Roles & Titles

Establishing the Goals for an Acquired Organization

A year ago, the author joined the office of a startup bought by their current company with the intent to expand their product across the US and globally. Through conversations with stakeholders and user research, the author proposed a flywheel structure and identified critical narratives and key metrics to measure performance. They also identified four future value streams and personas, and set goals for each vertical with key metrics. The team grew from two to ten members, and the business increased 8x in the next year according to the current plan. The author learned to build trust, think about users when building the team, not rush to hire people, and go deep to add value.

Proposing Solutions, Not Problems

When working with multiple teams across various countries, it can be difficult for upper management to understand the pain points. As a manager, it is important to bridge the gap by providing useful information and solutions to make the best decisions. Create a concise document with the situation, why it is a problem, and the best solutions. Send the proposal to your boss ahead of time and keep it short and to the point.

Implementing a Clear Promotion Process in a Growing Company

This article discusses the challenges a company faced when trying to promote employees in a systematic way across all leadership. To address this, the company created an engineering ladder and a promotion readiness document to provide clarity on expectations for everyone. This system opened up honest conversations between individuals and their managers, and it was so successful that other departments adopted similar approaches. As a result, people felt more inspired to challenge themselves and go after certain things.

From Chaos to Structure on the Operations Team

At my previous job, I was assigned a team that was not functioning well and had a poor reputation. I took a number of actions to improve their operations, such as using a single ticketing system, providing training and cross-functional competencies, setting up rotations for the support team, creating runbooks, and setting up standard SLAs. I also established healthy hours for operations and communicated to external stakeholders. Through this process, I learned to take time to assess the situation, spend time with each team member, communicate change to the outside world, and align team celebrations with meaningful milestone deliveries.

Creating a Useful Product Vision

A product vision is an important part of a company strategy that serves as a North Star for the product organization, motivating them to create a compelling product that solves customer problems. It should not be confused with the company mission or product roadmap. It is important to create a product vision when teams need to be aligned in a common direction. It is worth the investment to create a product vision that is short and straightforward, and everyone should understand the purpose behind it.

How to Effectively Communicate on Slack

After receiving feedback from users, a leader devised a framework for using Slack that was recommended company-wide. This framework included using public channels instead of direct messages, using threads to reduce noise, and using standup notes to document progress. After 3 months of iteration, the framework was adopted and proved to be effective for the organization.