People Management

Here's how to manage, build and grow your team in a human and effective way.

We'll give you concrete and unconventional tips from the most innovative companies and backed by the science of what motivates people.

Start here with our management guide and how to take back your work day.

Cells, Pods, and Squads: The Future of Organizations is Small

May 16, 2019 by Janet Choi 3 Comments

This post was originally published in 2014. It has been updated with new data and advice in 2019.

Think small and you will achieve big things. That’s the counterintuitive philosophy that nets Finnish game company Supercell revenues of millions of dollars a day.

[Image via Giphy]

So really, how do you build a billion-dollar business by thinking small?

One key is the company’s pod team structure. Autonomous small teams, or “cells,” of four to six people position the company to be nimble and innovative. Similar modules — call them pods, squads, or startups within startups — are the basic components in many other nimble, growing companies, including Spotify and Automattic. The future, as Dave Gray argues in The Connected Company, is podular.

Still, small groups of people do not necessarily make a thriving business, as the fate of many a fledgling startup warns. What is it about the pod team structure that presents not just a viable alternative but the future of designing how we work together?

How Managers Can 10X Their Productivity with Writing

March 6, 2019 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Managing a team well requires expert communication.

Holding meetings and using project management software systems do not equate to effective management. Effective management means aligning your team through goals, inspiring them to do good work, and seamlessly transferring knowledge from person to person and team to team.

When it comes to communication, missing by an inch can result in missing by a mile. As messages get passed from person to person, they get diluted, so if your communication isn’t constant or consistent as it moves around your team, you can end up sending people off in the wrong direction.

That’s why, as a manager, if you want to increase your productivity, you should focus on improving your writing. Writing provides an unchanging source of information that employees can reference anytime.

When your writing is clear and comprehensive, you make ideas stick, create accountability, and force critical thinking.

Make Your Ideas Stick

Good leaders can communicate complex ideas in simple, straightforward, and memorable ways. When you effectively condense a large amount of information into a few short words or sentences, it helps you get the point across faster and cuts down on the amount of back and forth with team members. Instead of spending your time explaining your thoughts and ideas, you can instead focus more energy on implementing them.

Perhaps nobody understands this better than Jeff Bezos. Bezos knows that carefully picking the right words and phrases to communicate a company goal or vision can make or break your team’s alignment with it.

“What Jeff understood was the power of rhetoric. Time spent coming up with the right words to package a key concept in a memorable way was time well spent. People fret about what others say about them when they’re not in the room, but Jeff was solving the issue of getting people to say what he’d say when he wasn’t in the room.” Eugene Wei, Compress to impress via Remains of the Day

Getting a group of people (thousands of people in the case of Amazon) to understand a goal, and then remember it enough to keep their activities aligned with it even months down the road is a really tough task. As a manager, it’s important to word your messages in a way that sticks in your team’s collective memory.

At Amazon, for example, employees think about and frame their work from a single phrase—’it is always Day 1.’ This phrase condenses an entire philosophy about innovation and mindset into two words- Day 1. In doing so, Bezos ensures that even with the overload of messages his employees receive every day, it’s always easy to tie their actions back to the company mission.

In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Bezos elaborates on his idea about Day 1, which he mentioned as far back as his 1997 letter by contrasting it to Day 2. He then goes on to introduce strategies for fending off Day 2, which are also encapsulated in short, two-word phrases like ‘Resist Proxies.’

Catchy and concise phrases like this decrease the cognitive overhead needed to understand each concept. It’s a lot easier to remember ‘resist proxies’ than it is to remember ‘be aware of when your processes become ineffective or become the thing you strive for.’

Coming up with the most effective wording as Bezos does in this example will not be easy. It will take a lot of time and a lot of trial and error before you can find the right way to articulate your goals and ideas. Dedicating the time to doing so before rolling out your initiatives, however, will end up saving you time in the long run, as you’ll spend less time repeating yourself and less time clarifying your thoughts and coaching employees on what they should focus on.

Create Accountability

As a manager, you are responsible not only for meeting your own deadlines and goals but also for making sure your team hits their deadlines and goals. The more time you need to spend recapping a previous conversation or resetting expectations due to a misunderstanding, the less productive you and your team can be. One way to cut down on the amount of time you need to spend on these types of conversations is to obsessively document as much information as possible.

Documenting everything in writing provides a safety net of sorts for information that slips between the cracks or is forgotten about in verbal communication. It is easy to forget details of a conversation or even topics discussed over the course of a 30-minute 1:1 or a longer training session, so relying solely on verbal communication can easily create knowledge gaps in your team.

With a comprehensive record of what happened, what was discussed, and agreed upon next steps, you can increase your productivity by making it easier to:

Set expectations: Oftentimes people come out of a verbal conversation with different ideas of objectives. Getting everyone on the same page can be as simple as writing down the objectives so that there is no ambiguity.
Make action items: A successful meeting is one in which everyone leaves knowing exactly what steps need to be taken to progress forward. If you don’t write these steps down, people can easily forget or mix them up.
Assign tasks: For a team to work cohesively, it is important that everyone understands their role in a project and which action items they are responsible for. The easiest way to avoid confusion and to make sure everyone follows through is to write down who is doing what.

Think about the last meeting you had with your employees—did you document objectives and action items and assign tasks? If you didn’t, you might find yourself following up with everyone from that meeting confirming these details and maybe even re-explaining some parts.

That’s why it’s important to keep meeting notes like this:

Having the topics and action items written down means that the attendees—in this case, Benjamin, Alison, and Rhett—won’t have any reason not to follow through with their responsibilities. If they forget a piece of the discussion, forget what their task was, or forget when it was due, they can quickly refer to the notes rather than needing additional time with you, the manager, to clarify and explain.

Spending five minutes to write up these notes saves the manager potentially three five-minute conversations that might be needed later on to recap details with each of the three attendees. Most importantly, having this record makes it easier to hold teammates accountable and ensure that projects progress on time and in the right direction.

Force Critical Thinking

Perhaps the most important component of getting your team to fully understand a mission or goal is fully understanding it yourself and knowing exactly how it fits into the business and why it works. If you present an idea to your team that is unorganized or has logical inconsistencies, they’re most likely not going to get on board with it. One way to test your idea’s logic and figure out the best way to organize it is to write it down in full sentences.

Again, one of the biggest proponents of this technique is Jeff Bezos, who insists that ideas are pitched to him in narrative format rather than in bullet points or PowerPoint:

[Source]

Bezos understood that when you have to put ideas into full sentences and then string those sentences together in a logical way, it forces the writer to think more in-depth and uncover any flaws in logic.

Think about how a PowerPoint is structured—text is limited to bullet points, and each slide contains a different idea without a clear narrative on how it connects to the previous slide. The presenter therefore doesn’t need to think through how the bullet points really connect to each other or how the ideas on each slide relate to one another. Furthermore, if you missed the presentation or forgot a part of it and wanted to refer back to the slides, it would be hard to piece together the speaker’s argument or logic without the accompanying vocal presentation.

In contrast, a written narrative memo requires the writer to connect all their ideas together, eliminating the possibility of logic gaps and also giving any reader an easily digestible format to refresh their memory on the ideas and arguments.

One useful way to structure your arguments is to use the Pyramid Principle, which uses the following format for written presentations or arguments:

Start with your answer first.
Group and summarize your supporting arguments.
Logically order your supporting ideas.

Using a consistent outline like this to put your ideas into will ensure that your ideas are structured in a way that your team can easily process and understand. In keeping with the common theme of using writing as a management strategy, this might cost you time up front but will ultimately save you time in the long run, as you’ll spend less time working with your team to bring them up to speed and re-explaining things.

Use Writing as a Productivity Tool

Ambiguity is a manager’s worst enemy. If your employees don’t understand a project’s objective, don’t understand what they should be doing or who is doing what, productivity will be limited. Good managers know that the best way to combat ambiguity and get everyone working as a cohesive team is by writing everything down.

When you put your ideas in writing, you have a tool to hold team members accountable as well as a single and comprehensive record of objectives and plans.

With accountability in place and everyone on the same page about objectives, the amount of hands-on management you’ll need to do will decrease. Your team can be productive without you, and you can dedicate more time to strategy and thinking about the next big thing.

This post was originally published at the Slab blog. It has been republished here with permission.

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Why Jeff Bezos’ Two-Pizza Team Rule Still Holds True in 2018

December 4, 2018 by Janet Choi 21 Comments

[Source: Amazon] Jeff Bezos is prolific. In 21 letters to his investors over the years, he has delivered dozens of nuggets of wisdom ranging from prioritizing long-term outcomes over short-term results to embedding R&D in every single department. He also has a unique take on company communication. Bezos believes that no matter how large your company gets, individual teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed. Think of it this way: at a large party, it’s hard to connect with people. You’re overwhelmed by the number of guests you could possibly meet and converse with. You end up with more — yet more shallow — interactions. If the host is trying to project a message to the crowd, he or she might have trouble shouting over the din. In contrast, at a small party, you might talk to the people sitting next to you for hours. You can develop more meaningful relationships and maybe come away with new ideas and inspiration. Although Bezos first declared the “two-pizza” rule in Amazon’s early days, it continues to resonate in 2018. As the pace of venture capital accelerates, and more and more companies enter hypergrowth, figuring out how and when to design teams for effective communication becomes critical. Not convinced? Here’s the hard evidence behind why the two-pizza team rule holds true. Continue Reading

How to Leverage Psychology to Provide Better Customer Support

November 8, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Despite the growing popularity of instant-messaging support and “conversational agents”—better known as chatbots—actually talking to a customer on the phone is one of the best ways to engage in a real conversation and learn more about a customer’s problems.

Done right, such conversations can be helpful, valuable, and even fun. But we don’t tend to hear about those interactions. Instead, we usually hear horror stories of automated switchboards, interminable wait times, and disinterested customer support staff.

Everybody has a terrible story about customer support. Whether it’s waiting on hold for three hours to speak with someone at the IRS, having to explain a problem repeatedly to one support rep after another, or dealing with random disconnections in the middle of crucial support calls, we’ve been conditioned to accept that customer support is a uniquely terrible experience to be endured rather than a satisfying, rewarding part of patronizing a business.

According to data from GetApp Lab, all that most customers want from a support experience is to speak with a real live human being. That’s it.

[Source]

It’s no secret why a majority of customers want to speak with a real person during support calls. It’s one of the best channels for quickly identifying and solving complex customer problems. When we really understand where our customers are coming from, it’s much easier to solve their problems and build trust.

Why Customers Dread Calling Customer Support Numbers

If speaking with a customer support rep is so effective, then why do so many people dread the thought of picking up the phone and calling an 800 number to speak with one?

On average, American consumers spend around 30 hours every year on the phone with customer support personnel. Because we spend so much time on these calls, we already have preconceived notions about how the entire experience will play out. We’re already on the defensive before we even finish dialing, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Although many consumers have legitimate grievances with telephone-based customer support, most of the negativity surrounding these calls is rooted in the perception that companies don’t respect customers’ time. Calling a customer support line isn’t just a pain in the ass—it’s often a considerable investment of time that prevents customers from doing other things. Even if there’s a very good reason for a lengthy wait to speak with a support rep, every minute a customer wastes waiting on hold damages that company’s brand. It creates negative perceptions about that company that can be very difficult to undo, even if the actual support call goes well.

These experiences also play a significant role in whether a customer will even attempt to contact customer support in the first place. It doesn’t matter how skilled, knowledgeable, or friendly your support reps are if your customers don’t even want to pick up the phone.

Customer Support Is a Critical Competitive Advantage

Instead of treating customer support as an afterthought, think of it as a way to further differentiate yourself from the competition. Talking through an issue with a customer over the phone allows you to get to the heart of the problem—and ultimately solve it—much faster, but it’s also a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the customer and create a positive association with your brand.

The better the customer support experience, the more positive the association—a crucial competitive advantage in any industry.

However, before you can deliver a world-class customer support experience, it’s important to understand why your customer chose to call you in the first place. Customers who prefer phone support are often looking for:

Quick solutions to complex problems. Voice support allows your support reps to ask detailed, probing questions and guide customers through the support process in real time. Even relatively minor issues like password resets can be solved much faster in a simple phone conversation, as opposed to instant messaging or chatbot support.
A more intimate, personal experience. Voice support isn’t just effective; it’s also a way to provide the kind of personalized white-glove service your tired, stressed-out customers crave. The more difficult the problem, the more your customers will appreciate attentive customer support.
Difficult conversations. Even customers who are furious still want their problems to be acknowledged. Voice support is ideal for customers who want—or even need—to vent their frustrations. The immediacy of voice support helps the customer feel as though their voice is being heard and gives your reps the opportunity to calmly walk customers through the solution they want.

It’s vital to understand the mindset of the customers who choose voice support over other channels. The needs of a customer who chooses to pick up the phone to speak with a rep are very different from those of a customer who opts to utilize live chat. Similarly, customers who favor email support aren’t likely to need as prompt a response as someone who calls your support team.

Understanding the differences in the needs of customers who choose different support channels is the first step in creating better, more rewarding support experiences. Likewise, considering the frame of mind a customer is likely to be in during a support call allows your reps to preemptively address problems before they arise and alleviate the frustrations of the caller.

The biggest challenge to overcome for voice support personnel is the negativity surrounding perceptions of voice support itself. A little understanding goes a long way, and by demonstrating empathy with customers and proving that you genuinely value their time, you can prove that customer support is a crucial part of your entire business, not merely an afterthought.

Give Your Customers the Support They Deserve

Your customers don’t just expect you to provide best-in-class support experiences when things go wrong—they also need to be understood and met where they are. Voice support is one of the most effective ways to solve your customers’ problems, but only if your reps understand where your customers are coming from long before the phone rings.

Great customer support isn’t just about solving problems; it’s also about building relationships, strengthening your brand, and helping people feel that their time is as valuable to you as their business.

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Scaling Your Business Without Losing Your Culture

November 2, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Aside from “innovation,” few buzzwords carry as little real meaning in Silicon Valley and the broader tech sector than “culture.”

While countless startups and established companies alike have seized upon the idea of corporate culture as a vehicle of employee attraction and a way to differentiate themselves in crowded markets, culture remains one of the most crucial aspects of your organization.

So how do you cultivate and maintain a strong, ethical corporate culture when you’re trying to scale?

In this article, we’ll be taking a look at what companies actually mean when they talk about culture, as well as ways to foster your corporate culture as a direct reflection of your company’s brand values.

First, let’s talk about what culture really means.

Healthy, Productive Cultures Don’t Just Happen

Perhaps the most important thing to realize about culture—at least as it pertains to companies and brands—is that, even if you do nothing, a culture will emerge across your organization. Once we understand this, it becomes easier to see that culture is a result of actions, decisions, and direct actions.

Put another way, strong corporate cultures don’t just “happen.” We have to make them happen.

This is surprisingly difficult even in the early stages of small companies. Think about it for a second. If workplace culture is an extension of a company’s brand values, who decides what those values are? Once that’s been figured out, how do you actually disseminate these ideas and values across your organization?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the CEO or founders are responsible for identifying and shaping a company’s values as well as ensuring that every employee understands these principles. The problem with this approach is that it’s up to a single individual to arbitrarily decide what the entire company’s values are and adopt a top-down approach to implementing those values. This is fine if your company aspires to be the personal fiefdom of a control-freak CEO, but for companies that want to cultivate and nurture genuinely meaningful corporate cultures, it’s completely, wildly unrealistic.

What We Really Mean When We Talk About ‘Culture’

One way to think about culture is to see it as “our way of life.” As you can probably imagine, this covers virtually every single aspect of a company and its operations, from large, intangible brand values to how your customer support teams answer the phone or respond to email.

Culture encompasses big and small things, such as:

The products we build and how we ship them
The way we communicate internally and externally
The messages we choose not to send—and why
The incentives we use to motivate our staff
The behaviors we exhibit every day
The boundaries that, if crossed, have meaningful consequences
The speed at which serious problems are escalated to someone who can solve them
The speed at which those problems are acted upon
The way we dress and the symbols we display
The ways in which we celebrate victories
The things that make us proud, and the things that bring us shame
The things that upset us, and the things that bring us joy
The things we do to grow as individuals and as teams
The way we perceive ourselves and our role in a company

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the things that fall under the umbrella of corporate culture. It is, however, a way to start thinking beyond Casual Fridays and ping-pong tables as being representative of the cultures we create.

Our companies—and our people—deserve better.

Action + Communication = Values

One of the major challenges to establishing and maintaining a strong, cohesive corporate culture is the fact that many companies rely on at least partially distributed teams. It’s hard enough to foster and cultivate an inclusive culture at a growing company without tossing remote workers and asynchronous communication into the mix.

That’s what makes understanding that corporate values are the direct result of what we do every day and how we communicate with each other so important.

However, even this is easier said than done. For small teams, it may well be possible to intentionally create a positive culture via Slack. For larger teams or fast-growing companies, it’s completely impossible.

As Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” For our purposes, this means that all those negative interactions we try to avoid—angry posts on social, customer support tickets, bad reviews—are actually the most valuable opportunities to identify and cultivate the brand values we want to foster across our companies. A negative tweet, for example, may be a great opportunity to identify a potential feature gap in a product or fix an overlooked bug. A customer support ticket might be a great way to update your internal documentation or develop a new troubleshooting tool.

Put another way, failure is a much better teacher than success.

Values Are Meaningless Until We Act Upon Them

As we mentioned earlier, “culture” has become one of the most overused buzzwords in tech. Many companies talk a good game about their culture and values, but talk is cheap.

Values mean nothing until we act on them. We’re inherently social creatures. We follow the examples set by others, particularly those we admire. It’s easy for a CEO to talk about open-door policies, but their actions are what matter; it doesn’t matter how easy it is for employees to air their grievances with the Executive team if nothing ever comes of it.

There are unique challenges to retaining a strong corporate culture as a company grows. However, it always comes back to the same two things: how we communicate and how we choose to act upon that communication. This applies to the scrappiest underdog startups and to established tech behemoths.

Avoiding Culture Shock

Corporate culture is a lot like a garden. Left alone, it may be fine for a while, but before long, you’ll be confronted with a tangled, overgrown wilderness that bears no resemblance to the garden you originally planted. If, however, you tend that garden carefully and consistently, it will bloom and thrive.

Take a look at the culture of your company and think of it as that garden. How are you nurturing it? When was the last time you got on your hands and knees and weeded it? How often do you water it? Sure, Mother Nature will do most of the work, but we have to get our hands dirty, too.

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3 Ways to Create a Culture of Documentation

October 25, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

At many companies, documentation isn’t a core part of their internal operations, but a laborious chore to be managed; a way to prove that a meeting or conversation took place, never to be looked at again. However, the most productive, successful teams recognize obsessive documentation for what it truly is—an opportunity to work smarter and help your team focus on solving new problems, not mitigating the impact of old ones.

As valuable and impactful as documentation can be for teams of all sizes, it doesn’t happen by accident. Like any other aspect of managing your team, documentation should be a core facet of your corporate culture and an extension of your brand values. Yes, it takes time and effort to cultivate a culture of documentation, but doing so can have an incredible impact on your productivity and the dynamics of your team itself.

Let’s take a look at how you can start actually building a culture of documentation within your team.

Start with Standardization

One of the main reasons why documentation is so often overlooked is because most teams don’t have a standardized approach to getting it done. Who’s responsible for documenting what, exactly? What should that person do with that documentation, anyway?

When you get down to it, most of the resistance to documenting internal processes is rooted in a fundamental resistance to change. As the old adage says, everybody loves progress but nobody likes change. That’s why standardizing your documentation processes is so critical — by implementing predictable systems for documenting your work, you’re eliminating most of the ambiguity and uncertainty that makes people so resistant to change in the first place.

One of the best ways to start standardizing your documentation workflow is by using templates. Obviously, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for streamlining how and when you document the work your team does, but you can simplify the process by using templates as a starting point.

Standardized document templates reduce the cognitive overhead of actually documenting internal processes, because whoever is responsible for doing the documentation doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel after every meeting; they can adjust an existing template, document the work being done, and get on with their day. This approach is also much less disruptive because it doesn’t require a radical overhaul of how your team thinks. Rather than creating brand-new documents every time a process needs to be documented, your team can amend a simple template.

Another benefit of standardizing your documentation process is that it makes sharing important information much easier. When people in different teams or departments know what to expect from internal documentation, they’re more likely to share and actually use that information.

Build Living Documents That Grow with Your Company

Standardization is important, but so is recognizing that very few documents will stand the test of time as your company scales. Processes that may have worked well during your company’s scrappy startup phase may be entirely inappropriate for larger, more established teams. That’s why it’s crucial to create living documents that can grow alongside your company.

Living documents—documents that are updated over time—are crucial to any long-term documentation project. This is because not only do living documents make it easier to take note of changes as they happen, but they also eliminate the need to create multiple documents. They can also be linked together to create cohesive, relevant, up-to-date document hierarchies for complex projects, rather than forcing teams to rebuild entire libraries of documentation every time from scratch.

However, just because a document can—and should—evolve and grow with your team, it’s still important to approach living documents with standardized processes in mind. This helps minimize repeated work, eliminates potential redundancies across multiple documents, and ensures everybody knows what to expect.

Use Asynchronous Communication to Empower EVERY Member of Your Team

One of the major reasons why documentation falls by the wayside is because it is perceived as a top-down process; managers document internal processes, which the rest of the team is then expected to follow. This approach can work, but it’s much more effective to secure buy-in from everyone on the team by utilizing asynchronous communication and allowing every team member to contribute.

Fortunately, there are dozens of tools that make asynchronous communication effortless. Whichever tool you choose to use, it’s important that every member of your team is able and encouraged to actively contribute to your living documentation. If your team members can offer their own insights, thoughts, and suggestions to a document, they’re much more likely to do so—and this is crucial to building a culture of documentation, rather than merely implementing yet another task for your already busy team.

Asynchronous communication is practically mandatory for distributed and virtual teams. Communicating effectively across even smaller teams can be a major challenge when you introduce factors such as time zones, which increases the risk of losing valuable internal knowledge and expertise. The easier you make it for your team to share their insights, the greater the cumulative benefit to your team as a whole.

Incorporating this approach to documentation can also make your team members feel more valued. If managers or executives are the only ones who can create or amend your living documents, it can feel exclusionary to members of your team who may have genuinely great ideas or suggestions on how to improve internal processes. Allowing and encouraging every member of your team helps your company grow, but it also helps those team members feel appreciated and that their ideas have value.

Better Documentation Makes for Better Teams

Documentation might not be the most exciting aspect of your work, but it can have an immense impact on your team’s productivity, cohesion, and overall happiness. It becomes especially important if your team or company is still in an active growth stage, particularly when branching out into new products, service areas, or industries.

By standardizing document creation and working asynchronously to keep living documents up-to-date, you’re making an invaluable investment in your team’s future success.

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Great Customer Support Starts with Great Teamwork

October 18, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Not so long ago, customer support was seen as a luxury rather than a necessity.

Many companies mistakenly saw customer support as an expense to be managed rather than as an asset to be leveraged. As flawed as this position may be, it’s understandable. After all, it’s a lot easier to quantify the value of a lead or a sale than it is to somehow measure the impact of a successful support experience.

Unfortunately, one result of this mindset is that, historically, customer support teams have been overlooked or neglected in favor of more tangible investments.

For instance, customer support has very little influence on product development, yet it’s still expected to handle any and all problems created by the product. Conversely, product teams—which can shape the growth trajectory of entire companies—often leave it to customer support teams to clean up their mess on the back end.

Of course, that was then. Things are different now—much different.

In today’s completely oversaturated technology market, it’s getting harder and harder for companies to differentiate themselves from the competition solely in terms of their underlying tech. As a result, only companies that invest in their frontline staff and give them the tools and resources they need to deliver better, faster support will succeed.

One of the best ways to deliver superior customer support is to elevate your customer support teams from within. Let’s talk about how we can do this by working together—across Sales, Marketing, and Support—toward a common goal.

Help Your Teams Work Together

Picture the scene: A customer buys two brand-new smart-home speakers because of their advertised surround-sound capability. But there’s a problem: That feature isn’t due to be rolled out until much later in the year. Now somebody has to break it to the understandably upset customer that they bought a product on the basis of a feature that hasn’t yet been implemented.

These sorts of situations happen every single day, and often its Support that has to deal with the aftermath. It’s on Support to deliver the bad news, and they’re the ones who somehow have to smooth over an impossible situation as best they can.

These kinds of interactions are hugely damaging to your company’s brand, not to mention that time, energy, and resources are wasted in an effort to salvage the situation. So how can you avoid situations like this in your own company? By making sure that Sales, Marketing, and Support work in harmony to create a seamless, consistent customer experience that scales. If you get this right, you’ll join the ranks of Amazon, Zappos, and other customer-centric companies that are renowned for treating their customers well.

Ready to bring everything together and deliver a superior experience to your customers? Read on.

Nail Down Your Customer Profiles

You can’t effectively support your customers if you have no idea who they really are. That’s why developing detailed, three-dimensional personas or customer profiles is essential; it’s vital that, regardless of department or job role, everybody knows and understands your customers in the same way. If you don’t, you can’t expect to communicate effectively about your customers’ needs, desires, or motivations.

[Source]

Creating rich, detailed customer profiles helps every department better understand their role in the acquisition process.

Never created a customer profile or buyer persona? Here’s how:

Describe your company’s ideal customer: Who are they? What matters to them? Why would they choose your business over a competitor? Once you’ve started to ask these questions, give your customer persona a name and a face to make them easier to visualize and relate to.
Delve deeper and fill in the blanks: Once you’ve established the skeleton of your customer profile, it’s time to drill down so you can start fleshing out the persona further. Why wouldn’t your ideal customer do business with you? What factors are important to their decision-making process? The more detail you can capture, the better; understanding the psychological nuances of your customer will help you craft deeply relevant messaging that directly appeals to and engages your ideal customer.
Think about how your ideal customer will discover your business: For this step, it’s time to think about content. What newspapers, magazines, and blogs does your ideal customer read—and why? Which social media platforms do they use most? What does your ideal customer search for online? Where do they get their industry news? The more you know about where and how your customers are spending their time, the more effectively you can intercept their attention and position your company as a solution to their problems.

The process of crafting detailed buyer personas takes some effort, but it pays off in the long run.

Onboard New Hires the Right Way

Many companies see onboarding as little more than a glorified orientation session. Typically, this involves a myopic focus on the company, its staff, and its internal processes. Although these are all elements of better onboarding programs, it’s vital that you also teach new hires about your ideal customers and how you interact with them as a business.

Here’s what this looks like in action:

Onboarding starts before a new hire’s first day: The best teams know that onboarding truly begins far in advance of a new employee’s first day on the job. In the weeks leading up to a new hire’s first day, send a series of “pre-start” onboarding emails to the new hire to prepare them for life at your company. Each email should have a different focus, but don’t feel limited to the specifics of their role—this is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the corporate culture you’ve worked hard to cultivate, too.
Launch a “buddy” program: Pairing a new hire with a dedicated onboarding “buddy” is a great way to personalize the onboarding experience and minimize stress for the new employee. Ideally, onboarding buddies should be chosen cross-departmentally to give new hires a better sense of what people do in other departments and how they work. This context is critical in developing a consistent, organization-wide approach to supporting your customers.

It doesn’t matter whether your new hire is joining your sales team, your marketing department, or your customer success desk. The goal is to help new hires hit the ground running and gain vital insights into how you work as a company, not just as a department.

Implement Interdepartmental Training Programs

It’s hard to get everybody on the same page if people across multiple teams can’t communicate effectively with one another.

Conducting regular, interdepartmental training sessions involving Sales, Marketing, and Support is one of the best ways to develop a singular framework for thinking about your products and your customers. This is also an exercise in cultivating empathy; exposing Sales and Marketing personnel to typical support problems helps them understand the challenges support reps face every day.

There are two things you need to do to develop an effective interdepartmental training program:

Be consistent: Whether it happens once a week, once a month, or once a year, it’s vital that everybody knows exactly when the next training session is so they can prepare appropriately. The more engaging your sessions are, the more value you’ll deliver to your employees.
Be specific: Don’t focus on vague, nebulous problems—address specific, actionable issues that your departments are trying to solve right now. Once you’ve identified tangible issues to tackle, walk through the solutions with everybody, not just key stakeholders. This is another exercise in empathy; it’s difficult to bring people together if you’re not committed to a culture of transparency, accountability, and inclusivity.

Opening lines of communication between Sales, Marketing, and Support will help your sales reps and marketing personnel gain a better understanding of the problems your support team faces every single day, which in turn can help surface new ideas and innovative solutions.

Investing in Support Drives Revenue

There’s no other way to put it: The more effort and resources you devote to providing top-tier customer support, the happier your customers will be—and your revenues will likely increase alongside your customers’ happiness.

Happy Customers Are Loyal Customers

There are few customer retention strategies more potent than doing everything in your power to make your customers as happy as you can. Why? Because the decision to patronize one company over another isn’t a logical decision—it’s an emotional decision. And, whether positive or negative, your frontline support staff is often the source of that emotion.

Great customer support experiences create positive emotions that result in happier, more loyal customers. This isn’t just important in terms of customer retention; it can be a valuable asset in attracting new business:

According to American Express, happy, satisfied customers tell an average of nine people about their positive experiences with a company or brand.
Data from Right Now suggests that 73% of customers say friendly, helpful support staff can make them fall in love with a brand.

This is all well and good, but that door swings both ways:

According to Right Now, 82% of customers have abandoned a company or brand due to a negative support experience.
Approximately 67% of consumers cite bad experiences as the primary reason for churn.

Loyal Customers Spend More

It’s no secret that consumers who spend longer in a retail store are significantly more likely to spend more than in-and-out customers. This can be explained, in part, by inertia; it’s harder to stop doing something once we’ve gotten started. Fortunately, this principle also applies to users of SaaS products.

Once a customer has a positive association with a brand—whether physical or virtual—they’re much more likely to spend more:

According to Temkin Group, 86% of consumers who have a positive interaction with a brand are likely to repurchase from that business.
Data from Medallia, a provider of customer-experience software, suggests that customers who report the best experiences with brands spend approximately 2.4x more annually than customers who report negative experiences.

Investing in Support Is Investing In Your Business

For far too long, customer support has been seen as an add-on, rather than an essential component of a business’s retention strategies. It’s only in the past few years that companies have begun to rethink their relationship with support teams and recognize superior support as a key differentiator in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

That’s why it’s crucial to empower your support team internally. That means facilitating communication between departments, helping employees work together toward shared objectives, and solving problems creatively by inviting everyone to participate.

Support teams can’t do their job without support. That means not only investing in new technologies but also securing buy-in across the entire company and making superior support a core part of everything you do as a business.

P.S. If you liked this article, you should subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll email you a daily blog post with actionable and unconventional advice on how to work better.

3 Ways to Prioritize Product Development with Matrices

October 11, 2018 by Walter Leave a Comment

Even the most organized people only have so much time, which makes prioritizing work all the more important. But how do you prioritize which tasks or product features to focus on when you’re faced with dozens of potential opportunities and a small army of stakeholders?

Matrices are simple organizational tools that can help you and your team visualize your product’s potential features within the context of all the possible features you could develop.

Although there are several different types of prioritization matrices, in today’s post we’ll be looking at three of the most common: the value-complexity matrix, the value-risk matrix, and agile user story mapping.

Prioritizing Product Features Using a Value-Complexity Matrix

As its name implies, value-complexity matrices plot the potential value of a product feature alongside the complexity of implementing such features. Put another way, this kind of matrix categorizes product features by their expected business value and their implementation complexity.

The definition of “business value” will vary from one company to another, even among competing businesses in the same industry or vertical. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of factors that can determine the business value of a product feature, from a proposed feature’s potential value to end users to the traffic or revenue that feature could potentially generate.

“Implementation complexity” is a similarly broad term that can encompass a range of technical challenges, from the length of time a proposed feature will take to integrate into an existing system to the costs of actually developing that feature.

At their simplest, value-complexity matrices can be formatted as a 2×2 grid of quadrants. The business value of a project can be categorized as either high or low, whereas the implementation complexity of a project can be represented as low or high.

[Source]

High-value, low-complexity items are the “low-hanging” fruit; these items should be strongly considered for further development given their high potential impact on the business and the ease with which they can be implemented. However, while you can and should pursue these high-value, low-complexity opportunities, it’s vital not to focus on these opportunities to the exclusion of all others. Many startups mistakenly focus all their efforts on securing these easier wins, often to the detriment of high-value, high-complexity features.

High-value, high-complexity items are often broader, more strategic initiatives that require a much greater investment of time, money, and/or effort. Despite the higher costs of implementing these features, high-value, high-complexity features can be immensely valuable in the long run. Rather than overlook these opportunities, consider examining these items to see if any of these longer-term goals can be broken down into simpler, easier subtasks.

Low-value, low-complexity opportunities may be worthwhile exploring eventually, but they should not be prioritized above the high-value features you’ve identified in your project. These ideas may be worth revisiting further down the road, and it may be worth examining whether there are opportunities to derive greater value from these items in the future.

Low-value, high-complexity items should be avoided at all costs. Not only do these opportunities offer little in terms of business value, the complexity of their implementation means these features are effectively off-limits.

Prioritizing Product Features Using a Value-Risk Matrix

Another way to evaluate the potential business impact of proposed product features is to use a value-risk matrix. Similarly to our value-complexity matrix above, value-risk matrices also categorize product features according to their potential business impact but also categorize these opportunities by the overall risk that their implementation poses to the business.

No business can completely insulate itself from all risk, especially when it comes to product development. However, you can categorize and plan for potential risks using a value-risk matrix, especially if you’re not completely sure about your underlying assumptions about a particular product feature. This makes value-risk matrices ideally suited to calculating the potential impact of completely new ideas and initiatives.

Like our value-complexity matrix, value-risk matrices can be structured as a 2×2 grid of quadrants: a project’s value can be categorized as either low or high, as can the associated risk:

High-value, low-risk opportunities are your most urgent priorities. These items promise high value to the business or user while carrying little or no risk, making them the most effective investment of your time and resources.

High-value, high-risk items are also deserving of serious consideration. However, while the potential impact of these opportunities can be exciting, the risks associated with these features can necessitate a more strategic approach, particularly if the risks are primarily financial.

Low-value, low-risk opportunities are definitely worth exploring but only once your high-value, low-risk opportunities have been prioritized. Implementing several lower-value features can have a larger cumulative impact over time, but their individual value makes them less urgent than other priorities.

Low-value, high-risk items should generally be avoided. Not only does their risk outweigh the potential benefits, but pursuing these opportunities could jeopardize the execution of higher-priority items.

Prioritizing Product Features with User Story Maps

So far, we’ve focused on techniques that emphasize the needs of your business and your product development teams. Sometimes, however, you need to put your users first, which is when user story mapping comes into play.

Originally developed by product management consultant Jeff Patton in 2005, user story maps plot your product development priorities against your users’ experiences of actually using your product.

[Source]

Unlike our first two examples, there is no one definitive way to structure or visualize a user story map. There are, however, some commonalities you’ll see among many user story maps.

The top row in our example user story map above (in blue) focuses on things that the user can do. This might include searching for a specific product, adding that product to an ecommerce shopping cart, paying for the product at checkout, or abandoning the cart. These events are typically presented sequentially from left to right, representing the various stages of the user journey.

The second row (in green) represents the various actions that the user can take to complete a given task. The remaining rows (in yellow) represent available subtasks or actions. As you can see in the figure above, the lower an item is in the user story map, the less significant or necessary that subtask is. Many companies can and do segment their subtasks by planned release, which allows development teams to further prioritize subtasks by urgency.

One aspect of user story maps that makes them so versatile is the freedom with which teams can reorganize and reorder tasks as a product is developed. This flexibility can be a major advantage when planning development cycles, as unlike the value-complexity and value-risk matrices, the stories within a user map can be changed, moved, and adjusted over time.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road(map)

The three examples are great starting points for further project planning. For example, if budgetary concerns are among your most urgent priorities, you might find that adapting a value-complexity matrix into a value-cost matrix is more useful.

Your team’s objectives will inform not only what you should be focusing your time and efforts on, but also how you’ll identify and distinguish urgent opportunities; a scrappy, two-person startup that needs to reach product-market fit ASAP will have very different priorities than an established, legacy enterprise IT firm.

When it comes to product development and planning your next dev cycle, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. There is no “correct” way of developing your product roadmap. When putting your product roadmap together, encourage every member of your team to help define and structure the process rather than forcing your team to adapt to a rigid, inflexible roadmap. Your team will be happier, your product will be better, and your users will definitely appreciate it.

P.S. If you liked this article, you should subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll email you a daily blog post with actionable and unconventional advice on how to work better.

How to cultivate a culture of open feedback

August 14, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Giving feedback can be terrifying. You’re often afraid of being too direct and setting a team member on the defensive. Or you’re worried that you’ll temper criticism with too much praise — losing your message in translation. Because giving feedback is difficult, people often do the exact wrong thing and avoid giving feedback altogether.

That’s one of the worst decisions you can make. When you withhold feedback not only do you risk the team member making the same mistake over and over again — but you deprive them of the opportunity to improve.

When you create an organizational culture around clear, open feedback, you’re making a promise between team members to compound and learn from past mistakes.

7 Lessons on Survivorship Bias that Will Help You Make Better Decisions

July 24, 2018 by Walker Donohue 2 Comments

Everyone loves a survivor.

We love watching movies like Gladiator, where a muscular Russell Crowe stands tall after defeating wave after wave of enemies.

Sometimes, however, we concentrate on the fact of surviving and fixate on that, and overlook everything else. This is a well known cognitive bias that psychologists refer to as “survivorship bias.”

Put simply, survivorship bias describes our tendency to focus on the people or things that have passed some kind of selection process—whether it’s literal survival in the gladiator pits, or getting a perfect score on a standardized test—and forgetting about other important factors.

Survivorship bias explains why people often believe that cars that were made 50 years ago last longer than those made today—even though these ideas are empirically false. The problem with falling prey to survivorship data is that it clouds your judgment and distracts you from getting to the root cause of a problem within your personal life, your team, or your product. It makes it easy to pattern-match and conflate correlation with causation.

Understanding survivorship bias and how it can cloud your judgment is the key to becoming a sharper, more critical thinking. That can lead to better team-decision making, building a more cohesive product, or making data-driven decisions like a scientist. Let’s walk through some examples!

People Management

Make Your Ideas Stick

Create Accountability

Force Critical Thinking

Use Writing as a Productivity Tool

Why Customers Dread Calling Customer Support Numbers

Customer Support Is a Critical Competitive Advantage

Give Your Customers the Support They Deserve

Healthy, Productive Cultures Don’t Just Happen

What We Really Mean When We Talk About ‘Culture’

Action + Communication = Values

Values Are Meaningless Until We Act Upon Them

Avoiding Culture Shock

Start with Standardization

Build Living Documents That Grow with Your Company

Use Asynchronous Communication to Empower EVERY Member of Your Team

Better Documentation Makes for Better Teams

Help Your Teams Work Together

Nail Down Your Customer Profiles

Onboard New Hires the Right Way

Implement Interdepartmental Training Programs

Investing in Support Drives Revenue

Happy Customers Are Loyal Customers

Loyal Customers Spend More

Investing in Support Is Investing In Your Business

Prioritizing Product Features Using a Value-Complexity Matrix

Prioritizing Product Features Using a Value-Risk Matrix

Prioritizing Product Features with User Story Maps

Where the Rubber Meets the Road(map)

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