became a consultant, and then, actually became an executive at an engineering firm. That experience of being a woman, and the only woman, in leadership in that engineering firm was what made me rethink what needs to change in society. I was not thriving in that culture and it was because it wasn't set up for me, it wasn't set up for my success. And so, I actually left that job as an executive to go into diversity and inclusion. I started Change Catalyst and Tech Inclusion programs, really addressing the inequities in our society. My whole life has been focused on creating social and environmental change.
And I believe, now, that if we don't change leadership, if we don't change who can be a leader and who is leading our countries, who's leading our companies, who's leading our technologies, our stories, then we can't change what's really happening in the world. I am here because I believe that this is the most important thing for me to be working on to create positive social change in the world.
Early Attempts To Foster Diversity And Inclusion In Tech
Poornima Vijayashanker: What about yourself, Wayne? Your background is also from a different angle.
Wayne Sutton: Yeah, yeah. I started off doing design, graphic design—I'm showing my age some. Then, got into design UI/UX and computer graphic design. I did IT for about 8 years in North Carolina—Research Triangle Park—then became a tech founder. Had a startup back in 2007 or 8, and didn't realize that in North Carolina that I was one of very few unrepresented tech founders, a black tech founder. And then, experienced the challenges of growing and scaling a company. Then, fast-forward to 2011, the data from CB Insights said that 1% of the tech startups, that raise "angel" or VC are founded by African Americans and Latinos. They actually grouped that data together. So it really was less than 1% Black and Latino that received any angel or venture capital in 2011.
By that time, I knew various colleagues across the country that was also working on startups. I was basically like address the problem. What can we create a solution around? Some other colleagues and I, we decided to move to Mountain View and create the very first incubator and accelerator, focused on underrepresented tech founders. That led to a whole other window of opportunity. Moved to Silicon Valley, then moved to San Francisco. And then went through a period where, after that, I realized that the tech industry did not want to talk about diversity and inclusion, did not want to talk about the disparities of access and inequality for founders to receive capital. The tech industry was priding itself on being a meritocracy. It was like: Anyone can create a tech company, anyone can create a product, it doesn't matter.
That may be true.
How The “Pattern Of Action” Created A Period Where People Didn’t Talk About Diversity And Inclusion
Poornima Vijayashanker: But it wasn't happening.
Wayne Sutton: No. It was not happening. And the data already showed that everyone was not raising angel capital. It wasn't because of lack of talent. It was not because the products were not as good. It was because what the VC industry would call "a pattern of action."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Right.
Wayne Sutton: And we went through a period where we’re not talking about diversity or inclusion at all. We're not talking about a lack of funding for underrepresented entrepreneurs. And then the tech industry released a diversity report, that was in 2014. And then email—and I want to say the phone, but more the email and Twitter DMs started come in. It was like, "Hey! We need to talk about diversity. I remember you used to talk about it in the day..." And Dan Blenman and I started collaborating. We met and started collaborating on solutions. We got invited to so many roundtables, kind of private conversations, one-on-one meetings around what can we do to fix this diversity problem.
Melinda Epler: Yeah, those were from the White House, to the Small Business Administration, to the FTC, the FCC. And then local tech companies and local conversations as well all kind of talking about that.
Wayne Sutton: That was at the White House during the Obama Administration.
Melinda Epler: Yes, just so we're clear…
Why There Isn’t A Single Solution To Improving Diversity And Inclusion
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yes, yes, of course. Well, we know who was in the Administration in 2014. So you already touched upon some of them in your intro, but what were some of the problems specific to tech that you continue to see in this phase and maybe even today?
Wayne Sutton: I would say that the biggest problem is still that happened then that we see today is still the state of denial that there is an issue. There is also the problem that it's going to be one technology solution or you do one thing that's going to fix everything.
And then—
Melinda Epler: One cheap thing.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
Wayne Sutton: And then one problem is still thinking that companies and individuals can focus on one demographic or one category. I don't want to say category. But one part of the conversation. And use it saying that it's solving all the problems.
And I would probably say lastly, it's another problem in that I was shocked at how many companies when they started talking about wanting to do work around solutions around diversity and inclusion, they will not even connecting it to their business. Or their customers. Or their direct culture. They were just trying to say, "Hey, we're working on this. Get off our backs! Here's our solution. It's hard." And all those things combined is not really good for the goal we want to achieve.
Melinda Epler: I think there's a few different reasons that this is happening. And this happened in tech differently than in other industries. It started back when Steve Jobs and some of the big, great tech CEOs became "the" story around tech. And the story revolved around that being the kind of...that is the tech founder: the white male CEO is the tech founder.
And when those white male tech founders built their companies, they hired their friends. They just didn't think about it. They hired their friends and their friends hired their friends and the tech companies are still set up for referrals mostly. When you have the same people referring their friends, then you're going to have a homogeneous culture. And so the issue is, now that those companies are so big, it's really hard to create change in them.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah.
How Success Patterns Have Bred The Current Culture In Tech
Wayne Sutton: That brings up another good point. Because the industry is manipulated by market trends and success patterns, right? So the VCs while they represent the founders, because they hadn't seen any. Or there hadn't been enough for them to say this is a good model, right? But in the culture of the tech industry, you look at your Microsofts, your Intels, your HPs. That's like one era of American business and society, how they grew and scaled companies.
Then the second wave is the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitter, the Snaps, the Instagrams, the Salesforce. Those companies basically, like Melinda said, they hired their friends when they started. Larry and Sergei were Stanford grads. And then they got funding from Ron Conway and the network. And there was a lot of luck involved, a lot of sweat, a lot of hard work, they built innovative products, but then because those companies made a lot of money, everybody just replicated that same pattern.
I'm old enough to remember where it didn't matter what school we went to. You can code, you can build, you can design—it mattered. Let's get to work! Let's build something! But then because it became a new norm of like, "Let's copy Google, let's copy Facebook, let's copy other companies." Then that became the standard like, "We must do this." And if we look at that demographic data…
How to Measure Diversity And Inclusion In Tech
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, obviously this isn't the first time that people are having this conversation. Like I mentioned in the intro, there have been many, many years that we've been having this. I know even for myself, moving out here in 2004, there were some rumblings, but not a whole lot, to the level it's at today. But obviously people have tried to fix this problem once before, and where have they fallen short? Like, what didn't work?
Melinda Epler: Part of it is not measuring. And that changed in 2014. That was a big shift for everyone, where they really could see these are the diversity...these are the actual demographics of our companies. "Oh! Whoa! Those are really bad! We need to figure out how to solve them."
Why Measuring And Building Awareness For Diversity And Inclusion Isn’t Enough
And then, once they said that, they kind of put those numbers out there. It hasn't changed all that much, because the first year was just about measuring. And then starting to hire diversity and inclusion managers and directors, but not putting a lot of money and resources into really...you can't hire one person to change a whole company with very little resources. That's just not possible.
So, as those diversity and inclusion managers have gained traction in their own companies, they're starting to get bigger budgets and things are starting to change a little bit faster in the companies. Now that does not discount the fact that people have been working on diversity and inclusion in some of the tech companies for quite some time. One of the issues is that many of the initiatives around diversity and inclusion in the past have focused on employee resource groups, community groups, and really helping support underrepresented people in the companies. And I think, on the other hand, some work has been done on education and awareness building. And this happens in every kind of major culture shift. It happened in the sustainability movement as well. There's an expectation that if you tell somebody there's something wrong, they'll do something about it.
But the problem is, you actually have to help them change their behaviors. And really fundamentally think about how to shift culture. How to shift processes and systems that are ingrained and perpetuating the problem.
Why Shaming People And Companies Doesn’t Enact Change
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, talk is cheap.
Melinda Epler: Yeah, and it doesn't really change anything. And the third component is really about shaming. There's also a really deep and disturbing trend around shaming people into changing. That doesn't really change people either! So, there's a new and growing movement and at least an understanding—I wouldn't say movement yet—and understanding that it takes more. It takes a bigger effort to really look at your culture. How do you change your culture? How do you change individual behavior? How do you fundamentally look at your recruiting process? And say, "Oh, wow!" From the very beginning. We need to change the way we're doing things. There are biases in the system, but also there are some mismatched systemic problems in the process.
Change Catalyst’s Approach To Helping Companies With Diversity And Inclusion
Poornima Vijayashanker: So let's talk about Change Catalyst and how do you approach this differently?
Melinda Epler: We have a few different things that we do. We have events, our Tech Inclusion events. And when we were talking earlier about having those roundtable discussions back in 2014, we started getting pretty frustrated that those roundtable discussions kept talking about the same things over and over. We had the same conversations over and over again. And they were really problems focused, which is important…
Is A Diversity And Inclusion Program Worth It?
Poornima Vijayashanker: What's an example of that?
Wayne Sutton: An example would be the question we get asked over and over again. "Who's doing it well?" And the reason why everybody wanted to know...
Poornima Vijayashanker: Like they're a benchmark.
Wayne Sutton: ...No, no, not that! The reason everybody wanted to know who's...everybody wanted to know what company was having any type of success around diversity and inclusion. Any type of success.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh! To see if it was worth it.
Wayne Sutton: They wanted to know if it was worth it, but also wanted to know if they could copy it. They wanted to replicate it. And that was really it. Because everybody wanted one moonshot idea to say, "We're implementing change." That they could say, "We're working on it." And that was a repetitive question across the board.
At times, really, there wasn't a company that had all the answers or all the ideas or...
Poornima Vijayashanker: You guys all suck!
Melinda Epler: Exactly!
Poornima Vijayashanker: Or it's not making an impact.
Melinda Epler: I'd say it's still the case. There's no one company that's doing everything right.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I'd agree!
What Diversity And Inclusion Training Looks Like
Melinda Epler: Largely because the diversity and inclusion programs are under resourced. But there are gems. There are some people that are doing some really great programs that we can point to.
I think also, in 2014, there was a lot of talk amongst underrepresented people that were feeling disenfranchised. Feeling like the opportunities weren't there for them. Feeling, hearing over and over again that there are barriers, there are barriers, there are barriers. But less about solutions. How do we break down those barriers? What do we do? How do we solve that problem?
So that was one. We really wanted to focus on solutions, and that's what we have done. We've designed it to focus on solutions. The second is we really with our Tech Inclusion Programs...it's a systemic problem across the tech industry. So, it starts in education, and then there's huge problems in terms of entrepreneurship. Lack of investing. Lack of investors who are underrepresented. And then also lack of investing in underrepresented founders.
And then of course, the workplace. At the time, it was really focused on recruiting. As we talked about, you also have to change the culture. You can't just change recruiting, because you're bringing underrepresented people into a culture that's not creative for them. And they're going to leave! Like I left my position, right?
So workplace, and then policymakers as well. Policy and government agencies, and their power and wealth, and ability to create change in the system. And now we also focus on storytelling, like you do as well, to really help raise the underrepresented voices and perspectives, and have more diverse perspectives out there.
So for our events, that what we really focus across the tech ecosystem, bringing everybody together to focus on solutions.
For our consulting, training, and toolkits, we're also solutions focused. And focused on behavior and culture change, and really going beyond recruiting—recruiting is a part of that, but all the way through creating a culture of belonging.
Change Comes From Multiple Sources
Wayne Sutton: Yeah, for us, it's that how change comes is different. We're not a "come in and look at one problem or one sector of the goal you want to accomplish around diversity and inclusion." We want to really discover and look at your entire company from a culture and a systematic perspective to help identify opportunities to create real change.
What we've seen in the past is that a lot of companies contact us after taking unconscious bias training, and saying "We did that, now what? What do we do now? That has had some effectiveness, but we need more." And it's been an opportunity and a challenge aspect is that smaller companies—and even larger companies—they really have to be committed to put their resources in to explore what real change looks like. Whether you implement a new tool to remove names from resumes—that's just one thing. That's just one task you can do to help affect your recruiting process.
But what about when you have your product team, your design team, your engineering team and there's different negative and positive behaviors in that one team dynamic. A software tool is not necessarily going to fix that. One unconscious bias training is not going to fix that. There needs to be a discovery and a real heart-to-heart conversation around employee behavior with accountability. And we come in and have those harder conversations, put together a report, talk with the executive team, and if they have a head of diversity officer, work with that individual to put together some strategies that can create change.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice! So what's the impact that you've seen so far through your programs and your offerings?
Wayne Sutton: We see impact across the board. There's impact from the consulting, has been from a company not having any strategy at all from everybody saying like, "Well, we care about this. We want to do something," to now that there is a board level, and executive-level type solution with a plan in place that they can measure and track results over time with some accountability involved, where there's an individual or team saying that, "This is the team that is working on creating inclusive culture." That's been in some of my trainings. A consultant impact.
The other impact we've seen around our conferences and events that we've done now mostly across the globe. We've been overseas. Across the globe, has been everything from gender-neutral bathrooms to new jobs created.
How To Navigate Conversations About Diversity and Inclusion
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's a great segue into my next question. I know a lot of people—especially in our audience—care deeply about diversity and inclusion. But they may find it hard to navigate those conversations or to even initiate them with their teams, with their bosses. So how have you kind of facilitated that?
Melinda Epler: We start by asking everyone in the company, at least a broad set of people across the company, what diversity means to them. What inclusion means to them. Start to develop a company-wide definition of diversity and inclusion. And then, literally we talk to people across the company about the ideas that they have, the experiences that they've had, and really develop a strategy that includes all of those voices. I think you have to do that.
So that's what we do at the kind of company-wide level, and including the executives all across the executive teams and the board as well. For an individual wanting to create individual change, who may not be an executive in a company, I think that there are some different resources for understanding the language around diversity and inclusion and there are some courses out there around allyship. And some information around allyship that I think can be really beneficial to really...there are so many different things that you can do.
Why It’s Hard To Take Action As An Individual Leading Diversity And Inclusion Initiatives
Poornima Vijayashanker: Before we dive into that, because I want to talk about that in a future episode, maybe we can talk about why it's been hard for them to take action individually.
Wayne Sutton: We have been contacted about a lot of individuals saying that they care about diversity and inclusion and they want to implement change in their company. They need help, right? And ultimately we go back and have a one-on-one call or face-to-face, and we say, “Well what does this conversation allow with the company values? What has been done? Have they discovered what has been done in the past?” And then question if they don't feel confident to have a conversation with their manager or someone, a colleague or someone in an executive role around diversity and inclusion, they need to see if this is a place they want to work. Because it can be a difficult conversation.
I mean, an article just came out today where an individual, he quit a well-known company because his manager or executive said that, "Stop talking about diversity and inclusion!" Right? So this topic is sensitive to a lot of people. They're afraid of it, they don't want to talk about it. It creates a sense of fear and anger and frustration for others. So whenever people come to us and say, "I want to talk about it," a suggestion is approach it with a business case. That’s one. Approach it with an empathy case. Approach it with an idea versus, "Hey, I want to work on diversity and inclusion at my company."
That's how we get asked. It's like “diversity and inclusion” is such a big umbrella word. So for your organization...
#1 Reason That Keeps People For Taking Action
Poornima Vijayashanker: Loaded
Wayne Sutton: Loaded, right? Well a lot of emotions with a lot of history. So if you are an individual and you say you work in product and you want to work on diversity and inclusion at your SaaS company, right? So a suggestion would be to identify that you're going to talk to your manager. “I want to reach this audience that we haven't been talking with or connecting with. With this lens, how can we make that happen?”
That's gonna cost them a product. But from a cultural perspective, it could be "Have we measured?" Or "I noticed that I'm the only female or African American, Latino, LGBT. There are some issues to mean that are not being brought up." Or, "How can we have a dialog about it?"
Melinda Epler: I mean, your question was "What keeps people from taking action?" I think, really. And the #1 thing is fear.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Losing their jobs.
Melinda Epler: Losing their jobs, but also just fear of making a mistake. It can be hard to navigate. There are definitely people who are good at shaming, publicly shaming. And that doesn't make it easier to create change and to take action. So I think that inherent in what Wayne is saying is that just take the first step. Take one step. Try something new. Talk to someone. Understand basic things. Understand what their experience is. Listen. Those can be really powerful first steps.
Wayne Sutton: It seems like the tech industry has forgotten that we are humans. We had a conversation as a team talking about...
Melinda Epler: Human first.
Wayne Sutton: ...Human first. Right? And just because I'm different. Just because I'm a black male from the South doesn't mean I can't have an intellectual conversation around topics that are passionate to me. That could be black man, STEM products, that could be how can we look at different demographics or location. Why can't we have a real conversation?
If we can talk about growth. We can talk about APR. We could talk about growth hack and design thinking. Why can't we talk about working together as humans and expanding your mindset, opportunity, and behaviors for all humans? What's the problem?
Why People Are Reluctant To Talk About Diversity And Inclusion
Poornima Vijayashanker: So maybe you can touch upon that. What's some of the resistance around the conversations?
Wayne Sutton: It goes back to what Melinda says: Fear! It's fear. But it's also fear because the tech industry traditionally has been a Type A, god-like mentality. Where everybody has all the answers and so if you go to someone and say—talking about diversity and inclusion—you want to have all the answers, so there's it can create a sense of fear. And/or the tech industry we know today, right, is in Silicon Valley, it's in San Francisco, it's in the East Bay some, and the data just in terms of population, in terms of African American in San Francisco is like 6 percent. And if we know the numbers that at Google and at tech roles is average 2 percent within the entire organization. So the culture that these companies traditionally haven't been diverse. So now you want to take an individual, who maybe the one only diverse individual—African American, Latino, women, or Latino or on the team—they want to talk about a cultural topic that is relevant to them, to someone who doesn't have the same experiences, it could be sensing like fear and they don’t have all the answers and not understand why. And that right there creates tension.
Melinda Epler: There are also studies that show that if a company is talking about diversity, then people within the company think it's changing. That is another aspect of this. That's just psychology involved in all of this. When you start talking about diversity, people think that it's changing.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Changing for the better? Or like…
Diversity And Inclusion Is Not A Zero Sum Game
Melinda Epler: Changing for the better. People think if you're talking about it, it's changing for the positive. And then there's also on the fear side, though, there's also a fear that if other people rise up, you'll fall down.
Poornima Vijayashanker: A zero-sum game.
Melinda Epler: Exactly. But it's not. This tech industry is growing rapidly. There aren't enough people to fill all the tech jobs. That's absolutely not the case. So we just need to change that perception
Poornima Vijayashanker: So, in the next episode we're going to talk about best practices, but before we wrap up this one, I want to just address some of the objections that our audience may come across when trying to broach the topic. They might have somebody say, "Oh, we're not going to talk about it all, it's not a priority. Like ship product." Or, "Hey, we had lovely little meetup the other day, with some great female engineers. What's the problem? We're making incremental progress." Or, "Hey, we've got to move really fast and whatever you do, how do I know it's going to be a 10x impact?" Right?
And that can be overwhelming for the person on the receiving end. So how do we deal with some of those objections?
Wayne Sutton: Yeah.
First Step Is To Measure Your Diversity And Inclusion Efforts
Melinda Epler: I think one of the things people in tech react really well to is data. So the first thing is measure. And find out that information. Find out the demographics of the company. Find out—if you can—the engagement metrics as well, because you can start to look at engagement metrics as it relates to race and gender and ethnicity. And that can...and people with disabilities. And you can really see something is not right.
And once you look at the data, then you can say, "Oh, wait! We have a really high turnover rate among women. That's a big..."
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, everyone's making babies!
Melinda Epler: That's a problem! There are lots of data that shows...
Poornima Vijayashanker: I know...
Melinda Epler: An important part of society. But that is only one. Most of the women who leave tech just so we’re absolutely clear, most of the women that leave tech go to other industries and become leaders in those industries.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So we're missing out on opportunities.
Melinda Epler: We're missing out on opportunities. The cost of turnover is high in a company. You don't want to lose people. That's a huge cost.
Poornima Vijayashanker: So that's just employment. What about with the product itself? Because you had been touching upon some of that.
Wayne Sutton: Yeah, I want to say that for individuals who want to create change or they've experienced some—they're in a culture they want to make improvements in, you start with the data like Melinda articulated. But it's also starting documenting examples, right? Like we worked with one company where the CEO had heard some stories but it was coming second and third hand.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, that's a challenge.
Document And Show Proof Around The Need For Diversity And Inclusion Efforts
Wayne Sutton: So if you're an individual, you work on your product team, your engineering team, or you could be a product manager. And you constantly see these examples, these situations happening. Take note that this happened on this day. This was the experience. And therefore you are able to have proof. The opportunity to create change may come under the window or umbrella of diversity and inclusion, but it could be just how can we conduct an inclusive meeting? Just a better meeting? How could we make sure all the voices are heard?
If you've got a product team, like seven guys, three women, and the women hardly ever speak up or talk, you have a communication and culture problem where the women either don't feel empowered or the men are being assholes. Or both, right?
And so, it's like that is culture. So the change you want to make may not say…”I want to create diversity and inclusion strategies.” Or, “I want to increase #1 my product team.” Or, “I want to make sure the voices are heard.” Or, “I want to talk about how we can conduct a better meeting that benefits the company, and everyone.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: So start small. And that makes a big difference compounded over time.
Wayne Sutton: But track it! Because you've got to have real examples that's relative to the change you want to make.
Melinda Epler: Yeah, it affects product design in a huge way. And I don't think we talk about it enough. That if you want to grow your customer base, and if that customer base is diverse, your designers and developers need to reflect that customer base. If you're designing for the wrong customer base, you're not going to have a success. And it has huge implications—I mean some really terrible ones out there. Even when the airbags were designed, for example, they were designed by men. And in the first rollout, several women died, children died, because they didn't test it out on women and children. That's just a really basic example.
Then we see that in the tech industry a lot now, where especially when AI is being developed and things come out on Google search where black people are mislabeled. That is a really dreadful outcome of not having diverse people design your programs.
Diversity And Inclusion Doesn’t Just Impact A Single Group Or Criteria
Wayne Sutton: I'll probably say here another problem is that—or opportunity—is that when people are talking about diversity and inclusion. You got to remember that if you're going to focus on inclusion, look at it from the perspective of everyone. Right? Think about diversity is beyond just a color of someone's skin.
We were talking earlier about people who are hidden, invisible disabilities. Think about accessibility. Think about age. Think about class. You have people with different heritage.
Melinda Epler: Veterans.
Wayne Sutton: Veterans. It's not just black and white. It's not just gender. It's literally everyone. But the solution that may pertain to a company can be one thing—and that's OK if you're going to focus on, "OK, we're going to focus on STEM youth, kids' pipeline." That's OK.
But identify, communicate that this is what we're doing as part of a solution, but not "the" solution. Or, “We're going to focus on college students.” That's OK. That's good. We need to do that. But identify and be clear and authentic about where your solution is around college students affects your business and your culture.
Understand that if you're a person in that culture, say my company's all, "We've got a diversity and inclusion plan. We focus on college students." Yay! Great! But if most of your employees want to focus on a different demographic, want to do something around veterans, then as a team, as a company, depending on what size, you've got to understand why. OK, there's an opportunity and a need to focus on these areas as well.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Well, thank you both for joining us today. And now for all of you out there in the audience, let us know in the comments below this video if your organization has put in place any diversity and inclusion initiatives. And what's been the impact?
And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll dive a little bit deeper and share some of the best practices if you're thinking about putting in place a diversity and inclusion initiative at your organization, or want to join another one.
Ciao for now!
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.
In the last two episodes of Build we tackled why accessibility needs to be prioritized in product design and the three key tips that are critical and will make a big impact on your product's adoption.
This week we’re going to answer two questions that inspired this series from one of our audience members: Jane. We chose these two because we figured they might also be on your mind!
Jane wrote:
Poornima,
Thanks for tackling a wide variety of topics when it comes to building software products. One area that I'm curious about is accessibility.
As a user experience designer, I know accessibility is important, but I've struggled when it comes to balancing out accessibility across devices and also making mobile apps interactive and fun without compromising on accessibility.
How should I think about web versus mobile and balancing out fun and engaging interactions with accessibility in mobile apps?
Sincerely,
Jane
Jane thank you for writing in!
Laura Allen who is the Accessibility Program Manager at Google for Chrome and the Chrome operating system is back and together we are going to be answering Jane’s questions in today’s episode.
As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn:
What are the similarities and differences when it comes to designing for accessibility on web versus mobile devices
How to balance balance out fun and engaging interactions versus accessibility on mobile devices
The various types of accessibility testing: manual versus automated and tradeoffs associated with both
Here are links to the resources Laura mentions in the video:
--
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
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## How To Balance Accessibility And Interactivity Across Devices Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: In the previous two episodes of *Build*, we talked about the importance of accessibility and we shared three critical strategies that will help make a big impact when it comes to building and designing products. If you missed either of those episodes, I've included links to them below. In today's final episode on accessibility, we're going to talk about what accessibility means across devices for both web as well as mobile. 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 on accessibility with Laura Allen, who is the accessibility program manager at Google for Chrome and the Chrome operating system. Thanks again for joining us, Laura.
Laura Allen: My pleasure. Thank you.
Poornima Vijayashanker: One of the inspirations for this series on accessibility came from our audience member Jane, so I'm going to start off today's episode by reading the question that Jane posed. Jane wrote, "Poornima, thanks for tackling a wide variety of topics when it comes to building software products. One area that I'm curious about is accessibility. As a user experience designer, I know accessibility is important, but I've struggled when it comes to balancing out accessibility across devices and also making mobile apps interactive and fun without compromising on accessibility. How should I go about thinking about web versus mobile and balancing out fun and engaging interactions with accessibility in mobile apps? Sincerely, Jane."
Jane, if you're tuning in to this episode, thank you for writing in. Laura, why don't we start by answering Jane's question to begin with. How do we balance out web versus mobile?
Laura Allen: It's a really great question. When you think about it, a lot of these concepts that we were talking about in previous episodes are actually going to stand true no matter what platform you're actually designing for. Think back to the web content accessibility guidelines, WCAG. They talk about perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, and those sorts of concepts and principles that go within each of those categories. Just taking one example, color contrast. Color contrast, having really solid contrast between text and its background, that's important no matter what device you're on. It's going to be the same sort of truth for if you're on a mobile phone or if you're on a desktop computer. A lot of these concepts are going to just span across platforms and be really relevant for you to consider.
One thing that's obviously a little bit different on mobile is that it's clearly more touch oriented for most users. Things like touch targets and the size of your touch targets, that's important to consider. Some people might not have as precise motion or control as they're using their phone or tablet, but honestly, the lines are getting a little bit blurry anyway. Think about all the different devices that are out there now, like laptop computers that also have touch screens or convert and are then used in tablet mode. As designers, we're starting to think about, "How do we just make an app itself accessible on all these different platforms, or a site itself?"
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's tackle Jane's second question on how do we balance out fun and engaging interactions versus accessibility.
Laura Allen: Yeah. That's another really great question. I think something that we should keep in mind when developing for mobile is sometimes we just rely a little bit too heavily on this idea of gestures and touch-based interfaces. I understand why, of course. It's typically being used by using touch. Some users aren't able to actually use touch to operate a phone. There's something called switch access, for example, which basically allows you to pair a one-button, or two-button, or multiple-button switch and control a phone just using those external buttons. That's just one example. Some people might be only using voice to control a device. Some people might be navigating with a screen reader, so as something flashes on the screen, they're not able to actually perceive that and then catch it in time to actually take action. Thinking about what are these things that we're assuming our users can do here, and then offering alternative ways to actually operate.
For example, if you have an app that you're building where you have cards that you need to swipe away to take action, a swipe can work for some people, but for others, maybe that's not going to be possible. How do we think about things like, "OK. Can we add a hidden close button here so that a screen reader could actually access that and somebody could just simply double tap to activate?" Lots of different things like that. Just, again, removing assumptions about how our users are interacting and then just building to cater to different groups.
Poornima Vijayashanker: I think your answers are going to be very helpful for Jane and the rest of our audience. Any final words of wisdom that you'd like to share when it comes to accessibility?
Laura Allen: Sure, yeah, a couple things. First, just thinking again about mobile versus desktop and web and what not, I think it's also really helpful when designing for mobile to be thinking about the platform-specific guidelines. This is like guidelines for more so just the interaction models for that platform. I know there's the Android developers resources and site. iOS has the iOS human interface guidelines. These things obviously go well beyond just the concepts of accessibility, but they're really important to keep in mind because if you think about it. One example of what would be discussed is focus management. When you first open up an app, where is focus meant to go? What is the default? As you think about these concepts that are kind of illustrated through guidelines for each of these platforms, it's really helpful to keep that consistent so that when a user who happens to be using assistive technology interacts with this app, they get a similar experience to what they're used to. It's a similar model for them, and therefore it's an easier ramp-up curve to actually get introduced to your design. That would be one suggestion.
Another thing to consider, which we haven't really discussed at this point: We talked a lot about auditing and integrating accessibility into your processes, and a lot of what we've talked about so far has been manual testing and the importance of really diving in, trying out the keyboard-only experience, or trying out a screen reader. Absolutely, I think that is so critical. I think honestly...I often get asked about manual versus automated testing, like what can we put in place to run automated tests. There are some great things to do, so there are automated tools, like, for example, there's a tool, there's an Android app called the Android Accessibility Scanner. It's free. It helps to run an audit of your app's accessibility and show you the results for things.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, great.
Laura Allen: Yeah. For things like missing labels on a button or color contrast, things like that, which I would imagine to be kind of low-hanging fruit that you look at and hopefully fix rather quickly. There are similar things on the web and desktop. Lighthouse is a great tool, which integrates with the Chrome Developer Tools. There are lots of other types of tools out there that you can leverage to do some automated testing and audits, but in my opinion, automated can only go so far. That's where you use it to kind of see a baseline, track progress over time and your results, but manual is really critical. Again, whether it's you going through or having assistive technology users go through and give you feedback, that's where you're going to capture that more human interface experience. You're going to understand what is the usability of this product, whether on mobile or on desktop. It's just really critical to find that right balance of manual versus automated testing.
Poornima Vijayashanker: This has been wonderful, Laura, and we'll be sure to include all the resources you mentioned below so that our audience can make sure to get access to them.
Laura Allen: Great. Thank you so much for having me.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, yeah. You're welcome. This has been great.
That's it for this week's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more episodes like this, and be sure to share this with your friends, your teammates, and your boss. A thank you 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.
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.
All this month we’ve been exploring how startup fundraising is changing and why it’s going to continue to change in 2018.
We started off by talking about why you don’t want to reach out to an investor when you just have an idea, how to evaluate if seeking investment make sense for your business, and in the last episode why no matter how great your idea or business is you’re still going to receive a lot of NOs.
After what might seem like endless reality checks, I’ve saved the best episode for last, we’re going to be talking about what it’s going to take to get a yes from an investor. Ooshma Garg and Danielle Morrill are back. Ooshma is the CEO and Founder of Gobble, and Danielle 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.
You’ll learn:
Finally, if you are a female founder or are on a mixed-gender founding team and want to pitch your startup to the partners are XFactor you can check out their website here and follow up with them via email: hello@xfactor.ventures.
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
## What It’s Going To Take To Get That First Check From An Investor Transcript
Poornima: In the last *Build* episode, we explored all the reasons an investor may say “no” to your big idea. If you missed the episode, I've included a link to it below this video. In today's episode, we're gonna dive into what it's gonna take to get that yes from an investor. 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, it can be very disheartening to hear no after no from investors, and make you wonder whether you're eventually gonna hear a yes. But it is possible, and in today's episode we'll talk about what it's gonna take to get that yes.
Today we're back with Ooshma Garg, who is the CEO and Founder of Gobble, and Danielle Morrill, who is the CEO and Founder of Mattermark. And they are both investment partners at XFactor, a new investment firm focused on funding female founders and mixed-gender teams.
So thanks for coming back, ladies. I know last time we talked about all the many reasons that we've received a no. This time let's turn it around and talk about what it's gonna take to get a yes and let's start by reveling in that moment where we each got our first yes. Danielle, when was the first time you got a yes?
Danielle: I got my first yes from Dave McClure. We were sitting on the curb in front of their new office they had just opened in Mountain View. It was my birthday and it was the “you can quit your job now” check.
Poornima: Awesome.
Danielle: So it was extremely exciting to kind of put that milestone.
Poornima: Yeah. What about for you, Ooshma?
Ooshma: I got my first yes from Ben Ling and Keith Rabois. I remember going to get a physical check from Ben. He was at Google at the time. Now he's a partner at Khosla Ventures. And so we had been meeting and going back and forth and then I showed up there and he just wrote this check that was more money than I had ever seen in my entire life. He's like, "Here you go." I felt like I was this bodyguard...like I needed an armored truck. I felt like anybody who looked at me could see that I was carrying tens of thousands of dollars in my hand. It was really funny. I remember just being so excited, but also funny enough, just so careful and so nervous carrying that check literally all the way to the bank.
Poornima: Nice. You weren't like Serena Williams, who just hopped into the ATM and tried to put it in the machine or something like that? She did a drive-by with one of her first—
Ooshma: Oh yeah?
Poornima: Yeah. With one of her first grand slam winnings. It was like—
Danielle: I didn't even have a bank account.
Poornima: There you go.
Danielle: That sounds awesome.
Poornima: That's awesome. All right. And then what did you do right after you got that first yes...after you deposited the money in the bank?
Danielle: I don't think I deposited it for a while. There's all this stuff that has to happen actually, so we also incorporated on that day, just luck of timing. But yeah, I think it's really weird. You get this check and it's like this life-changing thing and then you have to go back to your crappy one bedroom apartment with no windows in San Francisco and it's like, "Get back to work."
Poornima: Yeah.
Ooshma: Yes.
Danielle: Keep coding, so it's bizarre and this thing happens and you wanna shout from the rooftops, like, "Ah!"
Ooshma: Yes.
Danielle: But on some level you feel like, "Oh shit, this is real."
Ooshma: Yes.
Danielle: Does that resonate for you?
Ooshma: Absolutely. I think with every great success there's just great responsibility. And so now you have this amazing check and certainly it's time to crack a bottle of champagne and celebrate for a moment.
Danielle: Yes.
Ooshma: But with that comes everything that you were planning to do when you told the person you would do with it. And not only that. It's just the first check. Typically you're raising some kind of round and it takes 10 to 15 angel investors to get it all together. So it's a huge milestone that I think people can take a sigh of relief, but still have to carry it to the finish line.
Poornima: Now, one of my first investors was somebody who understood my niche market. I know we talked about this in the last episode, but once I found him, actually fundraising became super easy because he went out and kind of rallied the other folks who were kind of on the fence, right? It was, "I believe in this market, I believe in this founder, I believe in this idea, I'm gonna write this check and you all would be stupid to not follow." Have you had that experience as well?
Danielle: Yeah, I think different investors take different approaches. Sometimes they go and create the syndicate and sometimes you do and then they come back you up by adding a voice. But I think they're pretty networked so most investors here talk to each other or they're only one degree of separation away.
Ooshma: Yes.
Danielle: So you almost feel like when you're beginning to fundraise, you can kind of feel the Valley talking about your company. There's no trace of it on the internet, but they definitely are asking each other questions and saying, "Have you looked at the deal? What do you think of the price? What do you think of this person? Do you know anything about them? Have you heard anything negative?" Just all those questions. Because there is no diligence tool, and I'm laughing because Mattermark is part of that story—
Poornima: Right.
Danielle: —but when we were really early stage, it's really a reputational thing.
Ooshma: Yes.
Danielle: And so I think part of it is going out and beating the drum for you and part of it is also they're fielding questions. So as soon as you say, as soon as I said, "Hey, Dave invested in us." Then I should expect Dave is gonna get hit up with people saying, "What do you think of Danielle? Why did you invest?" etc., etc.
Ooshma: Yeah.
Poornima: Right.
Ooshma: But I do think it's important to make sure that when you get some of those first checks that you ask the person who else they would recommend join the round. That would be leaving a lot of value in introductions and referrals on the table if you didn't do that. Because this person has just expressed huge conviction in your vision. And so they'll typically or should be able to bring along at least a handful of introductions.
Danielle: And also, I've gotta add, I did not know to do that when I first started out. And I think it's because you think you're inconveniencing this person who's just written you a check.
Ooshma: Yeah.
Danielle: But actually they just wrote you a check because they wanna make you successful. And so you should ask and ask and ask. They will tell you if you've crossed the line, but you probably never will cross the line. And it's really easy, as an investor now, to just move on to the next thing and get busy. And it's not that I don't want to help, but I kind of assume if you're not asking, you're all right.
Poornima: Right.
Danielle: So ask. Because I think it's totally true. And I think I did leave a lot of that on the table and probably made it harder on myself than it had to be at first.
Ooshma: Yup.
Poornima: Yeah. They're also protecting their investment by getting their fellow investors to invest, right?
Ooshma: Yes.
Poornima: Yeah. So last time we talked a little bit about the stage that investors are at and oftentimes that makes a difference. And Ooshma, you sort of alluded to this. Now there's a lot of different types of investors out there in the market today. There's VC's, angels, super angels, micro funds, and so on. So let's talk through what makes sense at each stage, and let's start with accelerators because both of you have been involved with YC. So when does it make sense to approach an accelerator before or maybe after funding, and what did it take to get in?
Ooshma: Wow. You know, one secret that a lot of people don't discuss is that many folks that got into something like a YC got in on their third or fourth try. So I did not know that until I started talking to a lot of founders. And YC might've given them feedback, maybe they kept working on their idea and they got to a certain stage. So I think that you might apply but you shouldn't just quit based on getting a no that we talked about. Even getting in to accelerators at an early stage sometimes takes a few tries.
Poornima: And why would you even recommend people apply? Why does it make sense to do that?
Danielle: So I think it really comes down to helping you set up the company for success down the road. So what an accelerator or incubator program is gonna do is help you with your go to market, and that doesn't just mean your product go to market. It's also the marketplace they create for financing your company.
So they're gonna help you validate that you've got a venture-backable business and they're gonna help set you up with the relationships and the communication pattern that you need to have in order to be a viable option for those investors. And that's really valuable, especially if you're coming to the Bay Area from somewhere else and you can't really build that network in a few weeks.
Poornima: Sure.
Danielle: You really need to be here. And so you're gonna be able to get a lot of time back. Of course, they take equity for this. But I think it's probably one of the best trades you're gonna make because in the beginning it's just so binary. You're either gonna raise that round or your company's probably not going to exist and so early on that's probably one of the best ways to de-risk financing and then you can focus on the product.
Poornima: So you mentioned that marketplace pulling in intros for you. For the two of you, how did YC facilitate those intros to angels or super angels?
Ooshma: Well, in my case we were very unconventional. I started the company without YC and I just wanted to build this idea and I felt that there was a problem that needed a solution. So I started prototyping it, I asked my friends for introductions. I was luckily already here for three years after college building a network. So I could just start my own process and seed round and ask for introductions, start raising money, and we didn't need Y Combinator for the first couple years of the company.
Then, it takes a while. First your company has to get funded so you can explore it, all right? And then you have to find product-market fit and you get to a stage of scale. So it took us a while to find product-market fit and I did YC in the middle of our company's story, at a time when we were changing models. Solving the same problem, but with different solutions, and when the fundraising environment was really tough.
So I had to make the decision of, “If it's worth working on, I'm gonna take what I can get.” And at the time that was joining an accelerator. So I think that that's a good example because it shows that you might've been working on something for five years and if YC can help you, or an accelerator can help you, you should still apply and use that as a catalyst for whatever next funding round or whatever growth metric you're—or awareness you're really looking for. But I would also say that you can't let anything like that stop you from building your company.
Poornima: Right.
Ooshma: So any investor saying “no” or any accelerator saying “no,” you should be building something because you see a way for the world to be better with something. And you have to decide to just do that and do it anyway, regardless of how you get there.
Poornima: So let's talk about the mechanics behind this now. So there's obviously angels, there's super angels, there's micro funds, there's VCs. Walk us through what the check size is or who makes sense at what stage.
Danielle: Right, so, there's a lot of flavors. Generally, if you're talking pre-VC, then there's very few private individuals who are gonna write more than a $50,000 to $100,000 check. Generally, if you think about someone's net worth, they've got some chunk of their net worth set aside for investing, and it's probably like 5% or 10%, so you can kind of begin to understand what's going on there.
But the easiest thing for anyone who's not a VC is just to ask them. What's your check size and how much risk do you wanna take? Will you invest pre-product or no, is question one. And then post-product, it's like what do you need to see from me to invest? There's so many investors now in that pre-Series A stage that I think it would be hard to give a blanket answer. But the most important thing is to just ask them, "Tell me about the last two or three deals you did. How big were they and what stage?" And I would try to not worry about getting them to do something exceptional. People kind of have their comfort zone with their personal money. And what they're doing is probably gonna continue to be the same because they're anchored on their last check.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: So if they've been writing a lot of $10K checks, that's probably the check size that they're writing unless they come into a huge amount of money and it changes their world.
Ooshma: Right.
Danielle: And then the other thing is you're gonna have these weird institutional investors who will invest before Series A. I guess this is super common now. When I started fundraising this was a lot less the case. So these are kind of these super angels, micro VCs, I don't really know what they're called today. Pre...what is it, pre-seed?
Poornima: Pre-Series A.
Danielle: They call it all these different things.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: But fundamentally no, those check sizes could be anywhere up to, let's say, $500,000. They're generally not leading or pricing a round. No one has to lead a round if you don't have a equity round, so that's—a big part of it is just, again, what size check are you normally writing, do you need control in some way, do you add a board seat, all those things. The good news is once you get to Series A, it's a lot more standardized in terms of ownership. So there's some rules of thumb and I'm gonna say these and then you tell me if you think they're different because I feel like maybe they're not all the same. One big piece of advice is don't sell more than 25% of your company before your Series A. So fully diluted, when you run your own cap table out. You don't wanna be in a position where you've already sold half your company, because what happens is a Series A investor probably needs to have 20% ownership just for them when they come in. So if you've already sold half your company, on top of that, it starts to be pretty demotivating. That can be a little higher or lower, just depending on what's going on with your business. And then you of course have your other investors that might come in. So maybe you sell 25% to 30% of your company total in that round.
And then the B and C and so on. The way to think about it is the better you're doing, the more leverage you have.
Poornima: Sure.
Danielle: People generally sell 15% to 20% of their company in the B. And then at the C, D, and onward, it's kind of a sliding scale downwards from there in terms of ownership percentage. And you might be thinking, "Well, doesn't this add up to more than 100%?" And the thing is that you're diluting everybody else as you go. So you're selling a chunk of the whole company at that moment in time. So these investors, it's generally gonna come down to...fund size will line up with check size. And they're gonna say something like, "We raised $150 million fund, we're planning to write $5 million to $10 million checks, and then we're holding on to $5 million to $10 million per company for follow-on." Something like that, and you can just do the math.
Poornima: Right.
Ooshma: Or like, in our case with Xfactor, we have a $3 million fund and we're putting $100K in 30 companies. And that's the rubric. So I think to Danielle's point, it's your job to understand everyone's rubrics and appetites so that you are not wasting your time and not wasting their time. And at each stage—and let's take the seed stage for example, because it's one of the only stages where there's so many investors involved—fitting all those puzzle pieces together to get to how much money you need for the next 18 months and a specific material milestone. So I think you start out with calculating that money and you get your friends or blogs or whatever advisors to help you. And then look for people in that stage and then fit those pieces together and ask them to make introductions until you fill the amount.
Poornima: Yeah, so let's talk about that. How do you actually get these intros? If I'm outside of Silicon Valley, I'm coming in, or even if I'm here and I've been an engineer all my life or a designer or something and then I recently made the switch to a founder, I might not have that network. How do I get those intros?
Danielle: So, the truth is you're just gonna have to get out there and talk to people.
Ooshma: Yeah.
Danielle: And I think the thing is you probably know people who can help you that you might not realize. It's pretty rare, if you live here, even if you just moved here, not to know somebody who works at a startup. So you just have to start asking. And the truth is you're gonna have to give away information to get information.
Poornima: Sure.
Danielle: "Hey, I have a startup." OK, everybody has a startup.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: "Hey, we're raising." OK, "It's really hard."
Poornima: Right.
Danielle: A lot of people immediately are like, "Oh, OK, interesting." "Do you know anybody who invests in startups?" And the thing is you're gonna have to do this at scale. So you're gonna need to go to events.
Poornima: Right.
Danielle: You're gonna need to ask the people that you worked with in the past and you're gonna need to do things that you might not enjoy doing, like going on LinkedIn and just doing a ton of research. Nothing is better than a warm intro. So even though this feels really weird and painful to ask, these are gonna generate the introductions that are gonna be the best
possible. The next thing is cold after that.
Poornima: Right.
Danielle: So anything you can do to get something warm, even if it's many degrees of separation, is gonna help you more. And so that might also mean cold outbounding someone that you wanna then get an intro through.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: So portfolio founders are probably the best people to cold outbound rather than the VC themself or the investor themself. So if someone cold contacts me and says, "Hey, I'd love to get to know you and Mattermark, yadda yadda," and maybe their plan is that they'd like to get introduced to Brad Feld, the reality is if they can tell that we didn't click, they're not gonna ask for that intro. And that sounds really, I dunno.
Poornima: Transactional?
Danielle: Mercenary? Transactional?
Poornima: Yeah, yeah.
Danielle: But it's business, so that's what business networking is.
Poornima: Of course.
Danielle: And I think the truth is I wanna send Brad great companies.
Poornima: Yeah.
Ooshma: Yeah.
Danielle: So if you're an interesting company and you pitch me and I get excited, one, I might angel invest in you, which is the absolute best way for me to introduce you to one of my investors.
Ooshma: Yeah.
Danielle: But the other thing is we all got helped in the same way.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: So it sounds transactional, but it's also just kind of how it works.
Poornima: Yeah.
Ooshma: It's the culture of paying it forward.
Poornima: Right.
Ooshma: Everyone does that. And if they can't...they'll be honest. If they can't give you that introduction and you do click, maybe they'll give you some advice. And then we go back to that whole idea of listening and staying in touch and sending people updates. But I would say leave no stone unturned. If you just landed here, there's Techstars or 500 or Founder Institute or Y Combinator or TechCrunch Disrupt or Golden Seeds or who knows. There's all these things you can apply to. And of course, if you are an island and you don't know anyone, you have to start out cold. But cold will soon become warm.
Poornima: Yeah.
Ooshma: And you have to play the numbers game in the beginning.
Poornima: Sure.
Ooshma: And so just go to all the meetups, email everybody, send links and product demos. Just be creative. Oh! One hack that I had which actually led to me meeting you is that I would go to talks and sit in the front and come up with really good questions. And I'd strategically go to talks where I really wanted to meet the person and I knew they'd be a great investor or advisor. I would wait until the very end. They would give a talk and then all these people would be crowding around someone like Reid Hoffman. In this case it was Aaron Patzer from Mint. And so people were talking to him for 30 minutes. And I waited until the very end and he was like, "Oh my gosh. Who's this person waiting?" I said, "Hey, I'll just walk you to your car. I have a quick question." And then he became a very early on startup advisor and advocate for me. So there's all these unconventional things I think that you can do to get out there. And they might be uncomfortable but that's how we all did it.
Poornima: Yeah. It's funny. I actually mentioned this hack to a bunch of people whenever they want my time. I tell them I'm gonna be at this event speaking. Some people take me up, some people don't. Some people have gone so far as to say, "I'll pick you up from the airport." I love those people. Because I'm like, "Great! I don't have to worry about how I'm gonna get from Point A to Point B," right? Or "I'll buy you dinner" or whatever, but yeah, I think it's definitely going out of your way to get that interest and build that network.
So let's talk about what you guys are working on now. You are working on XFactor. So let's dive into that. Why did you even think this was important? Ooshma, you just rattled off 10 seed opportunities. So why XFactor?
Ooshma: Yeah.
Poornima: Why do you want to put another one in there?
Ooshma: You know, there was not one female investor in our seed round. And I think...I firmly believe that diversity creates innovation, diversity of thought. And America in and of itself is this diverse nation and considered to be the best in the world. And it's because of all the different perspectives and kinds of people that we have here.
I like to emulate that in the company and I would like that in our investors. I don't think that one perspective is gonna make us this breakout, worldwide innovative company.
So, I think that XFactor is unique and necessary because it's brought together a partnership of nine people and it's all women and we are all operators, founders, CEOs, and active companies. We're not retired. We're extremely current. All these things...fundraising, hiring, strategy, growth, it's all on top of mind. We can add so much value to early stage companies. And we're just approaching it in this very kind of operators helping operators, allowing for bad-ass women to help other women in a space where there just aren't as many.
Poornima: Yeah.
Ooshma: And really just adding some more diversity to both the founder pool and the investor pool to build more breakout companies.
Poornima: So you mentioned you were able to raise capital without having a woman founder. So why is that...why do you think that's important? Right? You did it, you proved it. You did it, you proved it. And I know I've...in my last company I raised from all men, so why is that important?
Danielle: I think that it's important because it's hard and the reality is we want these products to exist in the world. It's not really that these companies can't get funded. It is harder, but the best ones get funded. And it's just what are we missing?
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: What are we missing out on in the world that could exist tomorrow?
Ooshma: Yup.
Danielle: There's so many creative, amazing people who are not getting funded for reasons that have nothing to do with what the company is about. And the bad thing is that this kind of poisons the well too, so there's people who aren't even trying.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: And so I think we wanna send this message that, "Look, we shouldn't have to exist." XFactor shouldn't need to exist and if we do a really good job and we make a bunch of money, people are gonna realize that investing in women, investing in men, we wanna invest in the best no matter what. So down the road, hopefully we can't exist.
Poornima: Nice. Yeah.
Danielle: But until that happens I think we need to...the only way to change it is to actually create competition.
Ooshma: Yup.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: So we are in competitive deals and we are sending this deal flow, we're creating market for each of these founders because we're gonna need to see a lot more female role models at the top. Ooshma's company is progressing, Mattermark is progressing, but we're still very early stage and there's not a ton of examples of huge exits run by women.
Poornima: Right.
Danielle: So I think we're really great examples here, but it's very early days and the best chance we have of seeing those results at the end is to put as much as possible at the top of the funnel. And I wanna say I also think it's just an incredible investment opportunity because it's under-invested so dramatically. Frankly, we should be able to see incredible returns partly because there's just so many opportunities that haven't been taken.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: So I feel like not only is it awesome for founders, and I'm so stoked about them, it's awesome for our LPs and it’s gonna prove to LPs that female fund managers can return awesome results as well. And you know what? There's more asymmetrical opportunities like this to take. There's room to create tons more funds focused on women. You can create the exact approach with any minority group.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: So it's...it shouldn't have to exist, but while it does, we should try to create wealth for all the people involved and then long term, I think create competition in the market.
Poornima: Yeah.
Ooshma: And it's so...this is not a not-for-profit.
Poornima: Yeah.
Ooshma: It is not a charity. We are looking at people who are the grittiest of entrepreneurs and are in it for the long haul and ready to build multibillion dollar companies, and can answer all the hard questions. And we've got—
Poornima: So what are some of those?
Ooshma: Yeah. Well, first of all, we've gotten hundreds of pitches.
Poornima: Yeah.
Ooshma: And we've only made about nine or so investments.
Poornima: OK.
Ooshma: Since July. So in just the last three months we've looked at so many companies, and I think people assume, "Oh my gosh, there's a female investor, she's gonna invest in a woman." But I think it's out of respect to founders that you...that investors ensure that they are looking for and helping you build huge companies and use your time in the best way possible.
Poornima: OK. So what are you guys looking for in your...and what's kind of...you said that your check size is $100K, so we're looking at early deals. And what else are you looking for? What's it gonna take to get a yes?
Danielle: Well, the first thing is that we are definitely looking for a return that's pretty impressive. So even at the early stage if we invest, let's say $100,000 in a $1-million round, I would say the average post-money valuation is $8 million to $10 million.
Ooshma: Yup.
Danielle: So right away, to get to a 10x outcome, we need to see a company with really meaningful revenue. The good news is we don't technically need to find the billion-dollar companies to have a really successful fund, but I think the reality is we wanna find those outliers.
Poornima: Sure.
Danielle: So we're just like any other venture firm at the early stage looking for the most impressive opportunities to deploy their capital. We've got 30 bullets in the gun. So we're also thinking, "OK, we're gonna invest this money over the next two or three years. Is this the best deal that I can do this year for each partner?" Each partner is thinking about this constantly. So you're looking at the entire field and you're saying, "Of all the possible ways to deploy this money, what do we think can get the best return?"
Ooshma: Right.
Danielle: And that's what we're focused on.
Ooshma: And the partners hold each other to a very high bar. We're all CEOs of our own companies and we hotly debate every deal.
Poornima: OK.
Ooshma: And it's incredibly smart, active people around the table. So it helps us make great investments. And it helps us keep the bar high because we have a lot to prove to each other and I think we have a lot to prove as a fund. And that we want to. Because this is...it's about the great returns, but it's also, like Danielle said, about setting an example and about proving a point and hopefully making ourselves obsolete.
Danielle: So I think we should give some specific things for the viewers in terms of what we wanna see because, people listening, we want you to pitch us. So, you gotta have a product. You pretty much have to have revenue I would say for our group, although we would still talk to you, help you get there, stay in touch. We wanna some amount of revenue or customers. I would like to see high margin businesses. I'm looking for software scale. I don't think that that's true for all of my partners, but I struggle because I think we're looking for companies that take advantage of innovations to get the advantage in the market.
Ooshma: Yes.
Danielle: I'm looking for people who have some special passion. Ooshma talked about being mission driven. It's really hard. I think we really wanna find founders who are in it for the long haul, so if they're just an arbitrage deal, I don't know that we're quite as excited about that.
Poornima: Right.
Danielle: Again, I don't wanna speak for all my partners, but I personally would prefer to talk to somebody who's like, "This is the only thing I wanna do."
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: I'm looking for patents and technology innovation. I'm looking for stuff that solves problems in the enterprise space and software space for developers, just because I actually think there are a lot of women in those fields and I think there's more bias for women pitching those ideas than any other idea, and I think they—I wanna give them that check so they have the confidence to go do all the rest of the pitches.
Poornima: OK.
Danielle: I wanna write the quit-your-job check. That's the number one thing. So if you're watching this video and you're like, "I would have to quit my job and work on this full-time and I need $100,000," we wanna talk to you.
Poornima: Yeah.
Danielle: Because the quit-your-job check for me was life-changing. I think we would like to write that, so, sorry I'll let you tell them what you want.
Ooshma: I mean, man. Yeah, Danielle really covered a lot of it. And I think just the founder DNA and passion and willingness, of course plays a huge role. But the interesting thing is that our partnership is so diverse that we have folks coming at it from retail, from consumer, from enterprise, from hardware. We've assembled this...and from the finance companies and healthcare, finance, SAS, etc., so it's really neat because no matter what your company is doing, there's probably an expert in our partnership that can talk with you, consider the deal, and at least give you feedback, if not invest.
So I think that we are looking for breakout companies in all of those industries. But your...yeah, we—
Danielle: Our portfolio already has quite a range.
Ooshma: It has quite a range. I mean, we've invested in fashion, in hardware, in AI—
Danielle: Developer tools and machine learning and ag tech—
Ooshma: Yes.
Danielle: Huge range already.
Poornima: Well I can't wait to hear when they come out.
Ooshma: Yes.
Poornima: So, for our audience out there who's eager to get their idea out in front of you, how can they get in touch with you?
Danielle: An email to hello@xfactorventures is perfect. Xfactor.ventures is the domain.
Ooshma: Yes.
Poornima: OK, what should they send you?
Danielle: You can send us a pitch or you can send us a hello and we can set up a phone call. Either one is great.
Poornima: Cool.
Ooshma: Yup.
Poornima: All right, well, be sure to take them up on their opportunity.
Ooshma: Looking forward to it.
Poornima: That's it for this episode of*Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive many more episodes like today's and great *Build* tips. Ciao for now.
Announcer: 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!
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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.
It’s the start of a new year, which is an exciting time all around. You’re probably excited about new opportunities, starting a company, or building product in 2018!
While I’m all for optimism, I’ve also gotta stay true to them theme of Build: debunking myths and misconceptions when it comes to building tech product, companies and your career in tech ;)
So we’re going to spend the next four episodes of Build debunking themes around fundraising for startups.
I know what you’re thinking: “Poornima, is this really necessary?! Can’t we just focus on product and engineering? How about some Build Tips with those friendly product managers, designers, and engineers from Pivotal Labs?”
Don’t worry we’ve got plenty of those in store for you! Before we dive back into the fun and friendly banter of Ronan and his team, I thought it was necessary to start 2018 debunking myths around fundraising.
Here are my reasons for doing this:
Reason #1: If you want to be a founder and start a startup in 2018, you need to know how to control your own destiny.
Gone are the days of a quick and easy seed deal. If you don’t believe me, then here are two posts from very active investors Fred Wilson and Jason Calacanis with compelling data spanning the past 5 years. They show you that investment in early-stage companies is indeed slowing down, and why the trend is going to continue. #byebyebubble
Reason #2: If you want to be a founder and fundraise, you need to know what it’s really going to take to get the first check that gives you the freedom to quit your day job.
I know I previously explored what it takes to raise capital from investors and how investors add value beyond the check. But times are changin’! As I went back and reviewed the episodes I realized that while much of the advice still applies, there are new challenges founders, especially first-time founders face.
If you’re going to be one of them, then you need to be aware of them as you build your startup. There are also going to be a lot of sacrifices that you will need to consider making. As you’re faced with them, you might feel like you’re doing things wrong, when others have had an easier time. But you cannot compare when the market is in flux.
Reason #3: Don’t want to be a founder? Even if being a founder is the furthest thing from your mind, you might be thinking about joining a startup as an employee at any stage — garage to growth.
Well you need to be able to tell fact from fiction. You don’t want to get lured into visions of billion-dollar exits, only to discover that they are going to be cutting health care benefits, won’t be able to make payroll next month, or all that equity won’t help you buy my 2005 Honda Civic!
You need to be able to ask tough questions to understand the real health of the company, and market opportunity, so that you can decide if it’s worth taking the risk.
Reason #4: As an employee at a startup, every quarter you are going to be tasked with challenging milestones.
Metrics matter more and more these days, and every department has a funnel.
For engineering, it’s making sure the team is continuing to build and ship a quality product, balancing out features with infrastructure and keeping an eye out for that pesky tech debt to avoid slowdowns.
For product, it’s making sure there is a good balance of attracting new customers, while engaging and monetizing existing ones. And holding the engineering team accountable to spending time on paying down product debt.
While marketing has to keep growing traffic no matter what!
Teams are also staying lean longer, and founders are looking for employees with generalist backgrounds who can #GSD.
Everyone’s contribution matters to achieving metrics, which makes you feel wanted as an employee. But it also means that you need to be good at prioritizing, understanding tradeoffs, and a fast learner!
At the end of the day, you need to know and understand that what you are doing is actually moving the needle and going to help attract investment and customers.
There is no point in building product or marketing just for the sake of it.
Hopefully my reasons have convinced you why learning about fundraising is integral to your own success at a startup, and we can move on to the first episode of the year! In it, we’re going to tackle the first misconception a lot of first-time founders fall prey: thinking they need to reach out to investors the moment they have an idea.
It turns out you actually don't need to reach out to investors and you can get started by funding your idea on your own. You’ve probably heard this a lot already…
Quite frankly, investors won’t even take meetings if you do reach out. I can count on two hands the number of investors who I had successfully raised from in previous years that wouldn’t even return my emails recently! Why? Because it’s getting really competitive out there and they want to make sure startups have substantial progress before they are willing to take time to meet.
To help us out, I've invited Erica Brescia, who is the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor as an investment partner. XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to fund female founders as well as mix-gendered teams.
I choose Erica and her peers to come on the show because they are ALL founders first and investors second. Meaning they have sat on both sides of the table.
As you watch today’s episode you’ll learn:
In future episodes we’ll dive into topics like why raising capital won’t help you outdo competition, how to get over the constant rejection, 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.
Episode Transcript
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got an idea for a tech product that you want to scale into a big business? You probably think that you need to go out and raise capital from an investor, right? Well, it turns out that you may not need to. In today's *Build* episode, we're going to explore when it makes sense to reach out to investors.
Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each *Build* episode, I invite innovators and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. One misconception a lot of first-time founders fall prey to is thinking they need to reach out to investors the moment they have an idea. It turns out you actually don't need to reach out to investors and you can get started by funding your idea on your own. In today's episode, we're going to dive in deep to understand some of the mistakes that first-time founders make when it comes to funding their idea. We'll also talk about what investors are looking for and when it makes sense to reach out to them. To help us out, I've invited Erica Brescia, who is the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor as an investment partner. XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to fund female founders as well as mix-gendered teens. Thanks for joining us today, Erica.
Erica Brescia: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Poornima Vijayashanker: This is the first time that you and I are meeting. Thanks for being here. I want to know a little bit more about you. Let's start with your background. What got you interested in tech?
Erica Brescia: I've always been very interested in gadgets. It started out actually with mobile phones way back in the day, but I've always been curious about learning more about technology and gadgets and how things work. I really wanted to understand how mobile phone networks worked back in the day. Don't ask me why. I went on to study investment finance. A different path than a lot of people in Silicon Valley take. My father is an entrepreneur and I always had it in the back of my mind I wanted to start my own company. I got introduced to my co-founder and decided I was just going to help him work out a few kinks in the business and get it off the ground. Here I am now running a software company. It's really a case of being open to new opportunities, but also just having this lifelong interest in understanding how things work and learning new things.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's talk about Bitnami, your current company. What exactly does Bitnami do and what inspired you to start it?
Erica Brescia: Bitnami is a catalog of open-source applications that you can deploy on servers. It's primarily like B2B software. Things like maybe Moodle or Druple or WordPress, if you're familiar with that. We also package up a lot of development environments and development tools, things like Jenkins and Get Lab or Anode or Rails or Django Development environment. We have over a million deployments a month of the applications that we package. We publish them both through Bitnami.com as well as on all of the major cloud bender platforms. Users choose Bitnami because they know everything is going to work right out of the box every time, and they get a consistent experience wherever they deploy the software. If I can just add one more thing to that, one thing I'm particularly excited about is up until now we've been bootstrapping through our relationships with cloud vendors, but we're about to launch a new product for the enterprise. We're essentially taking the next step in the company's evolution by productizing all of the automation that we've built to deliver this catalog of applications so that others can take advantage of it, too.
Poornima Vijayashanker: It sounds like Bitnami has been going strong for a long time. How long have you guys been around?
Erica Brescia: We've been working on the Bitnami part of the business since 2013, but the technology dates back about ten years to when we started Bitrock, which is the predecessor. We do have several years in now.
A Day In The Life of a Startup COO
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's great. As a COO, what's your day to day like?
Erica Brescia: It was funny, when I thought through that question, there's no day to day. I spent Monday and Tuesday in some really key BD meetings. In Seattle yesterday, I was in LA for an open-source conference. I'm obviously here today. The way that we have our leadership roles between my co-founder and I might be different than a lot of other companies. I run everything except for product and engineering. That means that marketing, sales, BD, legal, finance, everything rolls up to me. That basically keeps things running and make sure that the company is growing and bringing on the right people and has revenue coming in and all those good things. Obviously as a quickly growing startup that's very, very tech heavy, I'm still involved in everything including product and engineering, too. There's never a typical day. It varies a lot and the days are long, but a lot of fun.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Very good. Now you have actually taken on another role. If Bitnami isn't enough, you decided to join XFactor as an investment partner. Tell us a little bit about XFactor and why the decision to go into investment.
Erica Brescia: Absolutely. I'll start with XFactor and tell you about the fund. Then I'll talk about why I joined. XFactor is a $3 million seed fund. We're making $100K investments in 30 companies. Pretty easy math. The genesis was really a woman named Anna and a guy named Chip. Chip is a partner with Fly Bridge. They got together and wanted to find a way to fund more women in technology because they had read some of the statistics about how difficult it can be for women to raise funding. The truth is, it's really an untapped opportunity. There's a ton of brilliant women building some very interesting companies. They were having problems in some cases getting through the traditional VC process because of some of the biases that we've all read about. We probably don't need to go through that. The idea was that they were going to get together a group of operating female founders. I think that's really the key is we're all women who have built and scaled our own businesses across a variety of sectors. I have a lot of experience in B2B and closing very big BD deals.
I've acquired companies and things like that. Some of the other women are very heavy on the consumer side and they're great at branding and rolling out new products. We got a really diverse team of women, but who are actually still on the ground running businesses, very in touch with the problems that founders have in getting new companies off the ground. We think we have a pretty unique perspective and also an edge in terms of what we can offer founders because we're so close to the challenges that they're experiencing. We're very focused obviously with that check size on pretty early-stage companies and helping set those founders up for success. We do expect most of them will go on to raise for their venture capital. We're there to support them in doing that. I actually haven't raised VC for my company, but all the other women have. We have a good diversity of experiences and opinions around that too.
Being A Startup Founder And Angel Investor
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why'd you join?
Erica Brescia: It took a lot of thought. They came to me. At first, I thought they just wanted to run the idea by me back in February. Then I get an email a few days later saying, “We'd love to have you join us.” I really did spend some time thinking about it and talking to my co-founder and my husband about whether or not I'd be able to balance everything, because it is a big commitment. If I make a commitment, I want to come through on it and make sure that I'm not letting the founders and my fellow investment partners down. It really came down to the opportunity both for personal growth for me and to give back. There's a financial opportunity, too, which is fantastic. I really saw that we have a pretty unique angle into both deal flow. Several of us are YC founders as well. We have access to the YC network and obviously just good networks in Silicon Valley and outside as well. I felt like we could do something really interesting. I could meet a lot more women in technology. Also, I really do think there's a huge untapped opportunity there. I think we'll be able to produce above-average returns. It really came down to me asking the question, “Do I have time for this?” I'm going to get less sleep for sure. That's definitely been the case.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure. You can make time.
Erica Brescia: It was just too good to pass up. This is one of those things that I just couldn't say “no” to because the opportunity is so big and it's something that I'm enjoying doing so much.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Wonderful. As soon as I saw the news, I wanted to reach out to you guys because I thought it was fabulous and needed to be spread to everyone else. Let's talk about your investments then. I know everyone has probably got different things that they want to invest in. We're going to talk to some of your partners later on. Let's talk about what you like to invest in.
Why Angel Investors Focus On Making Investments In Markets and Business Models They Are Familiar With
Erica Brescia: Sure. I right now am very focused on things that I am passionate about. I think about whether or not the company keeps me up at night thinking about it later. I am usually receiving on the deal flow that it's on B2B and enterprise sales in particular because that's where my expertise and experience is. I found myself drawn to some other things, too. One of the investments that'll be announced soon, I wish I could name some of them.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's OK.
Erica Brescia: I think we're about to announce that we've made eight investments in the first two months.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, awesome.
Erica Brescia: We've been very busy and we've met some amazing women. One of the investments that I've led so far is very much a technology, cloud-focused company, which is absolutely my bailiwick. The other one is a fin-tech company. I was really drawn. I loved the founder. Was very impressed by her and the team that she's put together. Also, it was just the problem that they were solving, I could see it so clearly. It was palpable and I was staying up at night and I was talking to my husband about what they were doing and why I thought it was exciting. When I start thinking about how they can make the business successful and what they should be thinking about, that's a very good sign to me. I know it's not direct answer. I invest in this list of companies, but that's really not the way that it's worked out so far. I've looked at a variety of med-tech companies, fin-tech companies, more women in technology and sourcing and recruiting companies. Some people doing interesting stuff with NLP. It's really been a very diverse range of companies.
Why Women Founded Tech Companies Are Broader Than Gets Portrayed
One of the things that I think you'll see us talking about more, which is very cool, is a lot of these companies are not what you would typically think of as the women-in-tech companies. A lot of people think all we want to work on is beauty. I like makeup and clothes and everything as much as the next person, but I don't know anything about those businesses. A lot of the deal flow that we've had, it's coming from all kinds of very hardcore tech, a lot of VR stuff, too, and AR. We've seen a broad range. Right now we're looking for the next billion-dollar businesses really. Any other VC it's, “Is this something I'm passionate about and can it be huge and can I add value in helping them make it so?”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Actually, that's a good segue into talking about I think one of the things that confuses some folks in our audience and even first-time founders is, what qualifies as a tech product and then what—let's start there and then we can talk about maybe what a big idea is.
Understanding If Your Startup Is A Tech Enabled Business Or A Tech Product
Erica Brescia: Sure. Almost anything these days is tech enabled. If it's not, you might have a scalability problem. I don't think we have very strict definitions as to what is tech or not. If excelling in technology and in the technical underpinnings of the product is going to give people an advantage, that's probably a tech company or something that we would think of as such. Some of the subscription businesses or there's a food device I can't talk too much about, but that we're looking at. A really novel subscription business around it. Another two companies have come through that are working on breast pumps for women. They're hardware companies but there's a lot of technology obviously that goes into the hardware. Obviously a lot of tech powering how they're approaching the businesses. It's really a pretty loose definition of what a tech company is. Even some of them are physical spaces now that we're looking at. It's a pretty broad range. It's not like we're only investing in software or we're only investing in sass or something like that.
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's good to know. Tech enabled but there's probably some conversation that needs to be had around, “Are you really just selling water online or is there a distribution model that is tech enabled and it's cool if you sell water online.”
Erica Brescia: Exactly.
Why Finding An Investor Isn’t Good Enough — You Need To Find THE Investor Who Understand Your Market and Business Model
Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. Then let's talk about I think another area, though, which is—you've already started talking about you enjoy the deals that are B2B, more enterprise, and maybe a little bit more saas heavy. I think one of the concerns that a lot of first-time founders have is, “I just need to find an investor.” I just need to find one investor, but they may not necessarily find that right investor. It's interesting because it's not just limited to tech. I was reading Barbara Lynch's memoir, who's a restaurateur, and she talked about going and finding the investors who invested in restaurants for her nine restaurants. Talk to me a little bit about what it means to be vertical focused as an investor.
Erica Brescia: You want investors who understand your business or at least have the capacity and time to learn about it and who are upfront if they don't understand things, too. There's several things that make people good investors. One is, don't be an asshole, if I can say that on your show.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure. Of course.
Erica Brescia: I just don't want to work with people who are not good people. To me, some people don't care about...I've actually had people come to me and say, “It doesn't matter. All VCs are going to be assholes, you just need to accept that and move on.” I'm like, “Uh, uh. No. No, I don't. There's a lot of great VCs out there.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: That's the normal assumption.
Erica Brescia: There are a lot of good people out there, men and women in venture capital. I do think it's important that you understand somebody who understands your business and the cycles. Before, example, we've had a lot of very hardware-centric businesses come through. Those are difficult to invest in. In particular, if you don't have experience in hardware because you don't have a really good understanding of how long it's going to take and what the development cycle should look like and how capital intensive that you're going to be. It's harder to make good investment decisions. It's harder to be helpful for the founder, because if you have unrealistic expectations for the type of business they're building, nobody wins. It's the same, we've seen a lot of robotics companies doing super cool stuff, but I've told them, “Look, I'm not an expert in robotics. I'm going to have to go out.” We do have an associate who does some work for us, but we have to go out and be willing to invest our time to get up to speed in those industries in order to feel comfortable making an investment.
It's good advice. I think what you're alluding to is, find an investor that actually knows what they're talking about in your space because otherwise they could really do damage by slowing you down, refusing to fund a second round or something like that. A follow on or just inundating you with questions all the time. The last thing you want to be doing is just educating your investors on the market when you have a company to build.
The Sacrifices Founders Have To Make To Get Their Startup Off The Ground
Poornima Vijayashanker: Exactly. No, that's a good point. Let's talk about the other side of this, which is also, it's very tempting, as a first-time founder or somebody who’s green, to have an idea, whether it's hardware or anything that we feel is capital intensive or sometimes we just don't even have the capital as a founder. We haven't quite got to the financial point of our life. It's tempting to immediately say, “Oh my gosh, to get this thing off the ground I need to go and get investment. That might not be the right time.” Let's talk about what time horizon makes sense. I know it's going to be product specific, but I think it would be helpful to just—
Erica Brescia: It really depends on so many different variables. One of them I think is important is to be realistic about where you are in your life and what kind of sacrifices you're willing to make. The reality is, if you have a family and a mortgage, it's a heck of a lot harder to stop taking a salary—particularly if you were to work in Silicon Valley because the salaries are quite high here right now—and go and start something from scratch. If you're 22 and right out of college and have none of those financial responsibilities, you might have more flexibility. My vote is do as much as you can before raising funding. Build as much as you can. First of all, there's so many good investment opportunities right now that I think most investors, they want to see...first they want to see that you're committed. If you just go out with a pitch deck—like I took two weeks of holiday for my job to put together a pitch deck and if you fund me, I'll go do this—you're never going to get funded because we want to see conviction.
We want to see that you quit your job, you're committed, you've been working on this with somebody else preferably for six months. You have the personality and the skills and the charm or whatever it may be, the conviction to actually get other people to join you. That's important, too. Unless you absolutely can not do it without raising money up front, I would say get at least to a prototype or as far as you can to be able to go show people and prove to people that you're there for the long haul and that you're willing to make sacrifices to make something happen. I will also plug incubators, like Y Combinator. Obviously I'm biased because we went through the program. That was a great experience for us in terms of helping us just build some momentum and we did rebranding of the company and accomplished a lot during that period. It's not about the funding necessarily, but it can give people who are cash wrapped a bit of cash to fund those first few months. It really helps you to accelerate that initial process and sets you up very well to raise from VCs after the fact.
We've certainly sourced a lot of our deal flow from YC. We try at XFactor to be very broad and we've had people from all over the world, in fact, contacting us. Of course, we're going to look to YC because they've already been through that filter. They've achieved something during the period that they're in Y Combinator. It's a three-month sprint. We've found that looking at people that have at least gotten to the point where you would be if you've gone through a Y Combinator or similar. They've got something to show. That's when it makes sense. I will say, this is really the approach that we've taken with Bitnami is try to find money from customers. Let's not undervalue the fact that people will pay you for what you're building. Hopefully if you're building something valuable, and you're much better off going through that experience, learning what it takes to sell to people and collect their money—there's a lot of details there—and try to build your business that way. You don't need to go for VC right away. There are great examples of companies that have been hugely successful doing that like GitHub and Atlassian.
Why It’s OK To Build A Lifestyle Business
Poornima Vijayashanker: I'm going to have you hold that thought because we are going to talk about that in a little bit. Now, the other thing I want to point out because you said customers, but I think also bootstrapping with a pay check to get off the ground. A lot of times people are worried about quitting their job and having a source of income, so using that especially for businesses that a little bit more capital intensive early on. Want to throw that out there. I want to dive a little bit deeper into this whole idea of, “I do want to get investment eventually.” Let's say I have gotten to a point, maybe I've gone to an incubator or I've gotten it off the ground, I have some customers. Then there comes that period where you're talking to an investor and they may not really understand how big your idea is. It's oftentimes that thing that people nitpick over and over again that, is this a big idea? Is this a big market? Or sadly people like to say, it's a lifestyle business. There's a stigma here in Silicon Valley against that. Let's talk about what exactly defines a big idea—if we can even define it because I know it's a little amorphous—versus a lifestyle businesses and maybe even break that stigma of that lifestyle business.
Erica Brescia: Sure. First I'll say I don't think there's anything wrong with a “lifestyle” business. There have been a lot of deals that we looked at. There was this one amazing woman, I won't name the company, but she came through my network actually. She developed some really interesting technology. It was my belief after talking to a lot of people that she's going to sell the company for somewhere between $30–50 million within two years. Awesome for her. Not a great VC investment?
Why Venture Capitalist Don’t Invest In Lifestyle Businesses
Poornima Vijayashanker: Why?
Erica Brescia: Because we can't produce the kind of returns that we're looking for. We have LPs just like any other VC fund. We have a responsibility to them to generate returns. I told this woman I want to help her in any way I can. She's incredibly bright. I just couldn't see a path to them building a billion-dollar business. That's really what it needs to be. There needs to be a path that you can understand for how this can be huge. It's going to be very risky. I should say we always know that businesses are going to change and evolve and you're very much betting on the founders. That's absolutely true, but at the same time, if they have conviction around a specific idea and we don't see how it can get to be a huge business, and some of the great hardware companies we're looking at are like that. I think they will have fantastic businesses and fantastic exits. I certainly wouldn't call them lifestyle businesses because they're life changing in terms of the returns that they'll create for the founders. They may not be appropriate for a VC fund. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
You need to take a dispassionate look about what you're building, how big the market really is, how much of it you have an opportunity to grab, and be realistic about that. Then think about the kind of funding that makes sense. You might be able to find a family office or something or angel investors who are not looking for the same VC-style risk and returns. They'll be totally happy with the company selling for $10, $20, $30 million. In a couple years, they'll double their money and everybody's fine.
Where Do Venture Capitalist And Angel Investors Get Money To Fund Startups
Poornima Vijayashanker: On that note, let's actually define what an LP is and why VC versus angels that people understand if they're not familiar.
Erica Brescia: Sure. An LP is limited partner and they're the people that put money into the funds. They're often wealthy. They always have some money coming from somewhere. Often wealthy individuals, but depending on the fund, they might also be pension funds or endowments and things like that from universities or different trusts and things like that. Basically the people who put money into the hands of the venture capitalists who are the people who actually invest that money. In the case of angels, angels I think have evolved a lot. Now we have the super angels.
Poornima Vijayashanker: We'll get into that in a future episode. I keep saying this, but it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen guys.
Erica Brescia: I won't take us to off course then. There are a lot of different kinds of angels. I was an angel investor before joining XFactor. I mean, not at a huge scale, but I'd made a few investments myself.
Poornima Vijayashanker: What's the scale?
Erica Brescia: I was writing like $10,000 checks.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Perfect.
Erica Brescia: Smaller checks. Then there are people like—I'll take my father, who's one of my closest friends and heroes and has inspired me to do all of this. He built a brick and mortar contracting business that did quite well. He's been making tons of angel investments and all kinds of different things. Some tech, some very, very nontech. You have people like that. Then you have people like Eric Han for example. My company did raise a bit of angel funding primarily to get some really great folks involved with the company. Some of these people were like Eli Gillin, Eric Han. Eric Han was the CTO of Netscape. He went on to be a very early investor in Red Hat. Since then, has been one of the first checks into a ton of companies that have IPO'd. He was on the board of Red Hat after they IPO'd. Eli Gillin is running his own company now, but he started and sold a company to Twitter and ran a bunch of stuff there. These are people who have done well in their career, typically understand tech. They make a lot more investments than somebody like maybe me or my father who might've written a couple of checks a year. These people are doing several key deals a year, usually only investing their own funds. That's one of the big differences. They don't have LPs. It's their own money. They might be doing it more at scale. We call them usually professional angels or super angels.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Business angels.
Erica Brescia: Exactly. Who are making a lot of investments, but they don't have LPs to answer to.
When Does It Make Sense To Approach An Investor With Your Startup Idea — First Know What You Are Going To Do With It!
Poornima Vijayashanker: Great. Let's end with this question. When does it make sense then when you think you have this big idea, to approach an investor? I know you guys said early, but what is maybe too early and what's a reasonable early to get a meeting?
Erica Brescia: It depends on what you need. Let's start with why do you need the money? That's the first question you should be asking yourself. Where is this money going to get you? You better have a good answer before you go talk to VCs. What milestone are you going to hit with this? Then the second question you should ask is, could I get it from anywhere other than VCs? Do I have friends and family who might want to just give me some money? Could I even take out a loan? Sometimes these other things make sense. There are a bunch of diverse opinions on this, but my view is you don't take VC unless you absolutely need it. Until it's holding you back from scaling. In the particular case of Bitnami, for example, we've primarily bootstrapped. We've only taken a million dollars in outside funding in total. I have over 70 employees in 12 countries. We're cash-flow positive. We've built quite a stable and steady business. We are starting to talk about potentially raising venture capital because we're launching this enterprise product that I mentioned before.
That involves building out an entirely new part of the business. I can do that off of cash flow, but I'll probably go a lot slower and we see that there's a limited window of opportunity here. I think it really depends on your specific case and whether you can do it any other way. Or if there's an investor that you can feel or that you feel can add a lot of value. There are certain investors who might have a ton of experience in your space. Maybe they started an earlier company and exited it and are just itching for the chance to do it better now that the technology is evolved or what have you. If you find people like that, I think they can be really helpful to building the business. Otherwise, it's like, you should raise when you need to raise. If you feel like you could run out of money in the near future and not be able to actually execute on your plan.
Yes There Is Such A Thing As Being Too Early To Fundraise For Your Startup And Yes It’s Inconsistent!
Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's admit. There is a time that's too early.
Erica Brescia: Oh yeah. There always is. It's funny. We funded a company that was quite early and quite a high evaluation. That's one of the deals I led actually. I knew the founder and he'd already built a successful company.
Poornima Vijayashanker: There you go.
Erica Brescia: You're much more willing then, almost eager, to get in because this is a male, female team. I happen to know the male better than the female. I told him I wanted into that deal because I think this guy has a ton of potential. Even though it was early, I would write him a check, but he's proven. That matters.
Poornima Vijayashanker: Exactly. I think that's a big stigma, or rather a big misconception around who's getting a deal, who hasn't built a product yet, or it's not on the market. It's great that you mentioned that. I think for most other folks, they need to see something. They need to see product. They need to see at least a concierge-style minimal bible product or service, some cash flow, some customers. They really want to...those who don't have a track record need to step up their game and show a little bit more credibility.
Questions Investors Ask Before They Take A Meeting Or Write A Check To A Startup Founder
Erica Brescia: Yeah. The things I look at is, are they committed is the number one thing. Starting a company is hard and a lot of people underestimate how hard and how many sacrifices you make. You can do a whole episode on what's involved in that. Are they committed? Can they build a team? I look at that a lot. That's one thing where people who want to move to Silicon Valley who have no connections there, that's one of my questions. How are you going to find people and convince them in a highly competitive job market to join your team? If you can do that, it also speaks pretty highly of you and your ability to convince people and help them see the vision. Then can they build the product? Is it something that people will pay for? Those are the checklist items that I have. The more that you can demonstrate, the easier the time you're going to have with fundraising.
If you can't prove that people will pay for your product, if you can't prove that people will use it, especially if you can't prove that you can build it, that's when we're going to have a lot of challenges getting to the next step. That's when I try to give people a clean “yes” or “no.” Sometimes it's like, “You're just not there yet. If you do these things, then I might be interested. I'm sorry. I need to see more before I can make the call.”
Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. I think that's fair. Thank you so much Erica for sharing all this information with us today.
Erica Brescia: Thank you for having me.
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 continue the conversation and talk about when it makes sense to transition from angel investment to seeking investment from venture capitalists and what you need to do in that interim period. Ciao for now.
This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor Pivotal Tracker.
Blog Post 2
Subject: When It Does And Doesn’t Make Sense To Fundraise For Your Startup
Title: Startup Funding: When It Does And Doesn’t Make Sense To Fundraise For Your Startup
Subtitle: Interview with Erica Brescia COO and Co-Founder of Bitnami and Investment Partner at XFactor Ventures
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’s 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 watch today’s episode you’ll learn:
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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!
Listen to the episode on iTunes!
You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.
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.
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Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.
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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.
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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.
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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.