Podcasts about Poornima Vijayashanker

106. Karen Catlin - Generous Allyship  “One of my favorite approaches for giving people feedback on non-inclusive language or other non-inclusive behavior. And that is, seek common ground and then educate.” - Karen Catlin “Be curious, not furious.” - Karen Catlin Karen Catlin Guest Bio: After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. In 2014, Karen started the Twitter handle @betterallies to share simple, actionable steps that anyone could take to make their workplaces more inclusive. That Twitter handle became the inspiration for three books: Better Allies®: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces, The Better Allies Approach to Hiring, and Belonging in Healthcare. She also emails a roundup of “5 Ally Actions” to over 30,000 newsletter subscribers every week. A self-professed public speaking geek, Karen is a highly sought-after and engaging presenter who has delivered talks at hundreds of conferences and corporate events. Her TEDx talk, “Women in Tech: The Missing Force,” explores the decline in gender diversity in tech, why it's a problem, and what can be done about it. In addition to speaking herself, Karen is determined to change the ratio for who is on stage giving keynotes and other presentations. To support her goal of bringing more diversity to speaker lineups at tech industry events, she coauthored the book Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking with Poornima Vijayashanker. In addition to speaking about her books, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies for members of all underrepresented groups. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, Google, eBay, and Intuit. Her writing on leadership has appeared in Inc., the Daily Beast, Fast Company, and the Muse, and she's consulted on articles for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times. Karen is a graduate and active alum of Brown University, mentoring students on how to launch their careers. She's also a member of the board of directors of Digital NEST and on the advisory boards for the Women's CLUB of Silicon Valley and WEST (Women Entering & Staying in Technology). In 2015, the California State Assembly honored Karen with the Wonder Women Tech Innovator Award for outstanding achievements in business and technology and for being a role model for women. Guest Favorite Quote:  “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” - Maya Angelou R.O.G. Takeaway Tips: Share the spotlight. Take the 50 Potential Privileges Checklist  Share office housework Set up your profile with inclusive requirements. (closed captions, diverse panels, etc.)  Keep growing on the journey. Subscribe to 5 Ally Actions for specific ideas on how to continue to grow.  Resources: www.karencatlin.com www.betterallies.com Additional Better Allies Content Better Allies Weekly Newletter Karen Catlin on LinkedIn (ln/kecatlin) Karen Catlin on Twitter (@kecatlin) Karen Catlin on Instagram (@karencatlin) Better Allies on Instagram (@betterallies) Better Allies on Twitter (@betterallies) Network Diversity Index Quiz Coming Next: Episode 107, Building Bridges Coaching Tips for Generous Leaders with Shannon Cassidy. Topic: Generous V.I.B.E.   Credits: Karen Catlin, Sheep Jam Productions, Host Shannon Cassidy, Bridge Between, Inc.

After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen coaches women to be stronger leaders and men to be better allies. Her client roster includes Airbnb, DoorDash, eBay, Intel, and Intuit, as well as motivated entrepreneurs and individuals. Karen's coaching offerings include tactics for increasing visibility, being more strategic, managing stakeholders, negotiation, and cultivating ally skills. Her writing on these and related topics has appeared in Inc., the Daily Beast, Fast Company, and The Muse, and she's consulted on articles for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times. In late 2014, Karen started the Twitter handle @betterallies to share simple, actionable steps that anyone could take to make their workplaces more inclusive. That Twitter handle became the inspiration for her books, Better Allies®: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces and The Better Allies Approach to Hiring. She continues to tweet and blog for Better Allies, and she also emails a roundup of “5 Ally Actions” to her subscribers every week. A self-professed public speaking geek, Karen is a highly sought-after and engaging presenter who has delivered talks at hundreds of conferences and corporate events. She speaks on a variety of topics, including inclusive workplaces and women in leadership. Her TEDx talk, “Women in Tech: The Missing Force,” explores the decline in gender diversity in tech, why it's a problem, and what can be done about it. In addition to speaking herself, Karen is determined to change the ratio for who is on stage giving keynotes and other presentations. To support her goal of bringing more diversity to speaker lineups at tech industry events, she coauthored the book Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking with Poornima Vijayashanker. Karen is a graduate and active alum of Brown University, serving as an advisor to the university's Computer Science Diversity Initiative and mentoring students on how to launch their careers. She's also a member of the board of directors of DigitalNEST and on the advisory boards for the Women's CLUB of Silicon Valley and WEST (Women Entering & Staying in Technology). In 2015, the California State Assembly honored Karen with the Wonder Women Tech Innovator Award for outstanding achievements in business and technology and for being a role model for women. What you will learn in this episode: Why Karen wanted to make workplaces more inclusive How our words and our actions can speak to people about being more inclusive What simple, everyday actions and language can we take and use to be more inclusive What is the difference between intending to be an ally vs being an ally How do you interject without making the perpetrator look bad How to seek common ground before educating someone What phrases or language is surprisingly racist or non-inclusive What behaviors and language can we stop doing and uses to be better allies Resources: Website: https://karencatlin.com/ https://betterallies.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kecatlin/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kecatlin https://twitter.com/betterallies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karencatlin/ https://www.instagram.com/betterallies/

Public Speaking for Techie's James Taylor interviews Poornima Vijayashanker and they talked about Public Speaking for Techie's In today's episode Poornima Vijayashanker talks about Public Speaking for Techie's. Poornima Vijayashanker is an entrepreneur, engineer, author, and speaker who has made her mark in the tech world. A graduate of Duke University, Poornima was the founding engineer at Mint where she helped build, launch, and scale the product until it was acquired by Intuit. Following the acquisition, Poornima went on to launch Femgineer, an education company for tech professionals and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to build software products and companies. She regularly speaks at industry events around the world and has authored the book, How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products, as well as co-authoring Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking with Karen Catlin. Having served as the Entrepreneur in Residence at 500 Startups, Poornima has also lectured at her alma mater's Pratt School of Engineering. What we cover: Why speaking is a multivitamin Public speaking for techie's and the curse of knowledge Lack of diversity in keynotes and panels Resources: Poornima Vijayashanker Website Please SUBSCRIBE ►http://bit.ly/JTme-ytsub ♥️ Your Support Appreciated! If you enjoyed the show, please rate it on YouTube, iTunes or Stitcher and write a brief review. That would really help get the word out and raise the visibility of the Creative Life show. SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW Apple: http://bit.ly/TSL-apple Libsyn: http://bit.ly/TSL-libsyn Spotify: http://bit.ly/TSL-spotify Android: http://bit.ly/TSL-android Stitcher: http://bit.ly/TSL-stitcher CTA link: https://speakersu.com/the-speakers-life/ FOLLOW ME: Website: https://speakersu.com LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/JTme-linkedin Instagram: http://bit.ly/JTme-ig Twitter: http://bit.ly/JTme-twitter Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/IS-fbgroup Read full transcript at https://speakersu.com/public-speaking-for-techies-sl074/  James Taylor Hi, it's James Taylor, founder of SpeakersU. Today's episode was first aired as part of International Speakers Summit the world's largest online event for professional speakers. And if you'd like to access the full video version, as well as in depth sessions with over 150 top speakers, then I've got a very special offer for you. Just go to InternationalSpeakersSummit.com, where you'll be able to register for a free pass for the summit. Yep, that's right 150 of the world's top speakers sharing their insights, strategies and tactics on how to launch grow and build a successful speaking business. So just go to InternationalSpeakersSummit.com but not before you listen to today's episode. Hi there. It's James Taylor. I'm delighted today to be joined by Poornima Vijayashanker. She is an entrepreneur, engineer, author and speaker who has made her mark on the tech world, a graduate of Duke University. Poornima was the founding engineer at mint where she helped build, launch and scale the product until it was acquired by Intuit following acquisition Poornima went on to launch with femme Junya, which is an education company for tech professionals and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to build software products and companies. Now, she regularly speaks at industry events around the world and she has authored the book how to transform your ideas into software products, as well as co authoring present a techies guide to public speaking with Karen Karen Caitlin, having served as an entrepreneur in residence at 500 startups. Poornima has also lectured at our alma mater, which is Pratt School of Engineering. It's my great pleasure to have her join us today. So welcome Poornima Poornima Vijayashanker thanks for having me today. James Taylor So share with everyone what's going on in your world just now. Poornima Vijayashanker Well, we have started our six week online competent communicator course. And we're in the middle of it. It's great to see so many first time people who have been speaking for a while, learn a new approach and apply that and I know this is where a lot of people realize, wow, this course is tough or this is getting hard. So it's great to see that there's still Sticking with the program that they're getting through it, that they're at least diving in to try our new approach. And that is my sort of day for today is focused on giving them feedback on that new approach. James Taylor I mentioned. You know, obviously, you had this basic set, you've been very successful career in tech. When did the speaking part of you get started? When did you find you develop this love of speaking and speaking to, especially at conferences that you speak today? Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, well, actually, I have been speaking for a very long time I in my youth was a very shy kid, and I figured around middle school that life was going to be hard if I didn't do something to change that. So I joined my middle school in high school Speech and Debate Team, and I was really glad that I did you know, it helped me Ace my college interview, and then go on to ace my first job interview, and then do more complicated things here in Silicon Valley, like, evangelize the companies into the startups that I started, help recruit and pitch investors. For me. public speaking is definitely a multivitamin and it's Something that Karen Catlin, my co author and I really evangelize it's, you know, it's a thing that people don't recognize. And it's definitely hard to get started in, especially if you have a fear of it, you're not sure if you're an expert, not sure where to speak. But once you get going, you start to see a number of benefits, as well as the people on the receiving end who hear your message. And so I have been applying public speaking any way I can. And I found that I benefit from it in terms of a business and building a personal brand. But the people who are listening also get a chance to connect with me, James Taylor and who are those? Do you have a kind of any early mentors and you're speaking over the particular speakers that you look towards? These are all I like, I like what they do in terms of how they present or how they think, Poornima Vijayashanker you know, I didn't because I didn't know any better. So when I started to speak, I, this was back in 2008. There weren't a lot of resources out there for technical Speaking there were four general public speaking. And I had learned them again in high school. And in college, I had a great debate coach who helped me not only with debate but do things like extemporaneous speaking, and improv improvisation. So I had a great coach in that capacity. But when I transitioned into industry, I noticed that one there weren't a lot of technical folks speaking in general, or the styles is not quite developed. And two, there weren't a lot of women or other folks that I could look up to. So I just honestly started to develop my own style. And then periodically I would come across great resources. You know, Scott birkins, got a good book. There is Reynolds who's got that great book on, on doing slide design. And so I started to pick up elements here and there, but quite frankly, it wasn't until I was pretty deep in that I realized, Oh, I have kind of cultivated my own framework from best and worst things that I've experienced. So I didn't really have somebody that I looked up to initially or had as a mentor. It was a lot of it was just audience feedback, and getting a sense of what was working and what wasn't. James Taylor I mean, you think of, I think of some of the best keynotes I've ever seen. And some of them are actually product keynotes. So I think, you know, the classic Steve Jobs at the Moscone Center near where you you're speaking from today, you know, he's a classic, you know, there's that that but often feels like in, in the kind of tech world in that kind of Silicon Valley world, that a lot of the speakers are in the either the marketing the sales or the biz, biz dev world, they're kind of getting more natural speakers. Are you starting to see that change now, within the more engineering community, you know, the people are actually building the stuff and creating these incredible products actually, you know, coming bit more To the fool there. Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, it's in the last couple years, just as there's been an explosion in terms of conferences worldwide for marketing and for sales and for product. There has definitely been a interest to do more technical conferences. technical courses have been going on forever, I think. And in my early career, like around 2004 2005, I would go to some of these. But there were pretty big gating factors, you know, you had to really take the time to submit a proposal, there were a couple major conferences happening at Moscone Center around the world. And now you're seeing there's a lot of unconferences. There are smaller regional conferences. There are conferences that have started to add a technical component. And so it's been great that there's more and more interest, but as a result, we need more speakers. And you start to see more technical folks saying, oh, maybe it's time that I branch out, and I do More public speaking to recruit to do product demos, or just to showcase the technical work that I have done in my team has done or my company's done. So you're starting to see more and more of that. But I would say, Yeah, for the last 10 years, it's definitely been on the rise. And I anticipate more technical conferences coming out, just like there are other conferences in verticals. James Taylor So this is the whole Silicon Valley tech sector has also come into the spotlight a lot recently, in terms of lack of diversity as conferences I saw, I saw one the other day and I think it was like 40 speakers at this event and there was not a single woman, you get this. So that's the first kind of like, okay, so I'm getting because you're coming from an engineering what and there's obviously there's that there's a strong sense in the engineering side and take that there needs to be a big rebound in terms of creating greater diversity, more inclusion there as well. What's happening when it comes to the more technical conferences and those kind of events are they Really now having to basically take a look at what they're doing and completely kind of rethink in terms of how they're appealing to speakers how they're bringing in speakers how they're potentially betting speakers. Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, well, I will say this, there's really no excuse because Grace Hopper celebration, which is the largest technical conference for women, has over 10,000 attendees and grows every year by probably 20 or more percent. And they don't have a problem getting women to do technical talks at every level, whether it's entry all the way up to senior level executive positions and sea level suites, right. So if they can, if they can manage to scrape at you know, that many attendees as well as speakers and turn people away, then I think that there is a big market for getting speakers into some of these other events. So I push back a little bit in terms of how aware people are how much of a priority it is for them. For my personal experience, what I have noticed is there is definitely an interest. You know, women certainly want to get out and speak. They're certainly full of doing it. They have to they're either far enough along in their career or there is even early folks who are like, there's I have something to share, right. And what I've noticed the last couple years, is there are conferences that are adopting a code of conduct in terms of diversity of speakers, diversity across not only genders, but you know, people of color, etc. And so the conferences who are more, I would say aware and with it are adopting these policies, not only to recruit speakers, but also how they conduct the conference itself. And I think it's getting getting with the times and recognizing this because the ones that do end up attracting more attendees, attracting the type of attendees that they want And it ends up being a more vibrant conference that lasts for many, many years. So this is something I think that people have to start to invest in if they are going to consider doing this conference again, having it be successful and having it be profitable because at the end of the day of conference as a business, right, James Taylor the other thing I often think about is a speaker's when we speak at a conference, we keynote a conference, We're often asked by that, that meeting planner, that event conference organizer to recommend a speaker for the next year. And I, I was thinking about it a lot, you know, you and I were in a mastermind group has actually predominantly female as well in that particular group. And, and I was thinking about as well as okay, because this question comes in so often from event planners, like who would you recommend? And I, I used to, I used to be okay, well, I'd recommend this guy because he was very similar to me be spoken with a different subject from me. And so it was, it was I was going into a default position and without without giving any thought, and it was just like it was thoughtless. Okay, this person, I know him, I like him, I think he would do a good job for the client. And it's what it's made me do as a speaker. And in terms of, you know, my continual development is having to rethink, okay, I need to have a much broader sense of who's out there, who's, who's doing like, Great stuff. And so this is a training for me. I don't know if you'll find finding this in terms of, because it's so much business is referral based, you know, for other speakers. Poornima Vijayashanker Definitely. And I mean, you have a sense of who the best speakers are. So, one of the excuses I hear from a lot of folks says, Oh, well, everyone was just too busy. Like, literally all the women who know how to speak. We're just too busy. James Taylor That day, they were Poornima Vijayashanker like, oh, what was it International Women's Day, like, what what was the reason right? And I think what it means is that a they don't think about it early on enough because they're waiting until the last minute, right? It's not Maybe a month or maybe two months out, or sometimes even two weeks, I've heard so many requests from people, sometimes even two days before saying, Oh, can you get me some money, nobody's gonna drop work or even get the time off to come and speak at your event with that much lead time, right? You've got to start thinking earlier, three months, six months, if you want to get on people's calendars, if you want to be taken seriously and be known as a professional, you know, organizations, so start to do it earlier on and make that a priority. And then of course, if you have situations where people say, Oh, I can't do this, or you know, I just happen to have a conflict, then having them suggest somebody else, but but the other place is to have your own watering holes. So for example, earlier this year, my sponsor actually tasked me with putting on a panel. And, you know, the sponsor said, Well, here's a panel for you, please moderate it. And I took one look at that panel, and it was me and I think there was one other woman and the For guys, and I was like, I can't do this panel, you know, and I pushed back. And of course, my sponsor and I have been working together for four years. So I had that ability to speak up and he is a great ally, had he not, I probably would have just said, like, sorry, I'm too busy can't make it right. Or you probably wouldn't be my sponsor. So I took the time and I said, Look, this panel is just not attractive for these reasons. And if you want me to moderate this, here's what I want to see. I need you to cut out at least two spots, and I want to replace them. And I'm happy to bring you people but what I don't want to see is four guys and one woman and then me as the moderator, that's not a very balanced panel. So he kind of tasked cast me with Okay, fine, go find the people make sure that they can speak here's kind of the background. And I already had a couple watering holes. You know, I am part of a couple slack communities. Obviously I have my own network. I have students that I train, so I have a lot of places that I can pull from. I still found it a little challenging. I won't say that people just trickled into me But within a couple days, I was able to get people to say I'm interested. And then from there, I went through their profiles to see that they had spoken. They had either a YouTube video or they had spoken somewhere before that could vouch for them. And I ended up actually, surprisingly, getting to women. And then what ended up happening was one of the guys who was on the panel, I couldn't make it. And so he gave up his spot to a female colleague, and the panel ended up being five women or was like four women and one guy, which is kind of coincidence. We didn't really planned it to be that way. But I gotta say, what ended up happening was, there was a awesome audience turnout, we were pretty much sold out. The people that came out said, Oh, somebody really put a lot of thought into this panel. And a lot of women came out saying, Oh, I looked at the roster. I saw that it was a great representation of women who are doing pretty advanced stuff. I mean, We had somebody who was doing augmented and virtual reality, we had someone who was a product manager for the last 1015 years. So these were not like, oh, let's just find somebody who's a recent grad or flexibly up the street, these were experienced individuals, right? Taking the time to think through who needs to be there, why and how that's going to reflect the audience and how they perceive this panel was important. So you've got to have somebody that's going to push back a little, as well as pluck the folks and say, these are the people that need to be on this. This is how it's going to operate. And that, of course, takes time, I understand. But if you don't put in that effort, then you know, people are gonna be like, Oh, this is just like any OLED panel. You know, why bother? And you're not going to get the response that you want to see. James Taylor Yeah, I mean, I think I was I heard from a speaker in Singapore the other day, saying, Yes, it is. I'm actually getting home our speaker together, we're going to refuse to be on all matters. panels we get things like this normal panels to be basically declined now, and we say okay, we think and we get it sometimes it's it's just, they haven't thought they're just not. It's just like it's like as you say it's last minute, I'll just, you know, they're not really thinking in any kind of way in terms of what potentially is going to be in the best interest of the audience in terms of having diversity of ideas and those people diversity of ideas as well. I'm wondering, so my wife is a an engineer. She's a mechanical engineer by trade. So I often test out my keynotes and her because her brain is very different to mine. She thinks much more analytically, you know, she's into the detail and stuff like that as well. So I'm very lucky I've kind of got that person that I've got that techie person to test out things on. For someone that doesn't have that. How should they be if they're working out their keynote and then knowing they know they're going to be speaking to more technical audience does have to be engineers, maybe scientists are more technical audience anyway. How should they be thinking about preparing If they're not necessarily a technical person themselves, Poornima Vijayashanker so I read a really interesting book recently by Angie Panzer, and it's all about writing for the workplace. And I thought that the takeaways apply to speaking as well. And the one thing that she mentioned in her book was how a lot of times when we write, if the writing is very dense, if it's convoluted, then the reader looks at the writer and says, Oh, this person, just, you know, isn't a very good writer, and isn't a very polished person or professional person, because of the cognitive load they put on the reader. Now, if the writer instead uses simple language, despite what level the reader may be at, right, the reader immediately gets it they kind of flow through the book, and they're thinking wow, I totally understand all these concepts. I was able to finish the book you know, cover to cover and they feel empowered, right. Same same rules apply to being a Speaker, it doesn't matter whether you are going in front of a technical audience or a lay person audience, you have to take the time to say, I'm presenting this information, there may be jargon, there may be concepts that are or things that, you know, I discovered that other people may not know, right, the curse of knowledge. So how can I best convey it in a way that's easily digestible? Not patronizing, you know, so that's the tone depends, and depends on how you how you phrase it and how you deliver it in your tone. But if you can incorporate that, then audiences are going to feel like wow, this was a very polished speaker, a professional speaker, a knowledgeable speaker, because you've done all the work for them. So regardless of who your audience is, whether it's technical or non technical, I always encourage people to do that. And it does work. That's the thing like once you start to do it, you're like, wow, I felt like I had stripped a lot of the content out I made the message simpler. I had a smaller table. takeaways are fewer takeaways. And people were thankful, you know, nobody said it was too watered down. And nobody said it was too dense. It was just right. And that takes a level of practice. But I would encourage your people in your audience to think about that, how can I take my message, regardless of the audience, and make sure that it's simple, because the people on the receiving end are going to are going to judge the quality of the speaker based on how simple you make it. James Taylor It's really that that line, which someone said, Kevin, which famous author said, it's Sorry, I'm having to write you a long letter, I didn't have time to write your shorter letter, because the writing the shorter takes so much more work. And you have to really think, you know, much, much more intensely about how do I want to distill this down. I'm also wondering, now you're saying this, I'm reflecting on some of the some of the speakers I really like and they often speak as three different levels so that there's so even if I'm not attending, I go and listen to them speak. I understand cuz they're speaking of the usual most consistent and things like that. So, you know, they'll relate it to maybe foods or things I get as a non technical person. But then there's another level up, which is maybe the more executive level and that executive executive level to certain using certain concepts there. And then there's another level again, when they using whether it's in terms of certain jargon, or they're giving clues. They're giving a sense at this point. I know what I'm talking about here. But I'm also having to create a create a talk and I think that's, that's must be a fine balance to be able to, to get a get a message across in that way. Poornima Vijayashanker Sure. Well think about this way, even your executive who has a million things going on in their head, they, they've got thousands of people pitching them, they've got emails coming in, they have their own decisions to make, right even if you were to take the time and put something into a simple analogy, or contexts that they're going to get in the first you know, 30 seconds or three minutes. You have just now saved them from having to do that load, right that that cognitive load. And so even for the folks who are like that, I find that it's very, very helpful to make the jargon of the company to demonstrate that you know what they're talking about, right? So if you say something like, Oh, yes, I understand that this company you guys use, okay, ours okrs mean, blah. Here's how I think you know, what I'm talking about relates to that. So you can you can kind of get your foot in the door and demonstrate credibility. But again, think about what that person on the receiving end goes through on a day to day and really take the time to say, How can I present this information? Because my sense is you're going to want to get something out of that relationship later on. You may want to go on to do consulting, you may want to get hired on again, as a keynote speaker, you may want a referral, right? And so when you've done that heavy lifting for them, Then all of a sudden, they're like, Oh, this person was fantastic, right? And it, it becomes this thing that people, like, I can't put my finger on it. But that's essentially what they're doing. And, and storytelling is one format to do that in analogies or another. But you've really got to think about that cognitive load on your audience member. James Taylor I'm thinking that's sometimes the benefit of being the closing keynote speaker, as opposed to opening is if you can get in a few days early to the event, and you can spend time and then you quickly get to hear the language of, of the delegates, what the toys but if it's an industry you don't know about, there's downsides, obviously, to be in a closing keynote, a lot of people thinking about leaving, where am I going to go? Like, I've got to catch my flight, but there's definitely some, some benefits there. So you're, I know you have this this, this course, which is really helping, the more more techies, you know, speak whether that's because they have to go and present product launches or whether they have to present to the teams or selling an idea, maybe to a client as well. What when when you start getting you know, working with those people When people say kind of going through that course, what is the what is the aha moment? Do you see from them where they suddenly go? Oh, okay. Oh, this this concept is just opened up his knees changed my paradigm on how to speak what was the thing that you tend to find there? Poornima Vijayashanker Well, I think the first is because so many of these folks don't tend to be presenters on a day to day basis, like a salesperson or a marketer would be their first resistance is Oh, I'm just not a natural speaker. Right? And, and getting them over that initial hump of you're going to be nervous. Everybody's nervous nerves are okay, here's how to manage that nervousness is the first hurdle. And so we do that through some pretty simple exercises that have nothing to do with anything technical, right? We just, we make it really, really easy. One of the first exercises I do is describe to me your favorite dessert, and that's something anybody can do. Right? And then they see Oh, that was it was kind of challenging to do, but I did it and it works. makes them realize that they can achieve something. The next phase is, I'm not an expert, right? Because even though people may be technical, they may think that they are not as big as the next person. Or maybe they're not far enough along in their career, or they don't have something novel and earth shattering to share. So the second thing that we help them do is really extract their expertise by looking at what they've already done, and realizing that there are people out there who may be less experienced or less knowledgeable than them. And those are the folks that want to learn. And so that's kind of the second breakthrough moment they have. And then the third is explaining to them just like building a product, no writing software or hardware or whatever they're working on has a process, there is a process to creating a talk. Once they get over that, then they're like, Oh, well, now I know like how to put this together, but up until then, they feel like it's a mystery and that you have to be really good. charismatic and you have to be leading like, a billion dollar company like jobs in order to do it. So. So once we get to walk them through these three phases, they immediately have a sense of I can do this going forward. And yes, I'm still going to be nervous. Yes, there's going to be moments where I'm going to need to break down abstract concepts, I'm going to need to practice my talk, right? But those I would say, are like the three pillars that we build on, so that by the end, everybody in our course, is doing at least a five minute lightning talk. And it's, it's pretty transformative, you know, recording them throughout. And then at the end, sometimes they say, Oh, you know, I was really nervous. I don't know how I did. So we make them go back and watch it. And the next day, they're like, Oh, my gosh, I didn't recognize myself. It's like what the majority of students say. So it's fantastic to be part of that process. And to see how awakened they become and to see that they can, they can do it and they just, they just needed somebody to kind of guide them along and to help hold them accountable through each of those steps. James Taylor Now you're in the land of tech. So I want to make a couple of quick fire questions here. What is that app that you're using just now the or the online tool? Do you find really useful for yourself? Especially for the speaking part of you it could be in terms of how you prepare or it could be in terms of how you get your speaking gigs or deliver on your on your speaking What? Are there any tools you really enjoy using? Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, unfortunately, I don't have a lot of tools that I use to get engagements I find that most of my engagements I have to just do sort of the general sales process of cold calling or cold outreach to people through email following up. I will say that what has helped a lot this year in particular, is my YouTube channel. So having and that I've been building for the last four years. So it's kind of funny that it was only recently that I'm starting to get more and more interest. And the thing about my youtube channel is I have a variety in In terms of the content that I produce, I have some short videos that are about a minute to five minutes long. I have longer videos that are interviews that I do for my monthly or weekly web. And then I have ones that are probably 15 or so minutes. I also take any previous talks that I've done, and I put them up there so that people can see. And that ends up being one a really great source of interest and to credibility, because at the end of the day, if somebody is paying me to come and speak at their conference, they want to know, okay, can this person actually deliver? Yeah, and having that video, no matter how long or short it is, can get your foot in the door and also help close the deal, versus a lot of people I know, don't have a video, and it doesn't have to be something highly produced. You know, one of the earliest videos I did was just me standing in front of a camera speaking to people talking to them about what Fungineer was. I was about three minutes. Long as if you can create a simple explainer video, you can use that in so many places, certainly on YouTube, but in your email signature, you know, as people request a sample, and I feel like that is really, really critical having that piece of video, and if you can emulate a audience setting, because I have a couple where I'm speaking to people, getting those audience reactions can be valuable, because a lot of a lot of organizers want to see how the audience reacts to what you're saying. So I also have my like TEDx talk in there. And that's very helpful. James Taylor No, that's gramming I think YouTube is such a powerful place. Because, you know, when I talk to meeting planners, it's like the number one if they're looking for, let's say, a speaker on innovation, that that they go to YouTube first is that it's the place to go. And then the other interesting when they'll if they're looking at speakers, because of the way that the the, the recommendation engine works on YouTube. If you've got your tagging, right, and your titles and a bunch of other things right, then you can actually get seen by the people who have Wherever you whoever you know that there will be a guru in your topic, you could get seen, you know, after that video, you know the recommended videos as well. So I think that's great. I think that's it. That's a great suggestion. What about books you mentioned Scott Burke and his book was a great book on on speaking, it was another book. It doesn't have to be on speaking, but maybe it could be on. It could be on, you know, the world of tech. It could be some of it some of the topics that you talk on. Poornima Vijayashanker Yeah, well, actually, right now I'm diving into a Patsy rodenburg book on presence, the second circle book, and I did that because I understand how to be present with my audience. I've been doing this for so long, but I need to be able to convey that it to my students, and I need to have a resource to do that. So I've actually found her book really helpful, because she very clearly explains why some people kind of get stuck in their own head or their maybe two outward, you know, it's sort of the overly salesy person or the old Really bubbly person? And how do you kind of rein that in and present with your audience? And again, that's where you develop the connection with your audience. And so for me, I'm, I'm currently reading that, and I think it's I think it's a great read. So I would recommend it for people who have maybe started speaking, but they feel stilted, or maybe they don't feel as connected with audiences, or if they're just looking to say, hey, how can I move better in my own body? How can I be a little bit more dynamic of a speaker? I think it's a great read for them to get started on. James Taylor Great. We'll put a link here as well. What about if you were to let's make you wake up tomorrow morning. You have to start from scratch. No one knows who you are. You've never been booked to speak before. You have your LinkedIn profile is being wiped clean. So what would you do? How would you restart especially the speaking part of your business in your career? Poornima Vijayashanker I honestly say I would go back to basics and basics for me. We're doing some in house training with my team. So when I was at mint, one of the things I did early on was train all the employees because I was literally the first engineer there, right? So I had to sit down with them and explain, here's the architecture, here's how you get started. So and that's a very kind audience. It's your peers, you can't really mess up and they're not going to grade you if you're doing a lot of thumbs up verbal tics, etc. So I started there. And then from that point, I thought, okay, I wonder if I can go out and take this information and spread it to other people. So I actually approached unconferences first, because the thing about unconferences is there's no I mean, they have standards, but there's no high barrier. You don't have to sit down and spend hours and hours crafting your proposal talking to a bunch of organizers. You literally come up with a topic, you throw something up there and then now people have started voting on what they would like to see but still It's pretty simple, and it's very casual. So you can then get an audience of about 510 or 15 people to come to your talk, and start, start there, maybe get a few testimonials from the folks who attended so that they have a sense so that you have them to then go out and get more speaking engagements. But but that's how I would start, I think I would just go back to what I had originally done, because for me, I think that that's a very organic way to do it. And it's also a way where you're improving as you go along. Right? You're kind of starting in a place where you feel safe. Because a lot of people, you know, they're like, Oh, I want to speak at a conference and then all of a sudden they get really nervous, right? So start where you feel safe. go from there, there's no there's nothing wrong and doing baby steps. And then once you get to a level where you're like, Oh, I could give the same talk again and again, I could do it at conferences, etc. Then start reaching out to people But I would, I would kind of follow a bad approach. The key thing though, is setting a milestone setting a goal and saying, I'm going to do at least one talk quarter talk of sense for your schedule. I think consistency is really the key. And like anything else, it's that consistent practice getting out there and doing the speaking. And you'll find that as you start to do it, it has a snowball effect, more people want to reach out to you more people are aware of you. And you then get to be in a position where you decide, you know, what are the things that I want to invest my time in? Where do I want to speak? Who do I want to reach out to James Taylor pretty we could speak about loads of other things related to this topic, especially in terms of being an evangelist and influence so within your industry and within your, with your company, because there's so many different ways to go, where would be the best place if people want to kind of learn more? Where should they be going now, if you want to learn more about you and the work that you're doing, and maybe we can take those next steps, Poornima Vijayashanker feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. I'm @Poornima James Taylor Well, I love that we're going to have that link here. And I'm actually going to be reading that book as well because I want to pick up all these, especially when you're talking about process as well. And I love I love when we can start breaking things down into process. So pretty much thank you so much. It's been a I love just when we have we have our conversations as well. And I think you're doing amazing, amazing things. I look forward to actually catching you on stage at some point really soon as well. And I wish you all the best is engineering creases. Thank you. Poornima Vijayashanker Thanks for having me. James Taylor Today's episode was sponsored by speakers you the online community for speakers and if you're serious about your speaking career then you can join us because you membership program. I'll speak as you members receive private one on one coaching with me hundreds of hours of training content access to a global community to help them launch and build a profitable business around their speaking message and expertise. So just head over to SpeakersU.com to learn more. #speakersU #speakerslife

Таймкоды: 04:50 - How to scale yourself as a first-time leader | Poornima Vijayashanker (https://youtu.be/LKkohgxsZdI) 19:15 - Bridging the gap between engineering and customer success | Annie Cook (https://youtu.be/5Bj4TLcBjnU) 27:10 - The four components of high performing teams | Lisa van Gelder (https://youtu.be/HcB7IeUClEk) 49:20 - Hiring junior developers remotely | Romina Suarez (https://youtu.be/4KMsgTQ6EaM) 01:03:00 - Splitting the monolith | Jimmy Bogard (https://youtu.be/oyY3Iec5IAc) 01:07:50 - The race to Mach 2.0 at scale | Nickolas Means (https://youtu.be/2sIzfGzf_50) 01:24:00 - Lessons from flying for engineering leadership | Rebecca Murphey (https://youtu.be/Tk1LFnoPvxM) 01:35:00 - On motherhood and leading engineering teams | Tara Feener (https://youtu.be/YdYZnvw7GGs) Мы в соцсетях: 1. Telegram: https://t.me/proConf 2. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvasfOIImo7D9lQkb1Wc1tw 3. SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/proconf 4. Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/by/podcast/podcast-proconf/id1455023466 5. Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProconfShow

Karen Catlin After spending 25 years building software products and serving as a vice president of engineering at Macromedia and Adobe, Karen Catlin witnessed a sharp decline in the number of women working in tech. Frustrated but galvanized, she knew it was time to switch gears. Today, Karen is a vocal advocate for inclusion, a leadership coach, a keynote speaker, and the author of three books: "Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking" (with Poornima Vijayashanker), "Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces," and "The Better Allies™ Approach to Hiring." --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/freeman-means-business/support

There comes a time in almost every engineer's career where they may need to communicate with a customer, train a teammate, pitch a project, or prove they are credible to a potential client.Poornima Vijayashanker was the founding engineer of Mint.com where she launched v1 of the ubiquitous personal finance platform. She went on to Found Femgineer, an education firm that trains technologists on presentation, public speaking, and communication skills.In this episode I sit down with Poornima to hear tips and tricks that make her students successful.https://femgineer.com/present-book/https://femgineer.com/confident-communicator-course/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Do you ever feel like you’re caught between making personal concessions and compromises in order to advance professionally?   I felt this way less than six months ago.   I was getting ready to transition from maternity leave back to work. Part of my transition plan was to initially work part-time so that I’d have time to rest and take care of my little one. Running my own business would give me the freedom and flexibility I needed to do this.   However, during my maternity leave, I became overly concerned with providing for my little one. As I transitioned back to work, I decided I need to think about taking on more clients.   A dear friend of mine had advised me to create a document with non-negotiables so that I wouldn’t be tempted to make concessions and compromises for things I needed from a client.   But I was concerned about how clients would perceive my non-negotiables.   In today’s episode of Build, I’m going to share how I went through this transition last year.   Once you’ve listened the episode, I’d like to know what was the last career transition that was spurred by a life event for you? How did you manage to pull through without compromising on what you needed? Feel free to tweet your response to @poornima. -- Build is brought to you by Femgineer (http://femgineer.com/). --  Femgineer's Confident Communicator Course 2019 is coming up! To learn more visit: https://femgineer.com/confident-communicator-course/ --  Enjoyed this episode and want to support the show? To become a patron of the show visit: https://www.patreon.com/build -- ## Easy to Set Non-Negotiables But Hard To Stick To Them Transcript   Career transitions are tough. Especially when they are spurred by life events.   They can feel endless, overwhelming, and cause us to shortchange ourselves by making concessions and compromises on what we need.   In today’s Build episode I’m going to share a recent transition I went through and how I managed to get through.   So stay tuned!   Welcome to Build. The show that debunks a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies and your career in tech.   I’m your host Poornima Vijayashanker.   I had previously mentioned that I’d be experimenting with the format of Build, so today’s show is a solo show with just me.   I’m curious to hear your take on it. As always, feel free to leave a comment below. I don’t always have time to respond but I’m always listening, reading, and learning from audience members like you ;)   Last year, in the midst of my maternity leave I started to worry, more so than I usually do, and specifically about money.   I had previously written some blog posts about how I had gone through a round of interviews at companies, and ultimately decided that running my own business was going to provide me the most flexibility and freedom.   Somehow all the logic had seeped out of my postpartum brain and been replaced with a need to provide for my newly born child.   Despite being a good saver, and being a part of a dual income household, staring at my medical bill for the delivery made me worry about all the unexpected expenses that would start creeping up.   I’m a strong believer that I tight budget isn’t enough. You also have to make money.   So I thought about all the things I could do. I could answer all the emails that were piling up from recruiters or I could start working on the course I wanted to offer in the fall.   But this was 6 weeks into my maternity leave, I was having a really hard time summoning the energy to do something new.   Not to mention having the time to do it.   I’d need time and energy to either prepare for interviews or market a new course. Plus I’d have to persuade others that I was credible.   I re-read my own advice, and realized I needed to find a way to cash in on credibility that I had already built up without compromising on my non-negotiables.   That meant instead of proving myself to someone new, I needed to go back to working with people who knew I was credible.   I called up a client that I had worked for back in 2014 and 2015 to see if they needed help. They did and they didn’t need it until I was done with my maternity leave. So the timing was on my side.   There were just two catches: I need to commute up to SF and they had reduced their contractor rates.   Both of these directly conflicted with 2 of my non-negotiables, which were working commuting only two days a week and my rate.   I decided I wasn’t going to budge on how I priced myself, and told my client to check if there was more budget.   I reminded my client that I was reliable, and they remembered the quality of work that I had done.   I was also fortunate to have others vouch for me.   I put the ball in my client’s court and waited patiently for their response.   My client came back and asked me if I would accept working 2 days at the rate that fit into their budget.   I happily agree to the terms because it was exactly what I needed as I transitioned back to work.   What I re-learned is that you can go back to a client or company, especially if you have built up credibility there, and it helps to have more than one person vouch for you.   Finally, I re-learned the importance of having set non-negotiables.   As I was negotiating on the phone call, I made sure to pull them up and have them stare right at me!   Now, if you’re willing to share, I’d like to know what was the last career transition that was spurred by a life event for you? How did you manage to pull through without compromising on what you needed? Please let me know in the comments below!   That’s it for this episode of Build. Feel free to share it with your teammates, your friends, and whomever you think might be going through a tough transition.   And subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more episodes.   Ciao for now!

Last week on Build, we shared what allyship is and why it can help build inclusive workplaces. Anytime new approaches like these come out our defenses go up because it can be challenging to change mindsets and best practices. Plus there’s some fear around what the unintended consequences will be.   I hear ya!   Here’s the thing about allyship, you don’t need to get the green light from someone at the top or put in a ton of effort to make an impact. Turns out there are everyday actions that can benefit your team and workplace and make you a better ally.   In today’s episode, we’ll be sharing them with you to help you get started as an ally!   To help us out, I’ve invited Karen Catlin, co-author of Present! A Techie’s Guide To Public Speaking, a leadership coach, and an advocate for inclusive tech workplaces. You may recall seeing Karen in a few episodes from last year on mentorship.   I invited Karen back on to the show to talk about the work she has been doing coaching allies.   Given Karen’s rich career in tech spanning 25 years, she has a lot of experience to draw from, and it has inspired her to help other become better allies and create inclusive workplaces.   Here’s what you’ll learn as you watch today’s episode:   How You Can Get Started Being An Ally How Karen went about testing a number of simple everyday actions people can take to being an ally 3 simple everyday actions you can start to take immediately How Companies Have Benefited From Allies Taking Simple Everyday Actions A Best Practice For Being A Better Ally In Your Community   Want to get in touch and learn more from Karen? Reach out to Karen Catlin on her website Follow Karen on Twitter and follow Better Allies on Twitter to get more simple tips Sign up here to be notified when her new book is out, and receive 5 simple actions each week to create a more inclusive workplace -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   --   ## 3 Simple Everyday Actions You Can Do To Be A Better Ally And Create An Inclusive Workplace Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     In the last episode, we talked about what allyship is, and why it's important for helping with diversity in the workplace today. If you missed that episode, I've included a link to it below this video. In today's episode, we're going to dive into some best practices on how you can become a better ally through simple, everyday actions. So stay tuned.                                                   Welcome to *Build* brought to you by PivotalTracker, 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 two big misconceptions that a lot of folks have when it comes to being an ally for diversity is thinking that they need to have a green light from some high level executive in order to have their initiative come out, and thinking that the initiative has to make a big impact in order to even pursue it.                                                   Well it turns out that there are some everyday actions that you can do that will cause a ripple effect and improve diversity in your workplace, and we're going to share what those are in today's episode. And to help us out, Karen Catlin is back. Karen is my co author for our book Present, she's also a leadership coach and an advocate for diverse and inclusive workplaces. Thanks for coming back on the show.   Karen Catlin:                     Thanks so much for having me again.   What Allyship Is And Why It’s Important   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah, so let's do a quick recap for people who might be joining us. Tell us what allyship is, and again why it's important today.   Karen Catlin:                     Mm-hmm (affirmative), so allyship is simply using your position of privilege to make more inclusive workplace, and help other people be successful if they don't have quite as much privilege as you. And this is so important today, because we have a war on talent, it's hard to hire people so you want to cast a wide net and keep those people once you've hired them, keep them productive and working hard at your company, and stayed, staying there.                                                   And, there are all these studies showing the economic benefits, benefits of improved innovation, problem solving, and decision making. So that's why it's important.   How You Can Get Started Being An Ally   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah. So let's talk about how people can get started, because I'm sure there's people in our audience who would love to get started as an ally.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, so it's really not that hard. And I love the way you started out saying you don't have to have a huge initiative, you don't have to be the VP of people at your company, or head of diversity and inclusion to start being an ally. You simply I think need to just start paying attention to what's going on around your workplace, and raising awareness yourself, and if you're not really aware of like what are some of the things I could be doing, it's fine to ask someone who is an underrepresented gender, or minority, just ask them for some feedback of what are some of the challenges you're facing, and what's one thing I could be doing to help you out?   How Karen Catlin Went About Testing Simple Everyday Actions People Can Take To Being An Ally   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     So in your upcoming book, you provide a myriad of best practices, but before we dive into some of those, let's talk about how you went about testing these practices.   Karen Catlin:                     So I start testing these ideas actually on Twitter.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK.   Karen Catlin:                     About four years ago, I started a Twitter handle called @betterallies. And it was anonymous, it still is anonymous until this show actually.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     And I started tweeting simple, everyday actions that someone could take to create a more inclusive workplace. And my whole goal was that I didn't want it to be, you didn't have to feel like you were the head of people at your company, or head of diversity and inclusion to make a difference. It really was something that the normal person could do. So I started tweeting these ideas based on my experience working in tech, based on coaching clients I had, as well as the research that was being published at the time of the challenges that are happening in tech workplaces as well as other workplaces by people who are underrepresented.                                                   Based on the reaction, I kind of started realizing, OK that works, that's helpful, that's not so helpful, and where it was helpful it was really helpful, and I started getting again, positive reinforcement that these messages were making a difference to the people who were consuming them. And checking out my Twitter handle too it's like, there's some, you can use Twitter Analytics to find out a little bit about your demographics.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Mm-hmm.   Karen Catlin:                     And I have about 50% followers who are men, 50% women, so I know that there are a lot of men who are paying attention to this and appreciating the content.   How Companies Have Benefited From Allies Taking Simple Everyday Actions   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Nice. I know you've coached some men, so do you mind sharing maybe one or two examples of how these best practices have helped their team, or their company?   Karen Catlin:                     Sure. One that's just so memorable to me is I was coaching a man about, he wanted to hire more diverse talent for his team, and we started talking about just different aspects. I asked him just so how does the team socialize today, like you know, to go out to lunch or after hours? What's social life like for the team? And he looked at me, and he said, oh, you mean I probably should've told those guys going to the strip club for lunch last week that that's not cool? I'm like yeah maybe that wasn't exactly the most inclusive social event.                                                   He honestly like, bless him, he just hadn't realized how other people might feel that they couldn't go out to lunch that day with some of the team members, right. Another example is some of the language we use, and I know Pivotal Tracker I was reading a blog post that they now have something in their daily stand up, and in their bill process for the week called the Inclusion Thing of the Week.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Oh, cool.   Karen Catlin:                     And they just come up with the idea of something they can be doing to be more inclusive, and they talk about in their daily stand ups and everything, and one of them was simply don't use the word “guys.” Some people may be thinking, “Wait a second Karen, what do you mean? Guys is gender neutral, we use it all the time.” To them, I always like to say well if you were a woman, you need to use a public restroom, and there was a door marked guys, do you go in? Probably not.                                                   Or if someone were to ask you, a man, how many guys did you date in high school? They're not thinking women, right there, right? So “guys” is not gender neutral, so that's another thing that as Pivotal Tracker learned is a simple thing they could do. As I've started coaching other people too, examples come up such as, “Well what's your spirit animal?”                                                   Well maybe that's not very inclusive because spirit animal is actually an important part of some Native American cultures, and spiritual component of it. So it's really kind of appropriating their culture. So I can't believe this is such a beautiful example of an alternative. Why not use patronas instead from Harry Potter right? So just swap that out, and have everyone feel that they can be included in the conversation.   Best Practice #1 For Being A Better Ally And Creating An Inclusive Workplace: Reviewing How We Give Feedback To Women Versus Men   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Got it. OK so let's dive in now and have you share three best practices from your book.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah. So the first one I'll share is all about performance feedback. People who do research into performance feedback have done things like study performance reviews, written performance reviews, thousands of them, and found that there is gendered difference in how we give feedback to women versus men. Some of that gender difference shows up in the form of the feedback that we give to women is more vague.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK.   Karen Catlin:                     And with men, it's more specific. We're telling men more often that this is how your work has impacted the business, here's how you can keep impacting the business, here's a skill you need to learn to have a bigger impact on the business. And with women less so, it's more vague. And at the same time there have been studies showing that we actually tend to hold back from giving constructive feedback, the hard feedback, to people who are different than us.                                                   So whether that's a different gender, different race, or so forth, we hold back from giving the constructive feedback probably because we don't want someone to think that oh he's only giving me that feedback because I'm a woman. So as a man we might think I don't want to give a woman feedback because she's going to think I'm sexist if I criticize her. I don't want to give a person of color feedback if I'm white, because they're going to think I'm racist, right.                                                   So we hold back, and we soften the feedback. But that doesn't do anyone any good, right.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     We really need that feedback, constructive as well as the positive feedback to keep growing our careers. So in the book there's a whole chapter on giving feedback with best practices of doing things like looking at the language you're using, and are you actually tying the feedback that you've giving someone to their performance? And to the impact they're having on a business?                                                   Are you providing skill based suggestions about how they can grow their career that way? And, at the end of the day, are you writing reviews of roughly the same length for men and women, for all of your staff? Because that's one indicator that you might be skimping on the feedback, real easy thing to check.   Best Practice # For Being A Better Ally And Creating An Inclusive Workplace: Give Credit To An Idea’s Owner Publicly   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Nice. Well that's a very comprehensive best practice, thank you for sharing. Do you have another one?   Karen Catlin:                     Sure, pay attention to what happens in meetings. So much of tech and frankly any workplace is driven through meetings. And, in meetings there are a number of dynamics at play that really prevent people who are in the minority from speaking up and fully participating. Perhaps it's that they are interrupted, we've talked about that already.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yep.   Karen Catlin:                     And number of reasons why that might happen, but if that is part of your culture, or perhaps there are some repeat offenders who interrupt frequently, that could be something you could be paying attention and stopping. It could be that the ideas are not being credited appropriately when women or people in minority positions are bringing them up.                                                   It may be that someone's asking a question, like in a client meeting of what they, they asked the question to the person who they think is in the power position of the meeting. Probably a man, when really it should go to a woman. So redirect that question to well, you say something like, that question would be best answered by Poornima, the founder of Femgineer, like throw that question to the right person. So look for ways that you can create more inclusive meetings by just paying attention to these social cues that are happening.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Got it. So this is great in meetings, but I think sometimes we're not sure if we're doing it the right way. So is there a way we can solicit feedback from our peers, from our boss?   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, why not use the back channel?   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK, yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     The back channel that's in any meeting, I mean we all use them right. The DM's or the text messages, private chats to just like touch base with people, like what did you think of that point they just made? Or did I clarify everything I should've clarified? We're constantly using the back channels, why not just ask people in the meeting that you trust, have someone DM you when you could've been a better ally, when you could've stood up for someone who was interrupted or had trouble making a point in the meeting, or whatever it is right. Use the back channel.   Best Practice #3 For Being A Better Ally And Creating An Inclusive Workplace: Saying No To Office Housework That Isn’t Your Job   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK. Your third best practice that you'd like to share with us.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, so the third one is I think I'll choose office housework. So office housework is the stuff that needs to happen in any office and it's no ones job really to get it done, and it's important work, but not really leading to business growth, career growth, and so forth. The classic example is taking the minutes at a meeting. When that's not your job.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     OK.   Karen Catlin:                     That's your job, that's not office housework, that's your job. But if it's no ones job and you just have called a meeting and someone needs to take the minutes, it often falls on the shoulder of a woman sitting around the table. The problem with that is the person taking the minutes is usually a step behind, so they're not participating in the meeting at full force so to speak, so they're being left out, their voice is counted as much. They're also put in a subservient position to maybe their peers who are sitting around the table, and that's not fair, and that might have longer impact right, well beyond the meeting.                                                   So it's much better to set up a rotation.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah. Actually did that at my second startup, yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     Excellent, so you were a great ally there. But office housework isn't just meeting minutes, it's also things like maybe it is someone's got to clean up all the comments in the code before we ship it off to our partner, or to make it open source, right. That important work needs to happen, but it doesn't really lead to career growth, right. It could be oh we need someone to mentor the intern again this summer, Susie did it the last five summers and she's awesome at it, right.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Right. Maybe Susie doesn't want to do it again, she wants to do something else, yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     Exactly, because the first time yeah maybe there's some career growth area, you learn to mentor, you learn to have that leadership skill, but the fifth time you've probably mastered it and maybe it's time to spread the wealth.   A Best Practice For Being A Better Ally In Your Community   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah, that makes sense. So these three are great for inside your company, do you have maybe a couple best practices you would share for the community at large?   Karen Catlin:                     Sure, so I think we should think about our networks, the networks we build professionally. Our networks, and there's research on this too, that they become very homogenous, or just like me, because we meet people and hang out with people, and connect with people, and stay in touch with people who we share some common interest with, right. So it's not that that can't cross gender bounds, or racial bounds or anything like that, but we tend to have networks that are primarily just look like us.                                                   So the impact of that is that then we only have people who are like us that we connect with opportunities, whether that is to get a new job, or to speak at an event, or some other career growing opportunity, right. We recommend people in our network. So the call to action here is diversify your network. The next time you're out at any kind of professional event, go say hello and introduce yourself to someone who does not look like you.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                     Whatever that means right. Start a conversation, see if you can't connect them with an opportunity, and reverse might happen to. So diversify our network I'd say is the first one. The second thing is, and this is such an important part of being an ally is, don't just be a bystander, or like I don't do these bad things, right. Be an upstander. When you see something bad happening, don't just like say that's not my problem, like say something, and see something, say something.                                                   There is a story that was shared on Twitter just I think a week or two ago of a woman saying that one of the worst things that ever happened to her as a public speaker was that there's a man who asked a question during the Q&A and kind of demanded to know was she single, because he wanted to pursue things with her. And at the time, I mean I wish there had been an upstander in the audience who would just stand up and say basically, hey dude, we don't do that here.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Right.   Karen Catlin:                     That's all it takes, defuse it and put the guy in his place, and show some support for the woman.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Yeah. Well you remember when I was in Canada, I fortunately had a team that helped when I had a heckler in the audience, and just kindly took this gentleman outside, and I could kind of move on with my Q&A, so it helps to have those folks in your kind of corner.   Karen Catlin:                     Yes, absolutely.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     So be one of those people.   Karen Catlin:                     Be one of those people, yes.   Better Allies: Everyday Actions For Creating More Inclusive Engaging Workplaces   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     So I know we just scratched the surface. So tell us more about the upcoming book as well as how people in our audience can work with you.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, so the book is *Better Allies: Everyday Actions for Creating More Inclusive Engaging Workplaces*. And you can get in touch with me at KarenCatlin.com, but I really encourage you to follow @betterallies on Twitter, or other social channels, we're on Instagram, Pinterest, and Medium as well. And there's a newsletter also so if you go to betterallies.com you can get the subscription link to the newsletter.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Wonderful, thank you.   Karen Catlin:                     Yeah, thank you.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     Well I can't wait to read Karen's book, and that's it for this episode of *Build*. Be sure to share this episode with your teammates, your friends, your boss, anyone who you think may be wanting to be an ally, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode. Ciao for now.                                                  

As the year comes to a close, you’re probably getting ready to attend a holiday party, maybe your company’s. And maybe you’re concerned about what to talk about with your teammates and boss. Diversity and inclusion may be hot buttons to stay clear of, especially with people scrutinizing practices and scoffing at the benefits.   But you know it’s important…so what can you talk about? How can you set your team and company up to see a change next year?   Allyship.   Wondering what it is and how to be a better ally? Well in today’s episode, we’ll cover what allyship is and how it can help you build a more inclusive company.   To help us out, I’ve invited Karen Catlin, co-author of Present! A Techie’s Guide To Public Speaking, a leadership coach, and an advocate for inclusive tech workplaces. You may recall seeing Karen in a few episodes from last year on mentorship.   I invited Karen back on to the show to talk about the work she has been doing coaching allies.   Given Karen’s rich career in tech spanning 25 years, she has a lot of experience to draw from, and it has inspired her to help others become better allies and create inclusive workplaces.   As you watch today’s episode, you’ll learn the following:   What an ally is and what allyship is How people can develop an awareness for allyship Why you don’t need to be a leader to be an ally in your company Why men care about being an ally How to spot or approach an ally to work for Want to get in touch and learn more from Karen? Reach out to Karen Catlin on her website Follow Karen on Twitter and follow Better Allies on Twitter to get more simple tips Sign up here to be notified when her new book is out, and receive 5 simple actions each week to create a more inclusive workplace -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## How Being An Ally Can Help You Create An Inclusive Workplace Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:         You've probably read a number of headlines around discrimination in tech. Despite all of the diversity initiatives, it seems like change is pretty slow. So, what can we do to make change faster, both in our teams and our companies? Allyship. If you're not familiar with what allyship is, well, in today's *Build* episode we're gonna talk about it. 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. As you're well aware of, diversity is a hot topic today. There are a number of practices, but people are scoffing at their benefits and they're wondering if there can really be anything done in the near term.   Well, there is a new approach called allyship. In today's episode, we're gonna share how allyship can help you and your company. To help us out, I invited Karen Catlin. Karen is my co-author on our book, Present. Karen is also a leadership coach and an advocate for inclusive tech workplaces. In the episode today, we're gonna be talking about what allyship is, why it's important, and in the next episode, we'll be sharing some of the best practices that you can put in place every day.   Karen Catlin:                  Thanks so much for having me on the show again, Poornima.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                  It's great to be here.   Why Diversity And Inclusion Have Been On A Decline In Tech For Two More Than Two Decades   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Thanks for coming on. You've had a rich career in tech. Why don't you share with us what you've done, as well as problems you've experienced over that time?   Karen Catlin:                  Yeah, so I spent about 25 years working in tech. I started out as a software engineer writing code for a living, and over time moved into management roles, and eventually into executive leadership. Most recently, I was a VP of Engineering at Adobe Systems. During that time, I definitely saw this interesting thing happening where there was a decline happening in the number of women coming into the field. There's a lot of research that backs this up, but there are just fewer women studying computer science. Not that that's the only way you get into tech, but it is definitely a key way, here in Silicon Valley, to get into tech.                                 So, there's a decline happening with the number of women who are into the field, and at the same time, women leave tech at twice the rate of men at that mid-career point. As a result, over the 25 years that I spent working in tech, I really saw the impact. I saw that there were a lot fewer women around and less diversity in general.   Beliefs That Have Held Leaders Back From Creating An Inclusive Workplace   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Were there specific problems that maybe you incurred or you saw happening within the companies?   Karen Catlin:                  Yes. And I worked for some really good companies, so I don't wanna throw my companies under the bus that I used to work for at all. But I will say that most of the men I worked with really, firmly believed that their company was a meritocracy, that you got ahead based on your merits, that if you worked hard and did good work you'd be recognized and promoted. But the numbers just really didn't back that up. In any company there are more women in the entry level, and as you get up to the C level, it just declines like a pyramid. So, definitely there was something going on.                                 Personally, some of the things I witnessed...and I think this will resonate with a lot of women who are watching this, is something called bro-propriation where you say something in a meeting, as a woman, and it's a pretty good idea but it kinda falls on deaf ears, doesn't really go anywhere. And then in the same meeting, a little bit further on, somebody says the same thing, usually a guy because there's mostly men in the meetings. A guy says the same thing in the meeting, and gets all the credit. We call that bro-propriation, because a bro has appropriated your idea, of course. That happened to me so many times.   Examples of Unconscious Acts That Contribute To A Lack Diversity And Inclusion In The Workplace                                 Then there's also this thing, and it still happens to this day, where people give me what is called an unconscious demotion. An unconscious demotion...I bet this has happened to you, too. You meet someone for the first time and you might say, "Oh yeah, I work in tech." And they say, "Do you work in HR or marketing?" That's an unconscious demotion. Nothing wrong with those fields at all, but if you're a woman who's already in a very male dominated field, like engineering, computer science, tech in general, it's like this yet another reinforcement that you don't belong there. That's just not cool.                                 It happened to me just a couple months ago. I was visiting my husband at his office and I met one of his new colleagues. Sure enough, he said, "What do you do?" I said, "Well, I used to work in tech, was VP at Adobe for a long time." And just told him something like that. And said, "Oh, well at Adobe, were you in marketing or HR?" I mean, literally, he said those words, and I just kind of...I wanted to punch him. But I ended up just sort of smiling and saying, "Actually, I was a VP of Engineering."                                 So those are just a couple examples of things I've seen. I could share some more, but I think you probably have some more questions you wanna get to.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah, of course. It's unfortunate that you're experiencing this and seeing this happen inside of your companies and other companies. Were there things that you were also seeing in the community at large over the years?   Karen Catlin:                  Yes. Definitely started seeing...First of all, in support of women as well as other kinds of diversity, there's a lot of activity going on, a lot of conferences, a lot of discussions, a lot of research. All of that's great. And I'm starting to see men wanting to also really get involved and help with diversity initiatives, help support women in their companies, and so forth. I saw that first hand. I also saw it at places like the Grace Hopper Celebration.   The Grace Hopper Celebration...I mean, you and I know. We've been there a number of times—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         It's the largest technical conference for women.   The Origin Story of Better Allies: The Bingo Card At Grace Hopper 2014   Karen Catlin:                  Yes, exactly. In 2014, there was something called the Male Allies Panel. It was a panel of men who were leaders at their company, and talking about what they did for women in terms of allyship, to support them, to champion them, and so forth at their workplaces. Unfortunately kinda fell flat. It fell flat because ahead of time, some women were upset that men were taking up valuable stage time at this conference, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Sure. Yep.   Karen Catlin:                  Some women also were concerned that these men really weren't the best allies.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK.   Karen Catlin:                  So they created a bingo card. They created a bingo card of phrases they expected those men to be saying that would show exactly how far they still had to go to become real allies. They handed the bingo card out, right? And of course, during that panel, the men were saying different things and falling short, and the women were checking off those bingo squares and started yelling bingo at different points during the panel.                                 Now, when I heard about this...I wasn't at that panel, I sort of was following it on social media. When I heard about this, I sided with these poor men. These were actually good men, their hearts are in the right place. They wanna do the right thing. They just don't know exactly what women need. They certainly don't know what people of color need, or you put those together, women of color, and so forth. So, I see people wanting to do the right thing but not quite knowing what to do.   Why Diversity And Inclusion Initiatives Are Important Now More Than Ever                                 Poornima Vijayashanker:         Got it. Why is this even important, right? There's so many of these diversity initiatives that come out and benefits just are slow-coming or maybe not existent at all in some people's eyes. Why do you think this is important?   Karen Catlin:                  Yeah. First of all, especially in the whole me too era right now, you kinda hope that people just wanna do the right thing, and it feels maybe like a moral imperative to support people of all types of backgrounds. So you kinda hope that. But at the same time, there's so much research that shows that diverse companies are more economically profitable and successful, that there's better decision making, there's more innovation, there's better problem solving. It's so many benefits that have been proven in social science and economic research studies coupled with it's the right thing to do. Then you layer on top of all of that, there's a big talent shortfall in tech as well as across the whole United States in terms of we've got the lowest unemployment numbers in...I don't know, in a generation. So, we have a problem finding the talent to fill a position, so why wouldn't you want to cast the widest net possible?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah.   Karen Catlin:                  One more thing. Women can lean in all they want and all they can, but until we start changing our workplaces so that things that have always been done a certain way change, the women aren't going to be successful. We really need to start looking at our workplaces and changing our workplaces.   Why Workplaces Are Slow Or Resistant To Change And Embrace Allyship   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK. What do you think is hindering that change?   Karen Catlin:                  There are a couple of reasons. I would say one is this is the way we've always done it. Why would we bother changing? An example of that is, well, I've always hired the best people for my network. Why would I go outside of my network? Well, if you don't go outside your network, and your network is your best buds, people who are probably just like you, you're gonna continue hiring people who are just like you and you're gonna have homogenous hiring, right?                                 So, if we've always done it that way, maybe that's something that's holding us back. Another is that there might be concerns that we are taking away something from men who are in positions of privilege right now, right? If we hire more women or people of color or whatever underrepresented minority you wanna fill in the blank there, if we hire more of those people, there's gonna be less opportunity for me. That's not exactly a growth mindset. If you think about hiring the best people, assembling the best team, the pie and the opportunities are just going to expand and there's gonna be larger slices for everyone as a result. That's another thing that's holding people back.   The third, I'll say, is that there's just, at times, a lack of awareness. Unless you're living these situations of being interrupted or having your ideas appropriated and so on, and so on, you just might not be aware it's happened to other people. You might not be aware that...even walking around a trade show floor and seeing maybe a sexy pinup image on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker or something, or a laptop sticker even, you might just think oh, that's sort of funny, not thinking about how a woman might feel is she sees such a sexualized image on a conference swag giveaway. So I think that we need to raise awareness as well.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         What drew you into this?   Karen Catlin:                  What drew me into this is this desire, especially after hearing about the bingo card in, at the Grace Hopper panel of all the male allies, that, coupled with just hearing from man after man that I would just be talking to, maybe casually, or coaching, men really being curious of how can I help here, I really do care about diversity. I wanna create a diverse workforce. I wanna work with all kinds of people. I care. I'm a good person. But what am I supposed to do? There really seemed to be this desire without the information.   Why Karen Catlin Decided To Become Coach Others Into Becoming Better Allies   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Why did you decide to embark on this mission?   Karen Catlin:                  I decided to embark on the mission because I felt like I couldn't not get involved. I really felt like I had a unique perspective. I had been working in tech for 25 years. I understood this industry. I also had this desire to really help make the industry more diverse. I really wanted to have an impact.   I started tweeting. After that Grace Hopper conference, I started a Twitter handle called @BetterAllies. I started tweeting answers to this question of what am I supposed to do, and simply talking about here are some simple, everyday actions you can take as an ally to be better for people of all sorts of underrepresented groups in tech.                                 So I started the Twitter handle. Then I started a newsletter and started getting some really positive feedback from both of those channels. People say Twitter is just a cesspool and everything, but I actually have fan tweets that I get.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Nice.   Karen Catlin:                  People like my content. So I got positive reinforcement there. My newsletter is growing like gangbusters, so super happy about that. Again, positive reinforcement. I just decided recently that I had to write a book on the topic, too. I had to take the best of what I learned on Twitter, through what I've been tweeting as well as the reinforcement I was getting there, and the content from my newsletter, and create a book for people to be better allies.   What Is An Ally And What Is Allyship   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Let's dig into what allyship is. What is an ally, and then what's allyship after that?   Karen Catlin:                  Yeah. So, an ally is someone who uses their position of privilege to help someone who has less privilege. So, in tech, that typically is a white, straight, CIS man who has a lot of privilege. They can use that position of privilege to help others. They can do that by doing things like mentoring, sponsoring, championing, speaking out on behalf of them, looking for opportunities, connecting them to different opportunities, being just somebody who's an all around good person, but not just sitting still, not just not being a bad person, but actually taking action to help promote other people.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Got it. So taking initiative.   Karen Catlin:                  Taking initiative, yes.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         You already touched on this, but who can be an ally besides the straight, white male?   Why You Don’t Need To Be A Leader To Be An Ally In Your Company   Karen Catlin:                  Definitely. So, allyship is not limited at all. That's the beauty, it's anybody can be an ally. You can be a leader at your company. In fact, I'll share a quick story about a leader that was my manager, a senior vice president at one point in my career. I still remember this time. I had just started working for him. I was new to the company, and I was in a very senior meeting with him. I heard him say, "Well, what I learn from Karen is the following." And then he said something.                                 I thought at the time, first of all, I didn't say those exact words. So he took what I had shared with him in a one-on-one earlier and reframed it in the company speak. So he taught me how to speak the language as a result. But also, what a shout out he gave me. What he, the SVP, learned from me, was the following. So that's a great example of how a leader who has a lot of cred within the organization can be an ally.                                 But an individual contributor can be an ally, too. An individual contributor sitting in a meeting and noticing someone might keep interrupting another person, might just pull them aside later and say, "Hey, dude, do you know you interrupt a lot?" And just raise awareness. So it's really a job for everybody.   Why Men Do Care About Being An Ally   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. I know we're gonna go into more best practices. Thank you for sharing those. I also know that there may be some people in our audience or just wondering are men really interested in this and questioning if they really care. Maybe you can share from your experience.   Karen Catlin:                  I'm sure there's some men who don't care, and that's fine. But there are so many men who do care. I get emails from people, they don't even know who I am. They're just emailing to or DM'ing the Better Allies handle, and they're asking for advice. They're asking for advice about...well, with everything that just recently happened around Judge Kavanaugh and the hearings there, how do I actually support women at my workplace who might be feeling upset about the way that Dr. Ford was treated? I'm getting emails, and messages, and questions of things like well, I just got this great job and I'm thinking about taking it, but hiring me is like the opposite of improving diversity, 'cause I'm a white guy and I really care about working at a diverse company that values that, so help me...Should I take the job? And the answer was yes. If you want the job, take it and go in and be an ally and a champion for diversity from your position of privilege.                                 So, I hear about that. I get questions of just how can I...I want to respect women I work with. Is it cool to invite them out for coffee, for a one-on-one, just to get out of the office. Can I do that? So, there are so many men who are thinking about this very thoughtfully and really want to make sure that they are being supportive and doing the right thing.   How People Can Develop An Awareness For Allyship   Poornima Vijayashanker:         That brings up a good point, that you wanna be well-received should you choose to become an ally. How can people develop an awareness and make sure they're headed in the right direction?   Karen Catlin:                  Here's what not to do. What not to do is to assume you're the knight in shining armor riding in to save the underrepresented person from whatever-   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Princess, yeah.   Karen Catlin:                  The princess, whatever. Because there are a lot of women who don't need to be saved, frankly, and don't want to be saved and so forth. And so, instead, what I recommend you do to make sure that you're having the right kind of impact, is look for systemic changes as opposed to one off changes where you are maybe just saving the day. What I mean by that is, let's say you notice that someone on your staff is being substantially underpaid for her grade level. You could make just that fix, potentially, if you have the budget and assuming you have control over their salary. You could change the budget for that one person, her compensation.   But better is to look more holistically at your department or the company and request that a salary review be done by gender and perhaps by other minority kind of aspects, such as race, or sexual orientation, and so forth. But make a systemic change, not just a one off. So that's something that’s a best practice to follow.   How To Spot Or Approach An Ally To Work For   Poornima Vijayashanker:         For our audience out there who maybe want to work for an ally, how can they approach and spot one.   Karen Catlin:                  If you are thinking about in an interview setting, like let's say you're going to a company you wanna be working for, someone who is going to be a good ally for you, perhaps your manager, or perhaps coworkers, during that whole interview process, you can literally just ask them. It's like, so what have you done to support a diverse, inclusive workplace here? Just ask them to give you some examples. And then I think you'll be in a pretty good situation for seeing whether or not they're going to be the kind of allies you want them to be.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Well, thank you for coming on the show, Karen, and sharing what allyship is. I can't wait to read your upcoming book. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about it.   Karen Catlin:                  The title of the book is Better Allies: Everyday Actions for Creating Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces. It's coming out early 2019.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Now, Karen and I want to know if you've acted as an ally inside of your company, what did you do and what was the impact that you experienced. Share it with us in the comments below this video.   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're gonna be diving into more best practices for becoming an ally. Ciao for now.

Last week on Build, we shared why it instead of rebuilding or redesigning an existing product, it might make sense to build a brand new product, and we walked you through how some folks on the Pivotal Tracker team arrived at their decision.   When you start building a new product, you have the best of intentions to revise old processes and move away from bad habits. But it’s easier said than done. So this week we’re going to share some best practices for keeping a new product on track!   And to help us out Lisa Doan and Vera Reynolds are back! You’ll recall Lisa is a product manager at Pivotal Tracker, and Vera is a software engineer at Pivotal Tracker.   As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn the following:   Why it’s important to set a mission and vision for a product and what happens when you don’t What being user-centric looks like in practice How to create a balanced team and have members weight in on decisions during planning meetings How to hold yourself and your team accountable inside a larger organization How to remind people of best practices How to go about testing a new product --  Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   ## 5 Best Practices For Keeping A New Product On Track Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker: In the last episode of *Build*, we talked about why, instead of doing a rebuild, or a redesign, it may make sense to build a brand new product for your company. If you missed that episode, I've included a link to it below this video.                           In today's episode, we're gonna dive into some of the best practices for keeping that new product on track. 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 the products, companies, and your career in tech.                           In today's episode, we're gonna be sharing a number of best practices to keep a new product on track, as you're building it, and to help us out, I've invited Lisa Doan, who is a Product Manager at Pivotal Tracker, as well as, Vera Reynolds, who is a Software Engineer.                           Thanks for coming back on the show, Ladies.   Lisa Doan:  Thanks. Happy to be here.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. Let's do a quick recap from the last episode on why you decided, instead of doing a rebuild or a redesign, to build a new product.   Vera Reynolds: Yeah. So, initially we thought we were just gonna rebuild Tracker, and when we went out in to the world, we realized that the problem space was just way too big and that net was cast too wide and so we need to follow the pain and find what were the most effective things we solve for our users. You have to understand that Tracker does what it does well. They are other competitors, absolutely, I'm not here to toot my own horn but it's a pretty good product. And so we found that there are other problem spaces that we could talk that are adjacent to Tracker that could complement it in a nice way and so that's we ended up where we are.   Poornima Vijayashanker: OK, so whenever we have the chance to build something brand new we want to start with the best practices, new best practices. I'm sure you've both experience this as well as you were assembling your team. What were some best practices and how did you go about learning them.   Lisa Doan:  So on the product side we had to adopt a lot of new practices. So when Tracker was built back in 2006, product was less of a thing but since then, things like lean startup have emerged, lean product, user centered design and we needed to catch up on those things. And so we brought in an innovation coach who helped us learn how to do experiments and really think about product in a lean fashion. And so we've been doing a lot of practices around that.   Poornima Vijayashanker: And I remember in the last episode you talked about how your innovation coach also helped you with a mission and a vision   Lisa Doan:  Yeah.   Best Practice #1: Set a Mission And Vision For Your Product   Poornima Vijayashanker: So how did that come about or what did that look like?   Lisa Doan:  Sure, so when she arrived we had been doing endless research and so she recognized that we were paralyzed and that the first thing we needed to do was pick a direction and that's what the mission and vision were tools to help us do. Where they came from is, the designer and myself had done plenty of research in the years prior about what the major problems our users were facing on Tracker. And so we had a couple ideas of what we wanted to address with the new tool and so those were incorporated during a workshop where everybody on the team was throwing out their ideas and what they wanted this new tool to be, how they wanted to solve problems for users. And after, I think a whole morning of just workshopping it over and over we finally arrived at a mission that everybody could really agree on.   Poornima Vijayashanker:                     So what was the mission that came out of this?   Vera Reynolds:                I'm gonna paraphrase it a little bit. Our missions to empower individual contributors on a team to align around shared goals.   Best Practice #2: What Being User-Centric Really Looks Like   Poornima Vijayashanker: So I've heard you through around user centric a lot. It seems like it's a new direction that you're going in. How is this different from what you were doing before with agile.   Lisa Doan:  Tracker was born by engineers for engineers and for the majority of our span as a team, we've been a very engineering centered. A lot of our leadership is former engineers who worked on the project. All of our product manager back in the day were extremely technical. I was the least technical PM and I have a degree in computer science. And so we always had this mindset of doing the best engineering possible but we were less focused than we should have been on what our user needs were and that's been a huge cultural shift that we've tried to instigate with our new team, which is, let’s think about the user first. Let's always question why we would build something before we build and that's a muscle that we've really had to really grow and exercise a lot is, rather than just coming up with an idea and just immediately building it is, let's go make sure this solves the user problems, validate that the user actually has this problem. And just really having a discipline around that.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Is that because the user is different so maybe you're not dogfooding it as much as a builder.   Vera Reynolds: We do actually dog food our current product. So that was one of the first, we were our own first user and I do think that helps with keeping that front of mind, but as an engineer, I've always been getting used to getting candid stories, not so much asking about why we were doing it. It may have been my experience but from what we've learned from our users, that's not unique and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, however we feel like a balanced team where everybody is involved and has is user centric to pull it up again, provides the better product.   Best Practice #3: How To Create A Balanced Team And Have Members Weigh In On Decisions During Planning Meetings   Poornima Vijayashanker: So let's talk about those balanced teams next 'cause I think that's the thing that's new to right, in your approach. What's a balanced team.   Lisa Doan:  So we like to think about it in terms of three spheres of influence, and so you have a sphere that's very concerned with the user, and so typically that falls to a designer. And then we have the sphere that's concerned with the business and so typically the product manager has been responsible for that. And then we have the engineering side, who's concerned about, usability, who's concerned about building, using the best patterns. And so balanced team isn't about specific roles and filling them but it's that, at any given time someone can weigh in for each of those spheres. And so at some point, whenever you're making a key decision, someone should be able to represent the user, someone should be able to represent the business and someone should be able to think about technical fusibility and the engineering impact of that.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. So as you're moving forward and building this product, you have each of those spheres weighing in on the decision.   Lisa Doan:  Sure, an example of that is when we go to IPM stories, and we're-   Poornima Vijayashanker: What's IPM?   Lisa Doan:  Iteration planning meeting.   Poornima Vijayashanker: OK.   Lisa Doan:  And so as a team will go through the stories that are coming up next and talk about any concerns that we might have. A good example of that now is, sometimes I'll bring a story to the team, and the engineers are capable of challenging me and saying OK, what is the evidence that we should actually build this. Whereas before the engineers were like, "OK, we'll build it." But there wasn't that conversation about what is this actually doing for the user. So it has great impact that we see.   Best Practice #4: How To Hold Yourself And Your Team Accountable Inside A Larger Organization   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So while you are a new team you have assembled, you're still operating in a bigger organization. But I know your goal was to stay more startupy and the best startups are always keeping an eye on time as well as money. So how did you hold yourselves accountable?   Lisa Doan:  When we first started we...this was a huge challenge for us. We went out and started to do research, but it became this endless research thing and there was no one asking us...well people were asking us when are you gonna build, but we couldn't tell them. We had no idea. Everything was just so vague and open at that point and so we introduced a concept, which I believe comes from the lean startup of metered funding. And so in the startup world, you're only alive as long as the money is there and so you're always trying to convince your investors that they should continue to give you funding. In the enterprise world that doesn't really exist. You have a team, there is funding for you already, and so you just continue using that and there isn't anyone whose making sure that you're making good on it. And so we introduced what we call a growth board. And so we have some stakeholders within Pivotal across different business organizations who will meet with us every six weeks and will hold us accountable to our learning. And so every six weeks we show up and we say this is what we learned and that's how it's affecting our direction. And they make the decision on whether we should pivot, persevere or kill the product.   How To Remind People Of Best Practices   Poornima Vijayashanker: So it's great that you're following this framework of pivot, persevere and kill, but let's get real here. I'm sure there was a time where you felt like, "Is there  ever gonna be a light at the end of the tunnel?" And if so how did you reinforce or remind people of these best practices?   Vera Reynolds: Oh yes, there were times. And I haven't been with the team for as long as Lisa has so I'm sure she has even more times that she can conjure up, but for me there were definitely moments where I questioned what we were doing, I questioned why we were doing it and that's where that balanced team really shone because it wasn't just me from my engineering perspective. It was having those question, I think having designers, PMs and testers with us was really...we were up lifting each other and helping each other move along and get through those tough spots.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Lisa, anything you wanna add to that?   Lisa Doan:  Yeah, there were definitely a lot of times where we were just really concerned about, is this even the right direction? What are we doing? There was so much ambiguity and that's an extremely uncomfortable place for many of use. The place we came from is, we thought of features and then we built them and there was this security in it. And the new world we were in is, let's go find problems, let's validate those problems. And the practices were new, it was a huge cultural shift. You're asking people to do things that are outside of their role. And so there was a lot of just stress for the early months and just trying to figure out, is this even viable? Are we even doing the right thing? Was this all just a mistake?   Poornima Vijayashanker: And so how did you put that team together?   Lisa Doan:  Well like Vera said, we had great people on our team and we still do and we hold each other accountable to our learnings. And so fortunately having all these different perspectives can bring a lot of light. And so sometimes as a PM, if I'm very down about something then the engineers can bring a point like, "Oh but the user said this in this one user interview." Which is something we never had before.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, cool.   Lisa Doan:  But now they're involved and they can bring up just as much evidence as I can and it's extremely helpful when times get difficult.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. So it's having another, basically set of eyes and ears to pinpoint things that might have gotten overlooked. That's awesome. I know you're currently in beta, but let's switch gears and talk about some of the positive outcomes that have resulted from doing this new product.   Lisa Doan:  Absolutely. We've seen a tremendous cultural shift, not just in our team but across the broader Tracker team as well. And so as I mentioned, we came from a veery engineering centric place and so we started to see the other teams start to adopt a lot of lean practices as well. Another huge benefit is, as soon as people started to see us start to get momentum they saw that it was directly related to having a vision and mission. And so now those teams have also gone out and established their own vision and mission which is helping to drive their futures forward and their work forward as well.   How To Keep Stakeholders Involved   Poornima Vijayashanker: And last time we talked about stakeholders. So coming full circle, how do they feel about this?   Lisa Doan:  They're really excited. Our growth board is really enthusiastic and supportive of us. They're also able to connect us to different parts of the organization, and so we've seen tremendous outreach from different parts of Pivotal that are very interested in what we're doing and very excited to join and help us. And so that's been a wonderful outcome of ours so far.   Vera Reynolds: They still keep us on our toes.   Lisa Doan:  Yeah.   Vera Reynolds: It's good to have that positive energy.   Best Practice #5: How To Go About Testing A Brand New Product   Poornima Vijayashanker: I know you're in a beta phase right now. How are you going about testing?   Lisa Doan:  One example I can give, is just last week an engineer and I, we walked over to someone on a different team and we asked them to use our tool, and we sat there and we observed them going through the various steps, and just cringing as they get to steps that are like, "Ooh we gotta clean that up, we gotta fix that." But also seeing that it helped them in their day to day jobs and that was really exciting.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, so doing some usability testing.   Lisa Doan:  Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker: OK. Anything else?   Lisa Doan:  We're continuing to do evaluative research and so that's making sure that they're not just on our very specific persona, but we're validation that the problem exists beyond just that persona and how we can potentially solve for various scenarios.   Poornima Vijayashanker: I know we've covered a lot and there's probably a lot more we can talk about when it comes to new products and staying on track. What's one thing you would love our audience to just always remember.   Vera Reynolds: I would just say if you're engineers, question what you're building and question your PMs.   Poornima Vijayashanker: No that's great. Alright well thank you both, Lisa and Vera for coming on the show and sharing some of these awesome best practices.   Lisa Doan:  Thanks for having us.   Vera Reynolds: Thank you.   Poornima Vijayashanker: You’re welcome.                           Well that's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to share this episode with your friends, your teammates, and your boss and subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more episodes of *Build*. Ciao for now!

Happy November!   November is one of my favorite months mostly because I love Thanksgiving. Last year I had a wonderful time celebrating it with Meghan Burgain, Femgineer’s Community Manager in Bordeaux, France. We had a Frenchgiving, and had the opportunity to share how Meghan works remotely.   This November we’re going to be tackling a new theme on Build: building a brand new product.   If you’ve been building a product for a while, you know it’s natural to start accruing tech debt and product debt. And there comes a point where it becomes really hard to add new features without paying down the debt through rebuilding or redesigning the product.   However, there may come a point where neither of those makes sense, and you may be evaluating building a brand new product.   The Pivotal Tracker team recently did this. In today’s episode, Lisa Doan, who is a product manager for Pivotal Tracker and Vera Reynolds, who is a software engineer for Pivotal Tracker, are going to walk you through how they came to the decision to build a brand new product.   As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn:   What spurred the conversation to consider building a new product Why the team chose not to redesign or rebuild the existing product What the team did to identify the problem it was solved with the new product Why the team held off on coding and building and what they did instead Why software engineers benefit from being involved in the research phase of a brand new product How to recruit new teammates to help build, and identify knowledge gaps -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## Why Build A Brand New Product Instead Of Rebuilding Or Redesigning One Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker: It can be really tempting to want to redesign or rebuild a product that's been around for a while. But often, it's much more of an undertaking to do that redesign and rebuild, and it can be easier to instead build a brand new product. The Pivotal Tracker team had to do this recently and in today's episode. they're going to share how they evaluated building a brand new product. 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 debug a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies and your career in tech. When you've been building a product for a while, it's natural that you start to see tech debt and product debt accrue to a point where it backs you into a corner and it's really hard to add new features without rebuilding or redesigning it.                           But at some point, it may not make sense to keep adding to that product and instead, you may want to build a brand new product. In today's episode, we're going to dive into why you may decide to build a brand new product instead of redesigning or rebuilding your existing one. To help us out, I've invited two lovely ladies from the Pivotal Tracker team. Lisa Doan, who is a product manager for Pivotal Tracker as well as Vera Reynolds who is a software engineer on their team. Thanks for coming on the show you two.   Vera Reynolds: Thank you for having us.   Lisa Doan: Yeah, thank you so much.   Poornima Vijayashanker: I know that Pivotal Tracker now has been around for over 10 years, has over 100,000 active users and there's just been a lot of features, and a lot that you've accomplished in the past 12 years. And so, adding to it might have been a challenge and that's why you decided to go a slightly different direction.   What Spurred The Desire To Re-Evaluate The Product                           But before we even go and talk about that new direction, let's talk about what even caused this to happen. Let's get in a time machine, go back in time. What spurred the change for a different direction?   Lisa Doan:  It was really a confluence of a lot of different things happening all at once. On the product side as a team, we were frustrated because we weren't able to really deliver major features that our customers had asked for. On the engineering side there was a lot of tech debt, and a lot of frustration working in the code base. And on the customer side, there was also a lot of frustration that we hadn't really put out major features in a long time and our product had somewhat stagnated.                           All of that led to us realizing that we needed to do something big, but there were so many things in our way that we wanted to deal with. That's kind of what led to the origin of our project.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Can you give us a timeline, like roughly when did that start?   Lisa Doan:  I think as a team we started to recognize about a year ago that something big needed to happen. It's just been a gradual process since then.   Signs That The Product Needs To Change   Poornima Vijayashanker: Looking back, can you point to maybe a cause or several causes that led to the product starting to decline?   Lisa Doan:  Sure. The product was actually born out of an internal team. Pivotal itself started as a consultancy. Back in 2006, there wasn't a great backlog management tool, and so the engineers built one that suited their needs. But because of that, Tracker was always a bit of an accidental product. We built it for our own needs. But, clients would then ask to take it home after engagements and then it just grew virally there.                           Because of this, we never really had a clear mission or vision. It was just something that we built that we had a problem and then we solved for. That over time became a problem because we added all these different customers, but they had varying problems and we didn't have anything to pin our work too. We didn't have a strong opinion on which direction we should take the product so that led to lots of different features that were kind of scattered in how they addressed user problem.   Why Choose NOT To Redesign Or Rebuild A Product   Poornima Vijayashanker: I know in the next episode we're going to talk a lot about how you changed your engineering and your product team's whole process, so we'll pause on that. What I want to talk about now is why you decided against redesigning and rebuilding Pivotal Tracker.   Lisa Doan:  In maybe October of last year, as a group we had finally realized that we were at this point that we needed to make a big call on something and the initial thought was like, yeah, let's just rebuild. it's just so much easier, the code base is so challenging. No one wants to work in it anymore. Because it was an accidental product, there was never a strong architectural vision so it was all sorts of different tech stacks everywhere.                           So, we decided that we were going to have this team go out and they would re-envision Tracker. We even called it Tracker, but Better. Really quickly we realized that wasn't such a great idea. Tracker was built for a specific problem, which is backlog management. That was the problem in 2006.                           But here in 2018, the problems are different. There are lots of different backlog management tools that any team can choose and tailored to their specific needs, and Tracker has kind of falling behind on some of those things. At the same time, the problem that all of our customers have is around knowing what to build.                           Teams now know how to build software pretty well and there are lots of tools they can choose from, but how do they choose the right product to build? Tracker doesn't solve for that in any way at all.   Two Paths: Maintaining The Existing Product And Building A Brand New One   Poornima Vijayashanker: So, you make the decision that you're going to build a new product, and the Pivotal Tracker team is going to continue building that because there are two different needs, kind of two different missions and visions. Let's dive into what happens next with the new product.   Lisa Doan:  One of the goals for our team was to go back and reconnect and realign with a larger organization. Tracker kind of had its own destiny within Pivotal, and we wanted to make sure that both Tracker and whatever initiative we started with our team were more aligned with Pivotal. One thing we did is, we went back and talked to our leadership and we talk to other users within the organization to make sure that we were following their pain and solving the right problems for them, whether it's within Tracker or within your products.   Poornima Vijayashanker: You're at a point now where Tracker is continuing to be built by a team. You form a new team to discover what this new product is going to have in it.   Lisa Doan:  Sure.   Identifying THE Problem To Solve   Poornima Vijayashanker: So, what are some next steps?   Lisa Doan:  From Tracker, we knew there was a big space of problems that our users were dealing with, and so we wanted to really dig into that. Another goal that we had was bringing our team closer to the Pivotal Organization. Overtime, Tracker had sort of become a silo on its own, so part of our team's goal was to reconnect with the broader organization and make sure our product is aligned with that.                           So we went out and talked to various stakeholders. We talked to the CEO, we talked to the leadership in cloud and R&D and understood where they think the business is going and how we could support that. We had to rebuild a lot of those bridges, but it's been extremely valuable because they provide us input that we didn't have previously that helps guide us in terms of the decisions we make when we're building this new product.   Poornima Vijayashanker: What became the focus of this new product?   Vera Reynolds: To get a little meta, we've been using Tracker to develop Tracker. It's a great tool, and it allows teams to go fast. However, what it doesn't help with his direction. One thing we've noticed is that we as a larger Tracker team have been going fast for a while, but we've been struggling with direction. That's the problem space we're trying to solve with the new product, east to compliment Tracker in a way that allows you to find that direction and continue on it.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Got It. So you're now in a new problem space. Then, did you start getting your hands dirty? Did you start writing code? What's the next thing that you did after that after you defined the problem space?   What To Do Before Coding And Building A Brand New Product   Vera Reynolds: We did a lot of research. I say that kind of tongue in cheek a little bit...   Poornima Vijayashanker: How many months?   Vera Reynolds: I'm an engineer, so it was a learning experience to put it mildly.   Poornima Vijayashanker: How many months of research do you think you did?   Vera Reynolds: We did about four months. Is that right?   Lisa Doan:  Yeah.   How To Experiment Before Building And Coding   Poornima Vijayashanker: A lot of the time that you were doing these, were you also running experiments or something else?   Vera Reynolds: Yeah. We actually had a Lean startup coach that worked with us for some time. She really helped us understand those practices because there was a lot of paralysis early on. As we started exploring this new problem space, there was just so much that we, not hadn't thought of, but we hadn't seen eye to eye for a while. There was a lot of things we could solve, and you get a little bit distracted like a dog and a pavilion of squirrels or something.                           So, our coach really helped us develop a practice where we create experiments, like you said, we talked to users and we had really a defined assumption so we're trying to debunk, or prove. We did about 30, I think, experiments before we started building. So, we took it really serious.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Wow, 30 experiments. What did these look like?   Lisa Doan:  There's a huge range. We did a lot of generative interviews where we just sit down and talk with customers. We've also generated prototypes, put those in front of customers and see how they interact with them. We've also done fun things like feature fakes and experiments with the existing products to get a feel for what our customers are really looking for.   How A Feature Fake Can Help   Poornima Vijayashanker: What's a feature fake?   Lisa Doan:  A feature fake is where you build the facade of a feature and you present it to your users as if it's a real thing, and then see how they interact with it. If they like it; and then you gather feedback around that to see whether or not they had a positive experience or if that's something they might be interested in before you actually do any of the work to build it for real.   Poornima Vijayashanker: After 30 experiments, I'm sure you uncovered a lot. How do you decide to whittle things down?   Vera Reynolds: Some of the things we've done came from Pivotal Labs like discovery, framing and inception, those are early stage meetings that help you scope your work and decide what you're going to build. You have to remember, we were still in that phase of research and we were always trying to keep each other accountable about not building things prematurely and not building too much. We use those practices and we had a meeting where we wrote just the bare minimum stories we needed to accomplish in order to have an MVP and started there.   How To Pare Down Customer Insights And Scope A Prototype   Poornima Vijayashanker: After 30 experiments, I'm sure you've got a lot of customer insight. How do you whittle that down?   Vera Reynolds: As part of every experiment, we wanted to end on a headline or major learnings and pain points that our users needed to be fixed. That kind of gave us a list that we could start with. We started there and wrote down features. We actually aren't continuing experimenting as we're building. We're validating prototypes and making sure we're only building the minimum things and only building what we need.   How To Handle Knowledge Gaps On The Team   Poornima Vijayashanker: Got It. Did you ever run into knowledge gaps where people on your team didn't know?   Vera Reynolds: Yes, yes we did.   Lisa Doan:  So many knowledge gaps.   Vera Reynolds: Pivotal Tracker is a very engineer-centric team. For better or worse, and I think there are strong engineer practices, but I've never had done user research until this team so there was a lot of knowledge gaps there for sure. For me as an engineer, and I'm sure Lisa can agree as well with Lean practices and experimenting fast and focused learning, things like that.   How To Assemble A Team To Build A New Product   Poornima Vijayashanker: Got It. How did you go about assembling your team together because I know like you said, you had your Tracker team and then there was a new team together. How did that come about?   Lisa Doan:  Where we were in the beginning of the years is, we were still believing that we were going to rebuild Tracker at the time. And so, moving forward with a new product we knew we needed people on the team who were willing to step out of their roles a little bit. We knew we had to step into this big body of research. We also had so many engineers on the Tracker team that we also wanted to keep involved in and teach some of the practices.                           So, we added engineers on our team in addition to myself and a designer. Engineers who are very empathetic, who care a lot about building features that users care about and love. That was something we definitely look for when we were adding people to our team.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Let's talk about how you assembled your team because you mentioned there was the Tracker team and now you have a new team for a new product.   Characteristics To Look For In Teammates   Lisa Doan:  We were pulling from the original a Tracker team. But going into the new product, we knew there was a huge body of research that had to be undertaken. So when we were assembling the team, we were looking for people who are extremely empathetic and could really dig into...Would be willing to adopt some of the skills that we were lacking on the team. Things like user research, talking to customers. So, we looked for engineers, testers, designers and PMs who were very focused on understanding the user's problems and then trying to iterate our way towards a product for those people.   Poornima Vijayashanker: To recap, you have a conversation at the beginning of last year or some point last year where you decide you're going to build a new product, you go out dialing to stakeholders, and then from there you decided, OK, we're going to assemble a team, fill in knowledge gaps. What happens after all of that? You start building?   Vera Reynolds: Eventually. Like I said, it took about 30 experiments to get to the point where we started building, but it was a happy day. It was a happy day on the team. We started building around June, and we have just recently began rolling out our MVP. So, it's a pretty exciting time.   The Importance Of Having A Mission And Vision   Lisa Doan:  One major thing that we haven't talked about yet that was critical to our success so far is that we had to come up with a mission and vision. Prior to having that, we were just sent out into the world with this idea of we're going to re-envision Tracker, but that's so broad. That's such a huge space. Tracker has 100,000 users and they're all across the board. They could be just a small startup team, it could be multiple enterprise teams that are using this product.                           So, it was extremely difficult to know where to start. And because of that, we ended up in a place of paralysis because it's like, do we attack this problem, that problem? Who knows? We ended up spinning for a while, so when our innovation coach arrived, that's the first thing she noticed. The first thing she went about doing is getting us to agree on a mission and vision.                           That was really a huge turning point for us because whenever we can make a decision, we would bounce it against that and ask, is this in service of our mission? If not, then we would have to readdress it, otherwise we felt comfortable moving forward. That really started the ball rolling, is just having something to point at and agree on that this is what we're choosing to focus on.   Why Software  Engineers Need To Be Involved In Tasks Aside From Coding   Poornima Vijayashanker: Was there anything else that you you needed to do before you could start actually coding?   Vera Reynolds: I think the important part was to not head down into coding and not come up for air. We are trying to keep engineers involved in research, continue to spin a that track and not go off and just build. I think that's the most important thing to remember for us now.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Is there anything else that you did before you dug into building and writing code?   Vera Reynolds: Not really, that was about it. However, we were all trying to remind each other to be mindful of not go on the rails of building and start going fast as we did previously on Tracker, and really be mindful of that user-centric value.   Poornima Vijayashanker: I know we're going to share a lot of these best practices in the next episode, so I'm going to end it here. Thank you both for coming and sharing how you decided to go and build this new product instead of doing a rebuild or redesign.   Vera Reynolds: Thanks for having us.   Lisa Doan:  Yeah, thank you.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Now I want to know, are you thinking about doing a rebuild, redesign, or maybe building a brand new product? If so, what's been your approach? Let me 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're going to go into more detail around how to keep a new product on track. Ciao for now!

In last week's Build episode, we talked about why if somebody doesn't understand your explanation for a technical concept, it's not OK to just tell them to look it up or Google it. We also covered the effects of doing this, the main one being that you don’t come off as someone who is credible!   In today's episode, we're going to dive into the specific tactics for how you can explain abstract technical concepts to an audience of either lay people or one that may be a little bit more advanced.   Anne Janzer is back to help us out. Anne is a prolific author and recently published Writing To Be Understood: What Works and Why.   Here’s what you’ll learn as you listen to today’s episode: What things we need to take extra time to explain How to gauge your audience’s level How to handle mixed audiences and explain in a way that is inclusive How to avoid “dumbing down” an explanation Why writing out an explanation is harder than sharing it verbally How to pick analogies that are going to resonate with your audience Which contexts to apply these techniques to -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- # 3 Techniques To Improve Your Explanations And Be Understood Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:           In the previous episode of Build, we talked about why if somebody doesn't understand your explanation for a technical concept, it's not okay to just tell them to look it up or Google it, and if you missed the episode and the reasons why it's important for you to explain, then I've included a link to it below. In today's episode, we're going to dive into the specific tactics for how you can explain abstract technical concepts to an audience of either lay people or one that may be a little bit more advanced. So, stay tuned.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           (pause)   Poornima Vijayashanker:           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, we've been talking about the importance of breaking down abstract technical concepts as the person explaining them. In the last episode, we uncovered why it's important as the explainer to take the time to explain things in a way that your audience is going to understand.   In today's episode, we're going to dive a little bit deeper to give you specific tactics that you can use the next time you're presented with having to communicate something to a teammate or to a lay audience.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           And to help us out, Anne Janzer is back. She is the author of a number of books that range on topics from writing to marketing, and she's kind of a cognitive science geek. So, thanks again for joining us today, Anne.   Anne Janzer:        Thanks for having me back.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. So, I know in your upcoming book, you've got a range of techniques, and I want to kind of tease out just a few for our audience, and I know it focuses on writing, but I'm sure a lot of these techniques apply in a number of contexts. Maybe you can share with our audience some of the contexts that you think these techniques could apply to.   Anne Janzer:        Really, yes, I think they apply any time you've got to communicate about a complicated topic to someone who doesn't share the same background you have on that topic. So, it can be whether you're writing an email to somebody or presenting to investors, maybe trying to explain to your family what the heck it is you do for a living.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah.   Anne Janzer:        That can be a challenge if you work in tech, I know. There's all sorts of things, and it certainly applies to ... most of this applies to writing as well as speaking. The challenge with writing that's different than speaking is that when we're speaking, I have my body language, I have my voice, and I can see if you're checking out, checking your mail, or confused.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Why writing out an explanation is harder than sharing it verbally   Anne Janzer:        It's very obvious, and when I'm writing, the reader's not present when I write, and the writer's not present when they read. So, everything's just on the paper. So, you have to work harder to really advocate for the reader as you are doing the work of planning and writing and revising so that it really, you can be almost present with them.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           So, let's talk about the things that we need to take extra time to explain.   Anne Janzer:        Right, so, here's the main thing. It's abstract topics.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Anne Janzer:        Technology is itself just layers of abstraction, right, and you work in this silo of abstraction, and that person works in that silo of abstraction. Maybe I know storage, and you know Cloud infrastructure, right? They're really related things, but they're different things, and when people are faced with abstract ideas, this is part of human reasoning. We are animals that abstract things.   Anne Janzer:        There's a couch, and there's a table, and they're both furniture. Now, everybody's comfortable if I talked about furniture, you know what I'm talking about, but when it gets to technology, you can get to the point where people aren't comfortable with that, and so what we need to do is try to figure out a way how to take something that is abstract and sometimes intangible. It's just an idea, and make it concrete so that people can understand it.   What things we need to take extra time to explain   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Now, what are the specific things that we need to take extra time to explain?   Anne Janzer:        So, when we work in the tech industry, we're dealing with abstract ideas all the time, abstractions, and it's just layers and layers and layers and abstractions, and so we come up with a lot of words and terms and jargon that is short hand, and it's absolutely essential for us to communicate with each other, right, but it's not always essential for us to communicate with someone outside of our field.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Anne Janzer:        And that is often the biggest barrier for people understanding what we're talking about when we're talking about technology, is the words that we use, the jargon and the abstractions that we use. So, that is the thing that the very low hanging fruit to take care of when you're writing or speaking, is what abstractions and what jargon am I using that could cause problems?   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. I've also noticed for a lot of my students and audience that they may have something that's internal to their company. So, yeah, sure something like HTML, okay, we get that that's an abstraction because of the acronym. It's kind of buzz wordy, but then they have something internal where they say, oh, we use this thing called an OKR, and they just assume everybody in their company knows it. Somebody on the outside's like, OKR, what is that, right?   Anne Janzer:        Right.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, so how can we kind of figure out what things we may think are specific to our organization or even our team, are not necessarily commonplace.   Anne Janzer:        Yeah, so you have to get a little loose. I like to print out what I've written, and maybe highlight anything that is term, an abstraction, maybe anything that is abbreviated, capitalized, acronyms. You know what they are.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Anne Janzer:        And for each of them, you need to ask two questions. Is it maybe, is it possibly unfamiliar to my audience, and is it necessary? So, if it's necessary to use it, the only way to talk about it, or everybody talks about blockchain is blockchain, right? Okay, I had to use the word blockchain. There's a law, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah.   Anne Janzer:        I have to use it. If it's necessary to use it, but it might be unfamiliar, then it is on you to define it or show an example the first time you use it, or use it in such a clear context that there's no confusion. If it's unnecessary and unfamiliar, if there's another way to use it, get rid of it. You're just adding unnecessary cognitive load to the reader.   Anne Janzer:        So, necessary or unnecessary, familiar or unfamiliar. I mean, you don't have to strip out furniture. You know, you don't have to strip out acronyms or things that people really should all know who are in your audience, but you do need to be anything that, yeah, maybe they know it, but maybe they haven't encountered it that many times.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Anne Janzer:        So, they're going to have to do a little bit of extra work to fill in the blanks while they're listening to you or reading.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           So, is there a way we can gauge the audience level, because I know a lot of times people assume, well, I'm talking about this new framework, this new technology, and it's in the title of my talk. This conference is about this talk. So, I just assume everyone coming here is going to know what this is. Why do I really need to take an extra 30 seconds, one minute, PowerPoint slide, et cetera to explain this? Won't it seem like I'm "dumbing it down" for them?   How to avoid “dumbing down” an explanation   Anne Janzer:        Yeah, right. I think you don't want to dumb down for people. You want to respect their intelligence, but you also have to remember someone at the conference just came out of three other sessions. Someone picking up your article may be like, wait. Why do I want to read this? It's in the title. I forgot. I mean, people come from very interruptive and context changing day, and you need to help them reset even if you think that everybody coming is showing up for that reason. They may not be. They may be showing up for other reasons as well.   Anne Janzer:        So, it's always worth trying to put yourself in the audience shoes for a moment, and say let's say I'm new to this industry, and I'm showing up here to learn. What should I assume the people ... what that person might know? What if you were on your second week of your job, and you show up at your talk, or you pick up your article? You want to help that person as well as the next one, right? You want to help your audience. You should be doing this to try to be understood, and you would like to be understood by them.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, or that person that got dragged to the talk, because hey, your buddy was like, this is going to be an amazing talk. I know the speaker, but you're like I don't know what this thing is.   Anne Janzer:        Yep. Yep. If all goes well, you'll be one of the speakers that people go to hear your talk even if they don't know what your subject is about, because you're so awesome as a speaker.   How to gauge your audience’s level   Poornima Vijayashanker:           So, how do we know who's going to show up, or how can we gauge the audience level before we write our post, our book, or give our talk?   Anne Janzer:        I think we have to try to put ourselves in the seat of the audience, the mind of the audience. Try to figure out who the people might be, and answer these three questions about them. What do they already know? Where are they coming from? And give them a little range. Don't assume everybody is at the top of the knowledge range there.   So, what do they already know? How do they feel about the topic? Are they there under duress? Are they there, because they're really fascinated by it, because they think it's a hot investment opportunity? I mean, there's a lot of different things that could be motivating people to learn about your topic, and it's interesting to know what they are. And what makes them curious? How can you engage their curiosity, and bring them in to learn more about what you're trying to explain? Because when someone's curious, they're going to be paying more attention. They're going to be coming with you as you explain your thing with them.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah.   Anne Janzer:        So, you have to give them a reason to be paying attention.   How to handle mixed audiences and explain in a way that is inclusive   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Sometimes we're in a mixed audience, though, where our teammates are there, some stakeholders, it's internal, or we're in an external conference or an event where there's people of varying levels. We don't necessarily want to bore the people who already know what we're saying, and we also don't want to talk down to the people who are beginners. So, how can we explain in a way that is inclusive?   Anne Janzer:        Yes, that's a challenge, and it's something that you're going to have to play with and balance, but I think it's important to remember that nobody gets upset if you quickly define a term the first time you use it, and you can also use to guide people who are different ranges, by using an interesting example.   Anne Janzer:        So, the people already know it find value from the example. People who don't know it, learned it, hear what you're saying. So, if you're talking about artificial intelligence and recommendation algorithms, right? Most of your audience may know what that means, but a few may be just like ... and then so you can say, you know, like when Netflix recommends, or the other day I went on Netflix, and I got a recommendation to check out this story. Now, you've anchored it in something that is an experience that everybody has. You've level set the people who weren't so familiar with that term. You've brought them right back up, and you haven't really bored the people who do know what it is.   Anne Janzer:        It's doesn't take a heavy lecturey touch to do this. You can do it through an example, through a story.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           So, I think that brings us to the first tactic. Let's dive right in.   Technique #1: Why using analogies or metaphors helps people understand your technical explanation   Anne Janzer:        Great. So, one of the first ways to explain technical concepts, this is something that you probably do instinctively all the time, which is to use an analogy. In fact, tech is just filled with metaphors and analogies. Like I said, we have files and folders, and we have, which there's no real folders on your computer.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Anne Janzer:        There is not little folder. It's an icon, but it's an analogy that we're working with. So, metaphors, analogies, they can serve two things, actually. One is they can help explain what's happening or give us a useful way to engage with stuff that is amorphous, and two, they can actually connect on a different level.   Anne Janzer:        So, I found this metaphor the other day about, or analogy, about using units. It's kind of like driving a stick shift car, right? So, it gives you more power, more control, but learning it can be kind of uncomfortable, and it takes a little while. So, now if you've ever driven a stick shift car-   Poornima Vijayashanker:           I have, and I burned the clutch.   Anne Janzer:        You've learned, or your burned a clutch, right. So, when I used that analogy, we had a shared experience, and you're like, okay that makes sense to Unix, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Anne Janzer:        That's interesting, but you also, the part of you that's listening to it probably, I did this thing with my hand, right? I have a physical memory of driving a stick shift. I have a physical memory of learning and the rabbit, the jumping thing that you do when you're like burning a clutch.   So, if you were listening to me or if you were reading those words even, the little parts of your brain that are involved with the physical memories or the visual memories of seeing something, those parts of your brain fired. Metaphor actually connects on a way beyond just our reasoning, thinking mind. People in functional MRI's, they show if they read a story, the action part, so their brains are actually firing as if they're doing the thing that they're reading about.   Anne Janzer:        So, our brains are not really ... we know rationally what's metaphor, but we also sort of connect on a different level. Now, if that happened while you're talking about Unix, that's a win, right? You're now more engaged. It's a little bit interesting to you, right? You've gotten the meaning, but you've also just become a little bit more interested in sticking with the experience of reading or listening.   How to pick analogies that are going to resonate with your audience   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right, but I've also seen that backfire sometimes where you pick a metaphor, or you pick an example that you think the audience is going to get. Let's just call a spade a spade, and say there's a lot of sports analogies out there that get used, and the person on the receiving end's like, I don't know the first thing about baseball.   Anne Janzer:        Yeah, or that's like the 11th inning. It's like no.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Or do you mean cricket? Yeah.   Anne Janzer:        Exactly.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           So, how do we know that our example or our metaphor that we choose is going to be universal?   Anne Janzer:        Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           How can we kind of test it out?   Anne Janzer:        Yeah. Testing it is exactly the thing. I mean, the analogies work if there's a shared experience. Sometimes you can have an analogy that isn't a shared experience. I think about the book, The Black Swan, or use The Black Swan, the story of the black swan as an analogy for an unanticipated risk. Something we assumed we didn't exist, because we didn't see it, right?   Anne Janzer:        That has to be explained. So, sometimes analogies are great, but it needs to be explained, but most of the time we want our metaphors to teach, not to need a lot of teaching.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Sure.   Anne Janzer:        So, we need to understand the audience. We need to be empathetic and understand where they're coming from, and give a little explanation if we suspect there are cultural differences.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Anne Janzer:        And be aware, too, that metaphors, because they activate those other parts of our brain, if you use a metaphor of a clown, and your audience is people that have that clown phobia thing.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           That's true.   Anne Janzer:        Do you know what I mean?   Poornima Vijayashanker:           It might activate the wrong part.   Anne Janzer:        You can activate the wrong things. Metaphors are powerful, and they can go in unexpected directions. So, be careful, especially across cultural. Working in tech is so multicultural. We need to be quite cautious with the metaphors that we use.   Technique #2: How storytelling helps an audience understand your explanation   Poornima Vijayashanker:           And what about the second tactic?   Anne Janzer:        The second tactic is, again, what we're trying to do is make something that is abstract more real to the reader, to the listener, and one of the best ways to do that is through story.   Now, I was an English major in college, and when I was in freshman year, a couple of my friends took a creative writing class. They were also English majors, and I saw them terrified. Every time they had to turn in a story, they'd pull all nighters, and I said to myself, oh my God. Storytelling is scary. It's stressful, and it makes you stay up all night. I am not doing any of that. Forget it. I'm a nonfiction writer. I'll be a literature major, and I'll go into technical writing, because there's no story involved.   Anne Janzer:        Well, so, years later of course, I was wrong. The best writers, when I read these books, I tell you the writers I admire who write about cognitive science, they use story incredibly effectively. They are not fiction writers. Story doesn't mean fiction.   Anne Janzer:        So, using story is a great way to connect with people, and it's something that we all need to do. Like I just shared with you a story about my personal transformation through that story. It's not that hard. I'm not a master storyteller. I didn't follow a three act structure. I didn't have rising and declining. I mean, you can do all that.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Anne Janzer:        But a story can be very simple. It could be a moment of time when you realized something. It could be a certain situation. The best advice, for me, I had to shed my preconceptions about storytelling and just try something very simple. Just experiment with it, and gradually get a little bit more confidence.   How short stories can help get your point across   Poornima Vijayashanker:           I've noticed that especially with folks who are very technical, that I do a lot of public speaking coaching with, they have an aversion to starting with a story, because their preconceived notion is, oh, it's going to be long winded. The audience is going to tune out, pull out their laptop, cell phone, whatever, and is this really necessary?   Why can't I just cut to the chase and say today I'm going to talk about a distributed denial of service attack? Right? Yeah, okay, you kind of like cut to the chase.   People get it, but it's so much more compelling if you were to say, six months ago, we were under attack. We were facing a distributed denial of service attack.   Anne Janzer:        Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           And then all of a sudden, the audience is like, what's that? That sounds terrible, right? And it's just a very simple switch.   Anne Janzer:        Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Like you said, it doesn't have to be long winded. So, how can we help our audience understand that when you're presenting a story, it doesn't have to be a poem. It doesn't have to be 400 pages. It can be pithy.   Anne Janzer:        Right, I mean, there are stories all around you. Any time you take an abstract technology and you look at a human interaction with it, there's a potential for a story.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           And use case.   Anne Janzer:        I mean, a use case is a story.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah.   When to NOT tell a story   Anne Janzer:        And actually, it's more interesting the more...not a ten page use case. God, no. Just a little short blip of this person using this to do this. It can be a story. It doesn't have to be...it shouldn't be a long thing. And don't give someone a story when they're asking for data. That drives me nuts.   Anne Janzer:        It's like you go up and say, what happened to the sales last year? Let me tell you a story. Oh, God, don't do that.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah.   Anne Janzer:        I mean, a story has its role.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Anne Janzer:        It's not something that you should be overwhelming people with, but it's a really powerful tool for either engaging their interest, engaging their curiosity, or explaining something, because they come along with you as they understand it.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. So, you could say something like oh, the conversion rate went up 75%, or went down 75%. You want to know more? Happy to give you the details.   Anne Janzer:        Yeah. Yeah, exactly.   How being brief helps you build credibility   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Nice. So, in the previous episode, we touched upon this desire to be long winded, and you mentioned how people often do it, because they want to come off as being credible. They worry, oh my gosh. If I take my 500 word bio and cut it down to 100, someone will miss something. They won't know that I wrote 200 books, or that I met with the Dalai Lama, and that's really important for being able to speak on Bitcoin. Right? So, how can we help our audience realize that it's okay to be brief, and it's not going to cost us our credibility?   Anne Janzer:        Right. Yeah, it's not going to cost you your credibility, and in fact, it's probably going to increase your credibility. People, again, credibility is based on being understood, and when we include too much, people perceive it that we're busy talking about us, and our needs, and not focusing on the reader's needs.   Anne Janzer:        So, if you are talking about Bitcoin, and you're an expert on Bitcoin, then just craft a bio about Bitcoin. I mean, people can link and find out more about you-   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Anne Janzer:        ...if they are so interested. Get them curious about you to find out more. That's awesome, but don't throw out everything at them in the bio, and put some of that stuff in your bio as opposed to in the body of your talk. You don't have to be, first let me tell you about my five startups or something, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah.   Anne Janzer:        I mean, people can look this up. You want to get them curious enough to look up the stuff rather than you feeding it to them, because if you think about everybody. We have so much stuff. I think that we're all reading less and less online. So, if you show up with 50 really great words, people will read them. If they see a block of 300 words, they're going to skip the whole thing.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah.   Anne Janzer:        I mean, if you want to be effective, be brief. Be concise, and give the reader what they're looking for rather than what you feel you need to be saying.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. So, it's all about that topicality. What is it that the crux of the subject is, and how does your bio, your credibility fit into that?   Anne Janzer:        Absolutely, and you will be credible if you show up and give them useful stuff. That's going to be important.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. So, what's the final tactic?   Technique #3: How tone and style impact an audience’s understanding   Anne Janzer:        So, the final tactic is to think about the tone and style that you're writing in or speaking in. Now, tone is kind of like brand. It's not something that you assert. It's something that other people interpret, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Right.   Anne Janzer:        So, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, that makes it really hard.   Anne Janzer:        It makes it hard. It makes it hard. That's why you actually have to get out and test your stuff. You have to test your writing. You have to test your speaking. You may think that you're showing up one way, and people may be interpreting it another.   Anne Janzer:        In speaking, we've got things to do, and you are expert in that to show up with a different tone, a different persona. In writing, all you've got is your words.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Mm-hmm.   Anne Janzer:        So, there's some leverage that you can use in looking at, we've talked about them already, abstractions, the jargon. That has a huge impact on the tone of the written piece.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Mm-hmm.   Anne Janzer:        So, going through and stripping out unnecessary abstraction, stripping out unnecessary words, actually makes the piece stronger. Sometimes when we add words like very and really, it weakens our prose, which is crazy. So, I mean—   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Qualifier words.   Anne Janzer:        Qualifier words just go through and cut them out in revision. Make your thing stronger by being more to the point and quick. The sentence length, you know, sentences don't have to go on for pages and pages. Short sentences. Not the way we speak, because obviously I ramble when I speak, but when I write, my sentences are short and to the point.   How to iterate and find your personal style   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. Well, these are all great tactics. Now, I know it's going to be a challenge, and it's going to take some work, some iterations. The first time we try some of these tactics, we may fall flat. So, how can we go about iterating?   Anne Janzer:        So, yeah, you're going to need to find your personal balance for what feels comfortable for you, works with the subject, and meets the audience needs, and that balance may change with everything you do, every talk you give, every blog post you write may be a little bit different. Well, hopefully not every blog post, but you're going to find your personal style and tone, and you're going to have to test things out.   The other thing to remember, even while we talk about brevity, is repetition, that people don't necessarily catch things the first time it goes past. In fact, they rarely catch things the first time it goes past.   Anne Janzer:        So, if you can find a way to repeat, iterate within your talk, or iterate within your article, by repeating your message in a slightly different way, a different example. Eventually it's going to sink in and have an effect. So, you may hit these readers with this thing, and these readers with a second occurrence, and these readers with a third occurrence when it's expressed in a slightly different way.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Anne. This has been really helpful. I know our audience out there is going to get a lot of value, and will hopefully start to employ these tactics as they have to—   Anne Janzer:        I hope so.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           ...communicate those difficult technical concepts, whether it's inside their organization or outside.   Anne Janzer:        I certainly hope so. Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. So, how can our audience get in touch with you?   Anne Janzer:        So, my website is my name. Anne with a silent E, Janzer, and you can find information there about the book, Understood, which is on Amazon and hopefully all the other places that you would buy books. We'll see. And also I have a regular blog about writing. You can sign up for that there, and I'd be happy if anyone had any questions, wanted to reach out to me. I'd be happy to hear from you.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, wonderful. Well, we'll be sure to include the links below the video and in the show notes.   Anne Janzer:        Great, thanks.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           That's it for this week's episode of *Build*. Be sure to share this episode with your friends, your teammates, and your boss, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more episodes of *Build*. Ciao for now.  

Confession time…   A few years ago when someone asked me to explain a technical concept and I couldn’t successfully get through to them or didn’t have time, I would send them this link. ;)   And it seemed funny the first couple of times I did it.   It wasn’t until someone did it to me that I realized how obnoxious it was. I eventually stopped asking for them for help, because I knew they weren’t very good at explaining things and didn’t have the patience to help me.   I also realized that I didn’t want to be like them. I needed to get better at explaining technical concepts. Ever since then, I’ve been on a quest to improve how I communicate technical concepts when I write and speak to people and audiences of varying levels.   Part of my discovery led to me Anne Janzer. Anne is a prolific author who has recently written a book called Writing To Be Understood: What Works And Why, and she’s also a cognitive science geek!   I sat down with Anne to debunk the misconception that if someone doesn’t understand a technical concept immediately, then it’s their fault. They're too much of a layperson, and they should look it up. But it’s actually the explainer who needs to do a better job of explaining, and in today’s *Build* episode, we’ll explain why!   In next week’s episode, we'll provide techniques on how you can get better at explaining technical concepts to a mixed audience or to a layperson.   As you listen today’s episode, you’ll learn the following:   Why people on the receiving end of an explanation find the explainer to be less smart if the explanation cannot be easily understood Why people are bad at explaining technical concepts using simple language Why we assume our audience knows what we’re talking about Why people may not get our explanation The three questions to ask yourself about your audience before you communicate with them Why we have a tendency to overexplain Why overexplaining isn’t helpful either and being brief is better   -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## Why Doing a Bad Job of Explaining Technical Concepts Hurts Our Credibility Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:  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 huge misconception that we all face is that when we're trying to explain a technical concept, if someone doesn't immediately get it, we think, you know what, it's their fault. They're too much of a layperson, and we advise them to just look it up. Turns out, the person who's explaining the technical concept, it's actually their fault for not explaining it.   I know that might seem counterintuitive, but in today's episode, we're going to explain why the onus falls on the explainer and in a future episode, we'll give you some techniques on how you can get better at explaining technical concepts to a mixed audience or to a lay person. And to help us out, I've invited Anne Janzer, who is the author of a number of books ranging from writing to marketing and she's kind of a cognitive science geek. Thanks for joining us today, Anne.   Anne Janzer:    Thanks for having me Poornima. I'm happy to be here.   Poornima Vijayashanker:   So you've got a new book coming out and it's all about explaining technical concepts and being understood. Maybe you can dive into the origin story for what inspired you to write this book.   Anne Janzer:    Sure. So, the title of the book is *Understood*. So it's about writing to be understood and it came from two things in my life. One, is that I spent a lot of my time in the technical industry as a freelance marketing writer working for dozens and dozens of different companies trying to explain these really geeky technologies to a business audience. So that's familiar to most of the viewers.   But second, I also, as you said, I'm a bit of cognitive science geek so I love to read all these books about the brain and psychology and behavior and behavioral economics. You notice that some authors are really good at explaining this stuff. And you think, so there's parallels between what they do and what I was doing, which is explaining complicated, abstract topics. So are some people just like born better at this? I don't think so.   I took a close look at what these writers do, now I've called up and talked to some of them about what they do which is great. It turns out that there are just methods and techniques and approaches that we can all use to become better at being understood when we're talking about something to people who don't share our knowledge about it.   Poornima Vijayashanker:   So it's great that there all these experts who understand why this is important, but for our audience out there, they're not sure why this is important. We can dive into that in a little more detail.   Why people on the receiving end of an explanation find the explainer to be less smart if the explanation cannot be easily understood   Anne Janzer:    Yes. So you may not feel like…you may feel, well, I'm the expert. It's not on me to make sure that everybody understands. It's not my problem basically, if I'm explaining it. But it is your problem. It really is and the cognitive science shows that.   When you explain something that's complicated and you use words or terms or even writing techniques that they don't understand, you are giving the audience extra cognitive load. You're making them do extra work, not to understand the thing that you're saying, but even to get through to the thing that you're trying to explain to them.   Research shows that when people experience cognitive load, certainly while reading, they don't assume that the writer is smarter, they actually assume that the writer is less smart. So when they don't get it, they don't think, gee, I must be stupid, they think, they're not so smart.   Anne Janzer:    There's a study by a guy named Daniel Oppenheimer, who's now at Carnegie Mellon, but he did this back when he was at Princeton. I have to read the name of the study because it totally illustrates what it's about. “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity or Problems with Using Long Words Unnecessarily.”   Poornima Vijayashanker:   Nice. Yeah.   Anne Janzer:    Which is great. And in the study they had people look at the same passage written two ways. One in a more straightforward way, one more complex using longer words or one piece sentence construction, let's say. People who read the more complicated ones rated the author as being less intelligent.   In one case, even when they knew that the passage was by René Descartes. They were reading translations and they're like, this is René Descartes from his meditations. They're like yeah, he's not that smart. If they read the more complicated one. So if you want to show up as being an expert you have to be understood. And it's on you. It's on you to do that.   Why people are bad at explaining technical concepts using simple language   Poornima Vijayashanker:   So why do you think people get into this habit of being long-winded or maybe using big words?   Anne Janzer:    I don't mean to be critical of it, because we all do it. It's a natural thing. If you work in a tech sector for a long time, you're surrounded by people who are all using these abstractions and these terms. You master the complexity of the subject. You're a part of a social group of people who have mastered that complexity. So it's natural to want to speak in a way that people around you understand, use those words.   But you need to remember that these abstractions that now come easily to you. Like now you can ride a bike, but a toddler can't ride a bike, looks up at the person riding the bike thinking, yeah, that looks really hard. So that's the situation. That you're really comfortable with these abstract terms, but if you're talking to people outside of your domain, outside of your area, those terms are much more difficult to operate with.   Why we assume our audience knows what we’re talking about   Poornima Vijayashanker:   So it's natural to evolve and get into this in crowd or you're surrounded by people who know. You kind of expect other people to know and then when they don't, you're kind of like, well, just Google it, right. So how can we get over this? This expectation that our audience just knows.   Anne Janzer:    Well, we have to remember that we suffer from the curse of knowledge, which is hard for us to remember not knowing the things that we not now know. So some of the times it's not that we're being dismissive of our audience, we're just assuming that they know the things. That these things are familiar to us are familiar to them.   So you really have to get outside of your own head for a moment and try to put yourself in the perspective of your audience. That's why the title of my book is Understood. It's not like, explaining, it's understood, because it doesn't matter what the words are coming out of your mouth or your pen. It matters how it sinks into the audience's mind.   Why we need to incite curiosity in our audience Poornima Vijayashanker:   I don't know about you, but I definitely had a few college professors, their names will go unnamed. In their 101 class, kind of expected me to know certain things or to, again, spend the time looking it up. So how can we combat that as well?   Anne Janzer:    So that story drives me crazy because the purpose of a 101 class and the job of the professor of that class is to give people enough information but also to incite their curiosity so that they can learn enough to figure out if they want to pursue that field. If they want to learn more or what is useful to them from that class.   And in many ways, we all are in that same position as that 101 teacher. When we're talking to people who aren't familiar with our area, our job too, is not to tell them everything I know or expect them to step up to what we want to talk about. Our job is to incite their curiosity about our topic so that they'll pay attention and get something and to give them a little bit more and to lead them into it. That's a whole different way to think about explaining complicated stuff. It's not like I'm going to dump all this stuff on you you need to know. It's I'm going to pull into this topic and bit by bit get you interested in it, tell you how it applies to you and see what goes from there.   Why people may not get our explanation   Poornima Vijayashanker:   So it's good to know that we may suffer from the curse of knowledge and that not everyone is going to have a same level of expertise as us. What are some other things that may get in the way of people understanding when we communicate technical concepts to them?   Anne Janzer:    There's a couple things to be aware of and one is that sometimes people think they understand already and you have to work around their existing models of what's happening. People think they understand what's happening, for example, to their data when they go onto a website and use it and then go away. The data stays where they left it. Right?   And that's not always the case. So sometimes they think they have an understanding of something. We always talk...if you think about how do you understand using storage. How is stuff stored on your computer? You think, well, I've got a disk, maybe you think you have a directory and then I have a folder and I put files in it. That's nothing like what's really happening underneath. The file may be distributed over many areas of the disk. Some stuff is not on disk, it's in memory.   Poornima Vijayashanker:   It's in the cloud.   Anne Janzer:    It's in the cloud. You can't come up to people and say no, you don't know what's going on, you're wrong. So you need to understand what their understanding is and figure out how to work around that.   And then there are the topics that people, they want to cling to their understanding of it. They don't want to hear about something that disrupts their understanding of it. That's why, if you search for a swimsuit on a website and then you go to the New York Times and it's serving you an ad for that swimsuit that you just searched for. It can be really distressing, these retargeting ads, because they show us something that we don't want to hear about, which is that we're leaving this huge digital wake of data around that people can use. We find that distressing because we don't want to hear it, but it's there.   Poornima Vijayashanker:   So there's the concept of challenging people's current understanding and then there's a concept of ignorance is bliss.   Anne Janzer:    Yes, right, right.   3 questions to ask yourself about your audience before you communicate with them   Poornima Vijayashanker:   So those are both things that we need to be aware of. How can we know...because I know in the next episode we're going to dive into how to get around this. But how can we at least develop an awareness to know which camp our audience may be in?   Anne Janzer:    That's the key thing is to think about your audience. I think you need to answer three questions about your audience before you go to speak to them or before you write for them. It's what do they already know about the subject and this requires that you put yourself in their perspective. You may have to talk to people that are like your audience.   How do they feel about your subject? Do they have resistance to hearing the message? Is this something that they like talking about? Are they curious or are they showing up for your talk under duress because they have to? That's something you want to know too, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:   Yeah. My boss is making me come to this.   Anne Janzer:    My boss is making me come to this. And the third thing is what makes them curious? What can you use to hook their interest in the topic? What going to make them want to explore more about it?   Why over-explaining isn’t helpful either and being brief is better   Poornima Vijayashanker:   Now one final thing I've noticed, especially with a lot of my students and audience members is they can be on the flip side, where it's not the case that they think they're the expert, but they feel like they really need to go down this path and be very, very long winded about an explanation instead of favoring brevity. So how would you recommend to kind of balance that?   Anne Janzer:    So there's two things I want to get at. One is that you need to make a careful distinction between what you want to talk about and what the audience needs to hear. There may be a small overlap and maybe you can widen that by making them more curious, but you need to respect what their needs are. And that's the hardest thing for us as writers to do.   When I worked on this draft, I wrote this whole section and I thought, this doesn't serve the book. I had to delete 10,000 words and just put it aside because it wasn't what the audience needed. It wasn't what the readers needed. So that's one thing.   Why we have a tendency to over-explain   And then second, I would look at the reason why they feel they need to explain everything and often I think it's an attempt to assert some kind of credibility. Credibility is such an important issue, right?   It's such a critical issue for speakers, for writers. But the way that we often go about asserting credibility can work against us. If you say, well, I'm going to get up and first I'm going to list off all my accomplishments so they know I'm serious. Or I'm going to just take them through every little experiment, every little process I did to get to this so they see that I worked really hard.   These things work against you because the root of the word credibility is believability. That's what it means. Well, to be believed you have to first be understood. So to be credible, you need to be understandable and that means you're going to have to cut out that stuff. People will respect you more, think more of you if they can really understand what you're saying. So if you were meeting their needs rather than asserting your own. So if you come at it from that way, it gives you an understanding for how to be more brief. What to cut and why to cut it.   Poornima Vijayashanker:   Well thank you so much, Anne, for sharing why our explanations may be convoluted and of course, why we need to do a better job at explaining them. I can't wait until our next episode where we're going to dive into a number of techniques and tactics to help our audience out there when it comes to explaining these.   Now Anne and I want to know, when was the last time you had to explain something that was complicated, maybe some technical jargon. Were you misunderstood? And if you were, how did you get over that misunderstanding? What were your techniques? Let us know in the comments below this video. And that's it for this episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where Anne and I are going to dive into some techniques to help you be more understood when you're explaining those technical concepts to your audience and to your teammates. Ciao for now.

All this month, we’ve been sharing best practices around hiring and interviewing product managers. If you checked out both episodes, you might be thinking: “This is a lot of work! How can we be sure we’ll end up with a stellar product manager, and that they won’t quit in three days or three months?”   We get that hiring and interviewing are just two pieces of a larger puzzle around talent management. And of course it’s not enough to just attract top talent; there’s more that needs to be done to make sure they stay motivated and productive. So to quell your concerns and help you figure it out, we’re going to do a deep dive in today’s episode around what to do after you hire a product manager. We’ll be sharing why current practices often fall short of meeting a new employee’s expectations and some alternate best practices for onboarding, training, retaining, and evaluating the performance of product managers.   Jeana Alayaay, Director of Internal Products and Services at Pivotal, is back this week.   Here’s what you’ll learn in this meaty episode:   How to onboard a new product manager and set expectations Why you need to have a development plan ready for your new product manager and how to walk them through it Why an annual performance review is too late to check in and provide feedback, and what to do instead Why even a seasoned product manager will benefit from coaching and guidance as part of their onboarding process What success metrics look like for a new product manager How to evaluate your product manager’s performance in the midst of changes that are beyond their control Why it’s good to set granular expectations around deliverables and milestones What to do when your product manager stops performing or suddenly quits -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- # How to Train and Retain Top Product Managers Transcript    Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK Jeana, we've covered a lot already. We've talked about some of the best practices when it comes to sourcing Product Managers, and then interviewing them. And, all of this before we even get into training, and retaining them. So, please tell me that we can guarantee for our audiences, we're going to find that mythical, or magical unicorn Product Manager.   Jeana Alayaay:      Unfortunately I don't know that they're findable. Because, I don't think unicorns are turnkey. But, I do think you can develop unicorns for your company, or your specific context.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK, but what if they leave in three days or three months? That's a lot of effort.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, oh man. That's tough, we'll cover that. Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK, let's get to it then. 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, over the last couple episodes we've been sharing some best practices when it comes to sourcing, as well as interviewing and hiring top Product Managers. But, I'm sure you're still worried if your Product Manager is going to be the right fit, or maybe you hire them only to discover that they weren't quite a top performer as you thought they were in the interview process.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Well fear not, because Jeana Alayaay is back. You'll recall, Jeana leads the Product Management, as well as Design team. We're going to share some best practices when it comes to training, as well as retaining your top performers so that they don't just up and quit. Thanks for joining us again.   Jeana Alayaay:      Thanks for having me again.   ## Conversations to have with new product managers   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. OK, so like I said, we've taken a lot of time to kind of address the criteria for how to find candidates, and source those candidates. But then, we gotta make sure that these people are going to perform, and stick around. What do we do next?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. So, I think the big thing is having a development plan that's shared with you and your Product Manager, right? I know that sounds a super simple common sense thing to do. But, it's amazing 'cause when we hire these top performers, we sort of expect them to just go on their merry way, cut wood and hull water. Then, one day they'll leave, right? We always think, "Oh, it's because it's more money," or whatever the case may be.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Sure.   Jeana Alayaay:      But, often the feedback is, "I just didn't feel like I was growing." Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Hmm, mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      Having that conversation at the beginning and saying, "Hey, how do you need to grow, how do you want to grow, and how can we have an actual development plan that puts you in the way of the opportunities to get you that growth?" Up front is really important.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK. What if they don't know?   Jeana Alayaay:      Then you're going to have to figure it out together.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm.   ## Don’t wait for the annual performance review to check in   Jeana Alayaay:      I think that obviously folks who tend to be a little bit farther in their journey tend to have a better idea. But, you always have folks who are just starting out. I think just coming up with some things initially, and then iterating your way towards it is totally fine. I think just having a lot of checkpoints there, right? I don't mean a development plan that you check in once in the annual performance review. I mean, something that you're visiting in every one on one.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK.   Jeana Alayaay:      That, you look at every quarter and you say, "Are we making progress against goal?"   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      With those folks who don't know, "Hey, what are we seeing, where have we gotten feedback, what are your feelings on this now that you've sort of been in the works for a while?"   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, so let's backtrack a little bit and just talk about onboarding.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   ## How to onboard a new product manager   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Do you have some best practices when it comes to even onboarding a new Product Manager coming into your organization?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. Have them spend a lot of time cross functionally at first.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK.   Jeana Alayaay:      Spend some time with the engineers, spend some time with the designers, spend a lot of time with leaders, those folks who, they're going to need to get alignment and decisions from.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right, mm-hmm .   Jeana Alayaay:      I think there's just a lot of up front networking that needs to happen, that we sort of gloss over. 'Cause we always want them to sort of jump right in.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      And, just start doing things. But, that will get you only so far until relationships really come into play. And so, I always like to sort of invert that model and say, "Build the relationships first." The doing thing, that will happen.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK, got it. For yourself as either the Hiring Manager, or as the Manager for this new candidate.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   ## Why even a seasoned product manager will benefit from coaching and guidance as part of their onboarding   Poornima Vijayashanker:        How do you think about coaching them, or training them?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. I think the first thing is to come forward with really clear expectations. One of the things that I say is, I haven't seen a Product Manager who's blown my mind in less than a year.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK, yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      Let me explain more of that. Even if you bring in a fairly seasoned, or senior person, right? They just don't even know the landscape, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      So much of their job is moving people in the landscape. It's like, to expect them to be here when they don't even know who those people are, is the wrong expectation to set for both of you. I think saying, "Hey, I expect you to be cutting water, and hulling water in three months. At six months, I think you're going to have a good sense of what's going on. And, at a year you're really going to start to be able to make strategic moves with people."   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK.   Jeana Alayaay:      I think that's actually a good approach.   ## How to evaluate your product manager’s performance in the midst of changes that are beyond their control   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Got it, so kind of set some milestones. But, what if there are barriers? The company's goals change, or the product goals change.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Or, some giant customer comes in and takes up all of the priorities.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        How do you kind of back channel that, or bring it back into their specific goals, or their career development?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, that's a great question. I would say this sort of harkens back to what I consider to be a red flag for a Product Manager, is not asking for help. The other side of that is top performers are really great about raising their hand and saying, "I need help." Or, "I think something is changing." Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      They're actually out there in the woods.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      Sort of getting a sense of how the Earth is moving.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      So, sometimes they're the best person to say, "I think the tides are changing and we should pay attention to that." I think having, again, a lot of frequent touch points and saying, "Hey, is the roadmap changing? Should it change? Has the strategy changed? Are there things in the business that are evolving, that are going to affect us?" And, having that be a part of the regular conversation is super important.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Got it.   Jeana Alayaay:      If we're waiting to the point that it's already changed, and we're in a fire drill mode.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      It's too late.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      The feedback loop is too long.   ## What to do if a product manager isn’t meeting your standards   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yep. OK, so we're putting in a lot of effort to onboard, train, and consistently coach them. But for whatever reason, after they've been a product manager for you for a few months, you notice that they're just not really performing. They might have been stellar in that interview process, but something just isn't adding up.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        What do you do?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. I think the first thing I do is sort of turn the mirror back on myself and say, "Have I actually set expectations clear enough." Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      'Cause often they just don't know what their job is. The flailing that you're seeing is them trying to figure that out, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      We have this expectation that they're going to know exactly what to do-   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:     ...And, they don't. Maybe it's not you. Maybe it's somebody else in the system that has a lot of impact on their day to day work. I think the next thing is actually having a conversation about it. Are they aware of it?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      And, can they actually give you some guidance about how to coach them, right? I think that you have folks who have a lot of self awareness. And so, saying, "Hey, I think we're struggling. What do you think is going on here?" And, seeing what they say. Then say like, "OK." If there's awareness there say like, "Why do you think it is that you're struggling? How do we get you the help that you need?" And, just having a very explicit conversation about it. I think it's totally death by a thousand cuts. Have the conversation early and often, and don't wait until it's gone on-   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:     ...And on, and on for too long.   ## Why it’s good to set granular expectations for deliverables   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. I think even in the expectation setting, getting very granular. I know some organizations expect their Product Managers to do all the wire frames.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yep.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Maybe do some consistent usability tests, and other organizations are like, "Oh no, we don't expect that from our Product Managers."   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        "That's like something a Designer does." So then, when the Product Manager doesn't deliver a very concrete thing, they're kind of like, "What are you doing?" Right?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        But, they never conveyed, "These were some things we expected from you."   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        They just kind of conveyed the high level, "Improve our conversion rate."   Jeana Alayaay:      Yes.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        "Monetize our product. Get us out there, and get more customers." Right? I think you kind of have to have that balance of, "Here's the super granular stuff, here's the high-level stuff." And, maybe for the high-level stuff you figure out how to go out and do it. Maybe that's talking to customers.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yep.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Maybe that's something else.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. I think, again, keeping a really tight feedback loop on that is really important, right? Knowing that they're not sure what's going on.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Sure.   Jeana Alayaay:      Or, you haven't gotten granular enough. Opening up that feedback channel is really important.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      I even say, "Hey, if you're not getting the information you need from me, bang down my door."   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      "Please, early and often."   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      I think the other bit is like, that I forgot to mention, is make sure that they're shadowing a Product Manager who's already hit their stride in their work, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK.   Jeana Alayaay:      So, that they have a sense of what the day to day should look like, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      Not to say that it should look exactly like that, but they know what normal is.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Sure.   Jeana Alayaay:      You know? 'Cause it's like, how else will they know that you're supposed to do the wire frames, or you're not supposed to do the wireframes.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right, right.   Jeana Alayaay:      It's...you know?   ## How onboarding and expectations differ for the very first product manager   Poornima Vijayashanker:        I think it can be a challenge though in a smaller organization.   Jeana Alayaay:      Sure.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Where, this might be the first Product Manager.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yep.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Maybe they're taking on somebody's responsibility who was the Lead Designer.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Or, the Chief Product Officer.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yep.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        And so, now they're taking on a bunch of tasks like daily to-do's, but then they also have the higher level kind of road mapping, thinking about where they're going.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, so Product Manager, if you're stepping into this role, make sure you do stakeholder interviews up front, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK. Oh, that's good.   Jeana Alayaay:      So, when you get into that org, go in, figure out who's doing the work, who the leaders are, and saying, "Where do you need me to fill in the gaps? Where do you need me to take the load off you? What is the plan for this?" Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      If you're the first on any team, figuring out what the hiring plan is—   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:     ...is super important, right? 'Cause that's how you can figure out where you're going to water between rocks, where you're going to need to fill in.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, that's a good point.   Jeana Alayaay:      If the plan is to hire more and more Designers first, right? Probably don't focus too much on taking up all that work. Focus somewhere else, like, "I'm going to have to do more of this sort of classic Product Manager backlog stuff, because we're not going to hire them until later." Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   ## Be sure to introduce your product managers to stakeholders as part of their onboarding   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, stakeholder interviews, have a sense of what the hiring plan is, make sure you get milestones from them. Say, "OK, I know that we don't have the funds, or the time, or whatever to hire today. When do we expect to hire?" Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      So, you can even manage your expectations around how long your works going to look like this.   ## What to do when your product manager stops performing   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Even after all of this effort, right? We have open door policy, we're coaching, they're giving us feedback. Somebody just stops performing, and all of our efforts aren't going to kind of turn this candidate, this employee around. What do we do?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, so I think when we first get the sense that it's not working, it's a service to them and to you to actually explicitly say, "This isn't working. What are we going to do about it?"   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      I know that seems like, again, very simple. But, you'd be surprised how many managers struggle to actually have that conversation. It's like, often the person doesn't know that they're not performing until they're put on a PIP, or they're asked to leave, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      Again, saying early, or when you actually believe it's become true that like, "Hey, this isn't working." That's a really important step. 'Cause one, you're giving them the opportunity to turn it around. And, you're also giving yourself the opportunity to think differently about the problem. Let's say you go through all of that. I would say, coach them out, right? Have an explicit conversation about, "This doesn't seem like the right fit. How can I help you get onto the next thing?"   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      Now, of course there's extenuating circumstances where there are like-   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Sure, right.   Jeana Alayaay:     ...Crazy things happen with the job or whatever. But, I feel like that's a different case.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK.   Jeana Alayaay:      Usually it's just like, they no longer meet the needs of the org, or the orgs changed.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      Or, they were the right person two years ago, but not the right person today.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      All those sort of things. It's usually fit things.   ## What does a product manager’s performance review look like   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Which brings up the kind of overriding question which is, the performance review, right?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Having to wait six months, or a year.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        And, the performance review for a Product Manager is definitely different from your Engineer's, where things are a little bit more, I wouldn't say this in every case, but a little bit more cut and dry.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        People are writing code, it's quality, it's tested, it gets out there, or they're fixing bugs. In a Product Manager role, it's a little bit more nuanced, where they may come back to you and say, "Well, here are all the things that I've done. But, now I'm stuck because the stakeholder won't move us forward."   Jeana Alayaay:      Yep.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Or, "I'm stuck because marketing needs to have a bigger budget to attract more customers so that we can then convert and monetize them."   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        So, how do you kind of structure that performance review?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. I think this goes back to having a development plan early on, and actually keeping a pulse on it, like a very frequent pulse on it. It comes up, at least in passing in my one on one's biweekly, certainly monthly, and then on the quarter, and so on and so forth. I think the product, to what you're saying. The product management cycle is much longer than the dev or design cycle.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      I think it is harder to get strong signals.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   ## Why it’s OK to iterate on goals   Jeana Alayaay:      But, I think there are success metrics that should be in the development plan that you're sort of measuring as you go, and you should also be iterating on them. Again, the thing that would alarm me, is if they hadn't told me about said stakeholder that's blocking them, until the performance review.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, right.   Jeana Alayaay:      Right? That's the wrong time to tell me. I would say, that's a performance issue, versus being blocked, you know?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      'Cause, if that was a thing that I could have tried to help you solve six months ago, we should have done that six months ago. I'm not sure why we're waiting-   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Sure.   Jeana Alayaay:     ...Waiting on it till now.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      The things that I would think of as a performance issue, performance issues are usually communication based.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm. What are some specific success metrics?   ## What success metrics look like for product managers   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, so the success metrics that I like to put in Product Managers plans are usually learning goals, right? At any given time, a product is in a specific life cycle. Thinking about what part of the funnel you're focusing on, or how you're trying to develop out that product and say to yourself, "OK, what do we need to learn as a team in order to get to the next phase for that product?"   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      And so, having learning goals for Product Managers that point to that is really important. Things like, "We should go out and learn from users, like what the next problem is." I'm being super generic here.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Sure.   Jeana Alayaay:      But, "Do we have evidence about what platform we should develop out next?" Not so quantitative, but really like, "Hey, are they out there seeking the problem, moving the org in the direction?" Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      'Cause that's a lot of their job, is do we see evidence of movement.   ## What to do if a product manager quits   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Got it, OK. Finally, despite all of your best efforts someone just ups and quits. Because, this is such a critical role, how do you respond?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, I guess it really depends on the circumstance. I think the first question I would ask myself is, "Did we give them enough permission not to buy in the interview process." Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      There's always extenuating circumstances. Something with the family, they were offered double somewhere.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Sure.   Jeana Alayaay:      I don't know what those things are. But, there's other things like they came in, and it's not at all what they expected it. That's the thing I want to fix.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Mm-hmm.   Jeana Alayaay:      If we didn't give them a good sense of what the environments going to be like, I think that's on us. Again, I think the other bit is, make sure you always have your list of 20 people that you're going to hit up next.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Of course, of course. Go back and see our first episode on that.   Jeana Alayaay:      'Cause you just never know when you're going to need to fill a role. You just don't know, you should always be prepared.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right. I think it's also, it is a bit of a challenge though to suss some of that out in an exit interview because people want to leave, and they don't want to burn bridges, or they're kind of like, "I don't want to spell this out for you. I mean, if you don't know why I'm leaving, I don't know if you'll ever know." Sometimes that happens to-   Jeana Alayaay:      Right.   Poornima Vijayashanker:       ...It might not be your specific fault as the Hiring Manager-   Jeana Alayaay:      Totally.   ## Why underperformance may not be limited to a single employee   Poornima Vijayashanker:       ...It might be a team issue, it might be kind of a company wide, or a leadership issue.   Jeana Alayaay:      That's right.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. Having a postmortem within the working group, I think is a way that we've addressed that in the past, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK.   Jeana Alayaay:      'Cause, I totally agree with you.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      During the exit interview, they don't want to say all those things.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      They don't want to air all the laundry.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:      So, I think having a postmortem as a team and saying, "Hey, so and so left. What do we know about that? Context?" Right? "What are the different perspectives here, what did we see, what did we not see?" Again, we can't all possibly have the information.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   Jeana Alayaay:      So, getting all that data from the different places, and pulling it together. At least to have a clear picture of what might have happened, super useful.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Thanks a lot Jeana, for sharing your best practices when it comes to sourcing, interviewing, hiring, and retaining Product Managers.   Jeana Alayaay:      Thanks for having me, it's always fun to chat.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. That's it for this week's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, to receive the next episode. And, be sure to share this episode with your friends, your teammates, and your boss. Ciao for now.  

Last week, we dug into the various product manager personas, and how to go about sourcing candidates.  This week, we’re going to talk about another critical step when it comes to hiring product managers: interviewing. Unlike interviewing engineers and designers, where you can test their ability to code and design and their responses provide tangible results, it’s harder to formulate questions related to one’s skill and abilities as a product manager that will produce concrete responses. Let’s face it—product management is more nuanced because it often requires people to have experience analyzing data and making decisions related to the goals of the business, in addition to some technical skills. Exposing the spectrum and depth of these capabilities can make interviewing product managers a challenge. For example, it maybe easy to evaluate if someone can organize a backlog of user stories, but harder to evaluate whether they are really capable of creating and prioritizing a product roadmap that balances out various business goals and milestones to an acceptable level of quality and depth for your team.   Plus a product team usually has one product manager who interfaces with many engineers and designers, so hiring the first product manager who is going to gel with all those people puts them under a lot of scrutiny.   To handle all these challenges, many companies end up crafting their interview process to resemble a standardized test that candidates end up studying for, rather than demonstrating key skills that they will be using to support the team and product. It’s no wonder some of the best candidates fall through, and companies feel stuck with a product manager who underperforms.   This episode is a must watch if you’re a hiring manager who is concerned about losing a talented product manager, or you’re a product manager who is trying to assess a company’s interviewing process. In this episode, we’ll share some best practices around interviewing and coming up with objective criteria to use when screening candidates.   Jeana Alayaay, Director of Internal Products and Services at Pivotal, is back to help us out.   As you listen to today’s episode, you’ll learn the following:   Why there is such a thing as being a bad interviewer How to prepare the people who will be interviewing candidates How to expose skill sets during the interview How to regroup after the interview Why candidates that don’t meet a checklist are sometimes still hired How to set expectations with candidates when your company is going through a period of change How expectations and the role are different when you are the first product manager on a team -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- # How to Interview Product Managers Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:         In the last episode of *Build*, we talked about the various personas when it comes to the product manager role and how to go about sourcing candidates. If you missed that episode, I've included a link to it below. Next you're probably thinking given how nuanced the product manager role is, how do you go about actually interviewing and making sure they have the right skill set?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Often this can cause the interview process to become really fragmented. You start to see some interviews that are very technical, others that try to expose business skills, and a third set that might just involve mostly soft skills. If you don't have that right set of criteria or practices, some of the best candidates can just fall through the pipeline. In today's episode, we're going to expose some of those best practices, stick around.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         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. We've been talking about the product manager role, how nuanced it is, how to source candidates and also, how to go about interviewing. Given how nuanced it can be, it's a challenge to set objective interview criteria as well as consistent practices to expose the skills that you need for your company and for your team.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         But fear not, because in today's episode, we're going to share some of the objective criteria and some best practices that you can adopt for your interviews. To help us out, Jeana Alayaay is back. You'll recall that Jeana leads the product management and design for Pivotal's IT group. Thanks for joining us again.   Jeana Alayaay:      Thanks for having me again.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. I've got to admit that I've gone through a number of product management interviews myself. After spending countless hours doing interview questions related to technical skills, business skills and then having done the work of actually leading teams, building products and shipping them, I was surprised by the feedback that I got from some of the interviewers saying I needed to do even more to get the role.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Why does this happen? It makes people feel like maybe you just need to answer the questions a certain way to get through the interviews so it’s like taking a test instead of knowing the information.   Jeana Alayaay:      I think there's three things here. I think one, there's a total disconnect between the job postings and what a company is actually looking for. I think the way that I've thought about it is, a job posting is actually part of the company's larger marketing collateral. So, you're not actually going to get the real deal on culture. This thing, it's never going to say like, "Hey, looking for a PM to walk into a super hostile environment." It's never going to say that.   Jeana Alayaay:      And so, I don't know that we can change that bit. But, I think what we can say is like, OK, where's the next touchpoint with the candidate? And it's with recruiting right? I think doing a lot of upfront work with recruiting sort of improves this, but I'm jumping a little bit ahead here.   Jeana Alayaay:      I think the second problem is that the hiring group itself isn't actually aligned on what sort of profiles they're looking for. You have anywhere from two to nine interviewers who are going in interviewing the candidate, they get to the end of the process, pull together all that data and you can't actually agree on whether or not to hire the person because no one ever said, "This is what a good candidate looks like." Or even better, "This is what a bad candidate looks like." As we all know, sometimes it's hard to know what good looks like, but we can definitely say what bad looks like or, this isn't going to fit.   Jeana Alayaay:      I think the third related thing is that the interview process most often doesn't actually resemble the environment that the candidate would actually be walking into should they get the job. A lot of companies have this prisoner's dilemma process where you go from person, to person, to person, to person and they ask you...Sometimes it's on script, sometimes they have their own scripts, but that doesn't actually resemble a product manager's job of doing a lot of work in groups, going around getting alignment like a lot of collaboration.   Jeana Alayaay:      I just don't think it resembles the environment at all. And so again, they get to that end of the process and they say no because they don't think the candidate's going to be successful in the environment but they've never actually given the candidate the chance to demonstrate whether they would be because it doesn't look anything like that.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         So then how do you get that criteria or how do you build that into the interview process?   Jeana Alayaay:      I think in general we don't put enough time into hiring. We put a lot of focus on the hiring manager, but we don't talk about the other interviewers. Everything from like, what is the group looking for to, are the interviewers themselves actually prepared to interview? I've come across these interesting situations where the interview process for one company or another posted on Glassdoor and that team says, "We've got to change the interview process because the candidate will know what to say."   Jeana Alayaay:      I go, "Well, do you actually know what questions to ask to get at that data outside of following the script? Do you know in your gut what you're looking for? What the company is looking for? Can you ask that question 10 different ways?" We don't often talk about whether the interviewers themselves are actually prepped to do this work.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Totally, there is such a thing as a bad interviewer.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, absolutely and so you end up with like again, two to nine people who are doing totally different things and none of that's really giving you a clear signal about whether or not this person is going to be successful in this company.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. How do you then prep the interviewers and then convey the criteria back to the candidate?   Jeana Alayaay:      Two part here. I think one is, you actually need to train interviewers. At least on my team, I don't have folks interview who don't have experience interviewing. So, they should actually have to shadow other folks, cross-discipline and within discipline that have interviewed before and actually understand what that process should look like. And, understand from the hiring manager what they're looking for.   Jeana Alayaay:      Sending somebody in cold no matter what level they're at, you're not going to get the best outcome out of that. I think going back to the recruiting process, I think it's totally fine and good to tell the recruiter to tell the candidate, "Here's what they're looking for." And I think this is a lot like the Glassdoor problem that I was talking about before. I've heard people push back against that and say, "Well, then the candidate's going to know."   Jeana Alayaay:      And I say, "I'm not sure that that's the case." In our case at Pivotal, we hire for empathy, but I'm sure you can ask questions of the candidate to figure out whether or not they're empathetic. If you're relying on the candidate saying, "yes I'm empathetic," you've already gone off the rail.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah, and I think a lot of times candidates either don't necessarily follow the instructions they've been given or they decide to go off on their own tangent to make sure that they appear good in front of the interviewer's eyes. So, there's definitely different ways in which they can miss the mark, but if you can give them some crystal clear criteria of what to expect and what the interviewers are going to want to see in terms of their resume or their experience. I think that's more helpful. Now, in terms of the actual interview, do you have a set of practices that you recommend?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. I actually usually step in in the second interview because I think it's really important they encounter the hiring manager early on and then at the end. I reiterate what the recruiter has said, which is like, "Hey, these are my expectations for the role," and I give them permission not to buy. I think this is really important because you're interviewing them, but they're also interviewing you and so you've both got to want to be there. And so, I think giving a candidate the chance to say like, "no, this isn't actually for me," before shepherding them into this longer interview process is important.   Jeana Alayaay:      The other thing I've talked about before, make sure you've prepped your team on how to interview and also set really clear expectations. I actually have a document, a really detailed document outlining what I'm looking for, things to watch out for, responses that I might expect, different scenarios that you might end up in. That way, the interviewers go on, they feel prepared and we get more consistency out of the responses.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         You do even list a bank of questions?   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK, that way it's not the same person or multiple people asking the same question or you found out that 50% of the interview was in data analytics and you're not even hiring for that.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah. And then, they're all sort of different versions of the same question. I always say like, "Hey, you folks are interviewing, figure out a way to say this that feels authentic to you, but this is what we're trying to get it. This is the data that we;'re trying to get from the person."   Poornima Vijayashanker:         I think that's helpful. I think also having the responses, like what the expectation is for some of the responses because some of the feedback that candidates either get or don't get is how detailed the response should have been. They may think they need to be pithy and save the interviewer time and just scratch the surface when the interviewer is really looking for, "No, I expected you to spend 30 minutes to highlight every single corner case of this particular product feature," or whatnot.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         I think it’s helpful if you have that bank of what should the response actually look like. Kind of like a test where at the end of the day you can go back and say, "This is how we graded you because this was the answer we were looking for."   Jeana Alayaay:      Yeah, and little ticks are helpful for that. I would say, if they're expecting a long answer, there's no reason why you shouldn't say to the candidate, "Say more," or, "Could you elaborate?" I think we too often just let the candidate fall into the dark and it's like, if you're after something, let's set them up to actually give the responses that we want.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         What do you so for new roles though? Because, this is great where maybe somebody left the company or got promoted and now you're filling this role. But in the case of a brand new role, I think a lot of time people don't even know, as in the interviewers, the hiring manager are like, "We need them to do this and this, but what else do we need them to do?"   Jeana Alayaay:      I think this is where it's really important that the hiring team actually get into a room beforehand and put a stake in the ground. You're not going to know 100% what you need the role to do, but you have some sense of it and people have an idea in their mind. It's really important that that idea come out in a way that's accessible to other people because otherwise you end up in the problem that I was talking about before which is, everyone has a slightly different idea and it has even less structure than you would for a role that already exists, so everyone's really all over the place.   Jeana Alayaay:      It's like Poornima goes in and she's like, "I think we need a data person," I go in and I'm like, "I think we need a community person." Ll and behold, we end up revving on this for months, and months, and months unable to fill the role.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah, I think oftentimes what happens is people don't know what they want and then the poor candidate's like, "What did I do wrong? I spent all this time preparing, followed the job description and listened to what the interviewer said. I just feel like I'm lost." Then it ends up being a branding issue for the company.   Jeana Alayaay:      Yup, and it's a really resource-heavy activity. I always ask, "Do we really want to send folks in who don't know what they want?" I know that we want to fill this role, but if we can't take 30 minutes or a couple hours to put some shape around it, is it worth us even opening up the pipeline? Those are conversations that don't happen enough and are hard to have.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         So then, how do you go about...Once you do have some candidates, you've walked them through the pipeline, how do you go about consolidating the feedback from each of the interviewers? Because again, there's definitely some tough interviewers who were aiming for 100%, 110% and then there are some people who are like, "This person knows 80% to 90% and they seem really coachable. We can all pull together and get them up to speed." How do You consolidate that feedback from all the individual?   Jeana Alayaay:      The first thing we do is actually jump into a room and do a Roman vote. We have everybody vote whether or not to even move forward with the candidate.what I've found in the past is, you could be in there for an hour talking through the candidate did this well, they didn't do this well and like five people have already decided that it's a no. So again, just being respectful of everybody's time like, "You don't need to do that."   Jeana Alayaay:      So, first let's get a count of who wants to move forward, who doesn't. Folks who are a no, it's important to have a few of them speak up and add some color to why they think it's a no, and then also on the yes side. Then again, a document or some sort of info radiator that captures what you are looking for to begin with is really important to bring to the table and say, "OK, here's what we're looking for. How do each of these candidates match this or don't match this?"   Jeana Alayaay:      I even include things like coachability and humility. Sometimes you're looking for somebody who's super coachable and so you've got to go around and say like, "Hey, I know you didn't hear what you wanted to hear, but are they coachable?" Reiterating what we're looking for, not do they know everything. Points like that become really important in synthesizing that data.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         For you, do you do an anonymous vote first and then once you have the yes/no counts then do a deeper dive? Because, otherwise people can get colored right?   Jeana Alayaay:      It's a silent vote, and a Roman vote's really interesting because you all do it at once. You do a one, two and then...Up is yes, sideways is move with will of the group and down is no, I are I have something to say. So, everyone votes at the same time. We start off that way then we move in. We usually reserve at least an hour afterward to talk it through.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Some companies rely on a unanimous set of votes and some leave it up to the hiring manager to make the final decision. How do you view either one?   Jeana Alayaay:      I can't say for sure because it has to be right for that culture, but I would say I consider myself to be a tiebreaker more than the person who makes the decision at the end of the day, though functionally I often am. You know, thinking about your hiring team, these are the folk or should be the folks that your candidate's going to work with. And so, if you don't actually respect their opinion, you've got one problem. And if they weren't prepped for the interview so they don't know what they're looking for, you've got another problem. I don't think either of those is solved by me making the decision right? That's a problem we should've solved a couple hours ago versus now.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Got it. And, any red flags or signals that you want to watch out for in candidates?   Jeana Alayaay:      For me, it's over-solutioning. What I like to see is a lot of curiosity and deep attention to the problem. I don't know if this is the best analogy, but we often refer to our project managers as like bloodhounds. It's like, you really want folks whoa re seeking after the problem and they're asking five why's. When they find a problem they say why and why again, why again and why again and that we're not jumping into solutioning.   Jeana Alayaay:      We're in this really interesting moment in time in the industry where it's actually super easy to build. And so it's like you don't want to build too quickly because all that stuff's going to be maintained. It's so expensive to maintain and maintain that thing into the future that you don't want to build anything you don't have to build. So, I would say if they're over-solutioning, I consider that to be a red flag.   Jeana Alayaay:      I think the other one is not engaging with the audience. You have a few different versions of this. Sometimes they're only focused on the hiring manager even when you have gender dynamics going on and whatever the case may be. You want to see that they're engaging with the whole room and that you're starting to get a sense of the type of communication that you're going to see from them on a day-to-day basis.   Jeana Alayaay:      Sometimes that actually means putting them into uncomfortable situations. In a later stage of our interview process, I actually throw them curve balls and I say like, "OK, something's gone wrong. What are you going to do about it?" To get a sense of how they think on their feet, whether they accept the situation with grace, whether they'll reach out for help.   Jeana Alayaay:      Another big red flag for me is product managers who are uncomfortable saying, "I don't know." Because, then we're hiring somebody who wants or thinks they should be a hero persona and is not going to rely on the wisdom of the group to make decisions. They're going to feel like they need to go away in a cave. You just can't do that with the types of products we're building because it's too multi-part. If you've got hardware and software and business or supply chain innovation, there's no way any one person knows all the things.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         What about feedback? Some companies are very strict about saying, "Nope, we absolutely don't give candidates feedback afterwards because of X, Y, Z reason." Others might give a little teaser, and then I've seen others where they're like, "We want you to come back in six months or even sooner than that so here are very deliberate things to work on for the next round."   Jeana Alayaay:      Two of those things resonated with me. I think one is giving feedback about why they weren't a fit today is really important. In most cases, it's because they're not a fit today, it's not because they're not a fit at all, sure there's always folks we're like, "This is never going to work," but that's not often the case. So, saying like, "Hey, here's what we were looking for. You weren't a fit for today, but maybe you would be a fit in the future for this specific scenario and here's what we'd be looking for," I think is a fine conversation to have.   Jeana Alayaay:      I don't know that nitpicking folks is necessarily productive because again, there's a lot of personal biases that go into that and I don't know that that's the best use of your time or the candidate's time.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Sure, that makes sense. Sometimes when we're giving this feedback, or even when we're consolidating this feedback, we have this light bulb moment where we're like, "Oh, actually this candidate doesn't meet our one, three or 10 check boxes, but for some gut reason we feel compelled to want to hire them." Has that happened to you and how do you justify that to your team?   Jeana Alayaay:      When thinking about some of those checkboxes, and some that I'm familiar with across the industry, I think specifically about technical skills, and that's a broad term, that could be anything. But, if you're hiring a product manager, is that the most important thing? And I'm not saying hire somebody that's never built software, that's not, that's not what I'm advocating for.   Jeana Alayaay:      But, I do think we put too much stock into that where it's like, "Hey, there's a reason we have developers and data scientists and all of that." There's a lot of folks on a team who can pick up that specific work. So, thinking about what you actually want them to be doing and whether or not they fit that. Then again, thinking about whether they're coachable. Let's just suspend this belief here and say that we're always hiring smart people and I hope that's the case, though sometimes I've gotten in a room with other hiring people and there like, "Well, we should hire smart people."   Jeana Alayaay:      And I think, "Is there someone here that's not hiring smart people?" So, let's just say we're always hiring smart people, looking at what ramp time is for that person. Maybe they just need a few extra months to marinate in some specific hard skills, but they have all those other soft skills which are a lot harder to acquire. A lot of those soft skills are years, and years, and years and very experience-based.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Right. Well, thank you so much Jeana for sharing your best practices when it comes to interviewing product managers.   Jeana Alayaay:      Thanks for having me.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. Now, Jeana and I want to know, what are your best practices when it comes to interviewing product managers and candidates. Let us know in the comments below this video and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where we'll talk about how to train as well as retain your product managers. Ciao for now.

To build a product, you need a team of engineers, designers, and the glue that keeps them together: product managers!   The role of the product manager has dramatically changed over the past decade, and because it’s still a relatively new field that’s in flux, companies often struggle to find candidates, which in turn makes it hard for candidates to understand what companies are looking for.   So all this month, we’re going to focus on a number of best practices for sourcing, hiring, interviewing, and retaining product managers.   In today’s episode, we’ll focus on giving you a lay of the land, starting with how product management is evolving and how to go about sourcing candidates for a product manager position at your company.   To help us out, I’ve invited Jeana Alayaay, the Director of Internal Products and Services at Pivotal.   This episode is chock full of helpful best practices for both product managers and those looking to hire them. As you watch, you’ll learn the following: How product management has evolved over the years Why you need to think about the type of product manager you are looking for (hint: there is more than one persona!) How to communicate the key criteria you are looking for in a candidate How to build a pipeline of candidates How to train recruiters to help screen candidates How to stop hiring out of desperation Why it’s actually helpful to give candidates a quick no -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## How to Hire Product Managers Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:        I know I'd love to just wave a magic wand and find top technical talent. But I've learned over the years that it takes a lot of effort to source, interview, hire, and retain that talent. It's become even more challenging in a new field like product management where company criteria changes as well as the skill sets that candidates have. So if you're struggling to find those product managers that are going to be the right fit for your company, stay tuned because we'll share a number of best practices in today's episode on sourcing candidates.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by PivotalTracker. 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. When you got a lot going on it's very tempting to want to take short cuts to hire candidates. But those shortcuts can often backfire causing you to hire somebody that may not be a good fit for your team. And when it comes to a role like a product manager where they're going to be interfacing with a lot of different people as well as teams, you want to make sure you got the right fit and you may need to put in a little extra effort to make sure you get that candidate.   ## Best practices for sourcing product managers   Poornima Vijayashanker:        In today's episode, we're going to talk about some best practices when it comes to sourcing product managers as candidates for your company. And to help us out I've invited Jeana Alayaay, who leads product management and design for Pivotal in their IT group. Thanks for joining us today, Jeana.   Jeana Alayaay:       Thanks, Poornima.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Jeana Alayaay:       Good to chat with you.   ## The evolution of product management and the role of the product manager   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Thank you. So you've been a product manager for quite a while now and you've seen it evolve as a role, so walk us through the evolution that you've seen and why it's come about?   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah, so I think to answer your question about how product management has changed, think about how the market's changed. So there's a lot of touch points with technology and consumers and businesses and so the expectations for what quality and user experience look like are increasing, increasing, increasing. So in order to accomplish that like product teams have to do a lot of cross-discipline collaboration in order to create and maintain that experience. It's actually this one big people problem. One of the main jobs of product management is really to manage that people problem. So the folks who are both good at that and who want to do that work are really sought after.   Jeana Alayaay:       Before, when we think about product management we think more about project management which is like who's managing deliver in the backlog. And now we're thinking more about like who's managing people ecosystems within a product organization?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK. So that means inside of the company, not people as in users.   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah.   ## Types of product managers   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK. Now you and I both know there's also a lot of personas out there when it comes to product managers. There's the growth hacker, the workflow warrior, the community, the creator or connector and then somebody that manages platform, data or just mobile. Do we need all these personas? What's kind of the...Are there a lot of differences and nuances between them?   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah. That's a great question. I love personas because it gives you a sense of who to look for out in the wild but I don't know that a persona is going to solve the problem of the modern product. So I think what we're looking at is products are these big spaces now. They're multi-part, they're multi-platform. They have a lot of different pieces and components themselves can be considered to be products. When you're thinking about managing that you should really be thinking about managing a team. Not having specific people on specific verticals and I'll tell you why.   Jeana Alayaay:       So when you hire specific people on specific verticals what you get is a bunch of individual contributors doing their own thing and that team is unable to elevate the bigger product or offering right at the higher level. So you just sort of miss the mark on that I think.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Got it. OK so kind of keep the skillset in mind for each of these but think a little bit more higher level.   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah.   ## Take stock of the skill set you need from a product manager for the long term   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Now this is the second PM team that you're managing and building at Pivotal. What did you learn from your first experience that you're applying now?   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah, so I think the thing that I was talking about earlier was really think about the makeup of the team like the skillset, and figure out how to compliment the skillset and build it out very intentionally. So I think when I first started as a hiring manager so to speak or a team leader, practice manager, I thought, "Yeah I'm going to hire a person to do this and hire a person to do that and hire a person to do that." But the job itself is so cross-functional that no one actually really works in isolation. So really you need a bunch of people who can pair up and actually combine skills in different scenarios.   Jeana Alayaay:       And so thinking about that, I think OK what do I need in three months, what do I need in a year? What should this team look like, rather than what do I need now. And I think that's counterintuitive because by the time you have a wreck open there's a little bit of desperation there because you need somebody to cut wood in hot water. You can fall into the trap of hiring somebody that you need today but not necessarily the person you need tomorrow, if that makes sense.   ## How to uncover and communicate the key criteria you’re looking for in a product manager   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right, especially if your product evolves or the strategy evolves or if the market evolves as well. That's actually a great segue into my next question which we got engineering, that's become very nuanced. There's front end there's back end and then there's specialization within that for the same kind of thing with a product manager, how do I determine my needs and set up the sourcing criteria for my team?   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah, that's a good question. I think the best thing to do is actually look to your team for that information. So I think as hiring managers, we're sort of set up into the system to make the decision in isolation but I think you can't actually know all the things that your team is experiencing on the day to day. So having your team do that gap analysis is really important. And having explicit conversations about what's working, what's not working, were we missing. Were you missing the mark? What kind of people do we need? Having that conversation is super important because I don't know that it is most that...Sorry let me back up. Most of the time the problem is not actually hard skills so to speak it's hard and soft skills. And so the thing that your team is missing is not somebody who can do really awesome data analysis or code or whatever, it's usually who's going to manage the most hostile, fiscal stakeholder group that you can think of.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        So what are those conversations look like or how do you bubble that criteria up?   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah, so I think my team prefers more structure so we usually actually do a work session where we sort of dump and sort what those needs are, what problems we're solving for. And really what I think my job is is to make sure that we're looking, again, three months, six months, a year, even two years out and we're not just solving for we have a super painful thing right now but where's the team going? How do we see the organization's needs changing, how is the team going to have to shift its responsibilities to meet those needs? And have that be a very, very explicit conversation.   ## How to source product managers   Poornima Vijayashanker:        So once you got that criteria, the next challenge is where do you find people that meet this criteria? What have been your watering holes?   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah, so unfortunately I don't have a magical answer to this but for me it's been referrals. And even like intercompany transfers. So I like to keep the profiles of the next three hires in my head with me and I sort of talk about them out loud, to my network, both inside of the company, outside of the company. So I think there's a lot about just letting the universe know that you're looking and then folks will come. I think the other part of that is to always be looking. So I think if you get to the point where you're looking and you need to fill a pipeline you're probably already too far behind.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah that makes sense. So then creating that pipeline so that you have a constant list of potential candidates, how have you gone about doing that aside from the two techniques you just mentioned?   Jeana Alayaay:       I think it should be part of a hiring manager's weekly workflow. So I don't think this is a thing that you do in fits and spurts. I think it's a thing that's like every week you look at your list. You're trying to build out 20, you're trying to build up a list of people to talk to. You're going through resumes, you're sending out emails just saying like, "Hey, I would love to be introed to anybody who's going to be interested in product management sometime in the next year."   ## How to build a pipeline of product managers   Poornima Vijayashanker:        That brings up another question of if you were looking to hire two or three candidates at the end of an interview round or maybe over the next few months, what's your magical starting number? What does the funnel look like? Is it one x, two x, 10 x, how many?   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah our team's lucky to have a very high conversion rate but I think conversion rate is different company, company, team to team. So think about that and then think OK so how many people do I need to actually interview in order to get to that number and then well the pipeline should be three times that size. So, if you need 20 interviews to get to the one then you need 60 people in the pipeline.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Wow, so that's 20 first-time interviews.   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah.   ## How to train recruiters to help screen product managers   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK, got it. And what are some other steps you would recommend people do as they're considering sourcing candidates so prior to the interview phase?   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah, so I think there's a big disconnect between usually recruiting and the hiring team. So I think having a lot more thoughtful conversations about what you're looking for is really important and it's where I've been successful. So I think even having a recruiter sit in on an interview with you so they better understand what sort of questions you're asking, what you're trying to get at and then actually having a debrief and sitting down with them and saying, "This is what I liked about the candidate. This is what I think was not a good fit. This was a red flag." Things like that so that when they're doing the initial screening in the future they have a better sense of where are you going to land with this person.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Got it, so iterate and give them that feedback as you're in the midst of the interview and make sure that that goes out back to the sourcing step. Is there anything you would recommend in terms of job descriptions? Because I know that can also be a real challenge for the people writing them as well as the candidates reading them and there's usually a mismatch that happens.   ## What to include in a job description and screening process for product managers   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah. I wish I had something more to say about this. I think there's a problem which is that the job descriptions as you seen are super generic. And I think part of that is because they're sort of part of a company's marketing collateral. So what you're never going to get in a job description is looking for a PM to walk into a super hard conversation. They all sort of read the same. And so thinking about that initial screening process is the place that I chosen to fight the battle around because I've tried to fight the job listing battle but it's not worth it and for some of those reasons are good reasons, right. And so thinking about OK let's say they get to the recruiter, what does a recruiter going to say to them what's that conversation going to look like and put a lot of effort into that.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Got it, so prepare them but yes the job description maybe a little bit more vague and then make it more specific as it goes down the pipeline so as you have that initial recruiter call and then maybe the initial phone screen.   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah, and I think one of the things I like to tell recruiters, which they know but it's good to say it out loud, is like let's all try to be respectful of each other's time so it's like they're looking, we're looking. We shouldn't move people through the pipeline that we're not actually interested in. And the first step to making sure that that happens is let's not move people through the pipeline who are obviously not good fits.   ## Why it’s actually helpful to give candidates a quick “no”   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah that's a good point, and I think I've certainly experienced that challenge first hand is getting that quick no is often better than waiting months and months to discover, "Oh, maybe you weren't the right fit." Or they changed their requirements or changed their company's strategy so candidates are much more thankful when you just say no in a couple of days and save them time so they can go on to the next set of interviews.   Jeana Alayaay:       Yeah exactly. And it's like now might not be the right time but that doesn't mean that candidate's not a good fit in the future so I think just thinking about it as partially a networking exercise where it's like you don't know when they're going to come back around. You're going to encounter them in another company so just being super respectful within the process I think is really important.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Well, thank you so much for sharing how you think about product managers and how to go about sourcing them.   Jeana Alayaay:       Thanks for having me, Poornima.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, and I can't wait until next week where we're going to dive into some of the interview techniques. And for all of you out there, Jeana and I now want to know what are some of the product manager personas that your company thinks about and what are some techniques that you've employed to sourcing candidates? Let us know in the comments below this video and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode where Jeana and I will be sharing some of the best practices when it comes to interviewing product managers. Ciao for now.

In the last episode of Build, we debunked a number of myths related to bitcoin, blockchain, and other cryptocurrencies.   Despite all the myths and hype these technologies have staying power in the market. But we get that you might be skeptical. So we’re dedicating today’s episode to showcasing how they are being incorporated into valuable applications that are making an impact in the market.   And if you’re still concerned about the volatility behind cryptocurrencies or how to get involved without losing your shirt, we’ll dive deeper into each of those topics.   Our guest, Audrey Chaing is back. You’ll recall Audrey is a crypto trader as well as a Blockchain analyst and consultant, and blogs on Blockchaing.     Here’s what you’ll learn from today’s episode:   How Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency Are Being Applied To Financial Services, Identity, and Supply Chain What Is An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) What Causes Volatility In Bitcoin And Other Cryptocurrencies What Are Cryptocurrency And Bitcoin Exchanges And Marketplaces What Are The Up And Coming Business Applications For Blockchain Transactions How Blockchain Is Being Used To Monitor Identity How To Get Involved In Learning, Building, and Investing In Blockchain -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- # How Bitcoin, Blockchain And Cryptocurrencies Are Being Incorporated Into Valuable Applications That Are Making An Impact In The Market Transcript                     Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     In the previous episode, we debunked a number of myths related to Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies. 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 cool applications that have come out of Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies and let you know which ones are here to stay and how you can get involved. 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. In today's episode, Audrey Chaing is back. You'll recall that Audrey is a crypto trader, as well as an analyst and consultant. Thanks for coming back, Audrey.   Audrey Chaing:                Thank you.   Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency Applications: Financial Services, Identity, and Supply Chain   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. Today, we're going to talk about some pretty cool applications of Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, and why they're here to stay, and how our audience can get involved. Let's kind of dive right in. Let's talk about, what are some of the applications of each of these?   Audrey Chaing:                Sure. To be honest, everyone's still trying to figure out the killer use case, but there's a lot of really exciting work happening. They tend to fall into kind of three buckets. One is financial services, which we are kind of more familiar with, with the cryptocurrencies and things like that, cross-order payments, remittances. Another area is identity, and another area is supply chain, and so—   What Is An ICO (Initial Coin Offering)?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Let's start with the financial services. I know there's a lot of ICOs, initial coin offerings. What are those?   Audrey Chaing:                Yes, initial coin offering, that's basically how a new cryptocurrency comes into existence. I mean, it's almost a new way to fund a startup that is related to blockchain. They could be doing any number of things. An example could be, "We're doing distributed storage, so then in order to buy and pay for services, you have to use our token coin." Yeah.   What Causes Volatility In Bitcoin And Other Cryptocurrencies?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Got it. What's causing a lot of the volatility now in the market then, as it relates back to these ICOs?   Audrey Chaing:                A lot of it is, frankly, just speculation, because people have heard of how much money that some others have made in cryptocurrencies, and people are interested because they want to make a quick buck. Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah.   Audrey Chaing:                Also, for the people who are less familiar, there tend to be different stages of a sale in an ICO. You would get kind of in-the-know institutional investors that would come in on the early rounds and get a very large discount. Then they might have several rounds of sales, and then by the time you reach the crowd sale, they might also have a tiered, "If you get in now, you get a larger discount. Wait till next week, you still get a discount, but it's smaller," and so—   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     So it is very much like fundraising—   Audrey Chaing:                It is, yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     ...from like venture capitalists or angel investors.   Audrey Chaing:                Now, the difference is that you get liquidity a lot faster. If your token ends up getting listed on exchanges, that means you can start trading right away. Sometimes there are kind of lockups for the large institutional investors, but that is one big difference.   What Are Cryptocurrency And Bitcoin Exchanges And Marketplaces?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. Actually, let's dive into that. There are a lot of other applications in the financial services, like what you just mentioned, exchanges and marketplaces. What exactly are these? Walk us through.   Audrey Chaing:                Yeah, sure. Actually, just to clarify, too, ICOs, the tokens could be in any number of industries. It doesn't have to actually relate to financial services. Some of the more straight financial services use cases might be...There's something called Coins.ph. It's in the Philippines. A lot of Philippine workers work internationally, remit money back to their homeland. This actually is interesting, because it brings on a lot of the unbanked population, so there's...In order to participate in our current banking system, you need to have a minimum amount of deposits in order for it to even be worthwhile for the bank to have you, and a lot of people don't have that. Now, with crypto, integrated with our current banking system, you can use the Coins.ph app to send money to friends, and they could go to an ATM and pick up cash, or just the corner store, pick up cash. You can pay for your tuition that way, your cell phone bill, all sorts of things.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Very cool.   Audrey Chaing:                There's also, there are traditional ways of sending money around, which is Western Union, wire transfer, which tend to be slow and relatively costly, but now with crypto, it can happen a lot faster and a lot cheaper.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Got it.   Audrey Chaing:                Those are kind of the financial use cases, but you asked about exchanges. There are many. A lot of the reason that there are so many is because there are so many coins, and not every exchange will have all of the coins you want to trade. Most people in the U.S. would be familiar with Coinbase. I think they have a pretty good brand name, and pretty on top of their regulation, their...It's easy to use. However, they only trade four different coins, so if you want a coin that is not one of the four that Coinbase has, what you have to do is put your fiat, or your U.S. dollars, into Coinbase by some either Bitcoin or Ethereum. Identify what other coin you want. Let's say you want Monero. Right? Then you have to find which of the exchanges has Monero, send your Bitcoin over to that one, and then buy your Monero that way.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     In the previous episode, you started to hint at some business applications for blockchain. Not the cryptocurrencies, but just the underlying technology. Why are people using this for business?   Business Applications For Blockchain Transactions   Audrey Chaing:                I guess going back to the kind of large categories, we already talked about financial services a bit, but let's talk about supply chain for a second. Right? There are some very interesting proof of concepts going on. I can talk about a couple. One is with prescription medication. You can basically track that it is legitimate, right, it's not like a fake or copy, and then you can make sure that, say, it needs to be refrigerated, that it was taken care of the whole way through.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     How do you, how can you tell that?   Audrey Chaing:                Kind of like, well, you could kind of use sensors to say that, "OK, the temperature never reached above X amount that would make the medication bad." You could, kind of like how you already scan along the way, say, a FedEx package, you could track all these different stages and have them write to the blockchain.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     OK, got it.   Audrey Chaing:                Then since it's on the blockchain, you can't go back and edit the database. Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Right, so basically, it's stuck there, and then people can see the audit trail because it's on-   Audrey Chaing:                Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     ...blockchain.   Audrey Chaing:                Exactly. Another interesting use in supply chain is provenance for food. For example, if you are eating bacon and you are interested in, "Where did this pig come from?" All the way from which farm, what it was fed, how it was...The whole process of how it reaches you, you can now track that.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Very cool. How does somebody then get onto the blockchain to have the entire supply chain and each of these transactions listed? Audrey Chaing:                Yeah, so blockchain, in the traditional sense, is a public blockchain, so you, or I, or anyone could go onto Blockchain.info, for instance, and look up any Bitcoin wallet or Bitcoin transaction. There is this idea of permission ledgers, which, especially, some enterprise are looking into because they don't want everyone to have access to everything, but in the traditional sense anyone can look it up.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah, but then it's only as good as the reporting, right?   Audrey Chaing:                Yes. There is this kind of...When you try to mesh the real world with the digital world, how do I know, "So-and-so is attesting that this is true. Well, is that legitimate?" Then, so that is something we definitely need to think about when we try to kind of mix the digital and the real world.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Got it, yeah, so going back to your bacon example, if somebody forgets, maybe in the packaging stage or one stage before that, to list a transaction, what happened, then the public isn't going to know what that is, so there is going to be still a hole in it.   Audrey Chaing:                Yeah, so these are the things that are being kind of worked out right now, with all of the kind of proof-of-concept work and research.   How Blockchain Is Being Used To Monitor Identity   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Very cool. What's another application that you think is here to stay for blockchain?   Audrey Chaing:                Identity is another area where there's a lot of work, a lot of interest, kind of how it could look like in the end. Right? You could have full control over your data. For instance, if you had your medical data here, your social media data here, your shopping data here, you could say, "I want to grant you this particular piece of information," and you can even decide to be compensated for it or not. That's kind of the self-sovereign identity piece. There's already some work happening in this area in governments, even. The government of Finland, they have this blockchain-enabled card for refugees. This card will be an identity card, but also, they load it with money, so that's one interesting use case. Estonia now has e-citizenship, so there's a lot of interesting stuff going on.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     I know one concern that our audience may have is, which of these things are fads? Which of these things are here to stay? It sounds like some of the things that are more groundbreaking, like identity and supply chain, are here to stay, but can we really know?   Audrey Chaing:                Yeah. Actually, we can't. That's a good warning for anyone trading crypto or getting to blockchain is that there's a lot of potential. It's very exciting. However, there are some real technological hurdles, including scalability. That's the largest one. There are a lot of smart people working on it, including like off-chain solutions, but we won't know for sure. Yeah, I would say if you're going to invest, I think it's smart to have something, but don't put in more than you would be OK losing, because that is a possibility. You could completely lose it all.   How To Get Involved In Learning, Building, and Investing In Blockchain   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah, and in terms of investing and learning about applications of blockchain, or getting involved in building something on the blockchain, what would you recommend?   Audrey Chaing:                Well, I guess there are a lot of choices, but not a whole lot of great resources, to be honest, so you have to decide kind of like what kind of do you want to build on an existing chain? Do you want to build your own? I mean, building your own is quite a undertaking, but people have done it. I think the best way would be just start. There's no, it's very, not a whole lot of documentation, not a whole lot of tutorials. There are meetups all over, so I'm actually a part of Oakland Blockchain Developers and SF Ethereum Developers. They have people come in and do technical talks and sometimes code labs. That really helps, but it's very, it's not fun to work with yet.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah.   Audrey Chaing:                Right?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     OK.   Audrey Chaing:                It's very early, and-   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     So not for the faint of heart, but maybe for those—   Audrey Chaing:                Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     ...who want to get in, eager—   Audrey Chaing:                And it changes very quickly. I mean, even if you're looking at Solidity, which is what a lot of people use for Ethereum, the syntax changes frequently.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. Well, that also might also be a good thing, so for people who are eager to always be at the cutting edge—   Audrey Chaing:                Yes. It's definitely-   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     ...and want to be involved.   Audrey Chaing:                ...cutting edge. You know what's shocking is, sometimes I talk to people, and I'm like, "Yeah, I've written a smart contract in Ethereum," and people are like, "Oh, my God," so just like this is crazy that this is like a thing, but it's so early that not very many people have done that.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Audrey, for sharing all your expertise when it comes to Bitcoin, blockchain, as well as cryptocurrencies.   Audrey Chaing:                Thank you for having me.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode. Ciao for now. This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our main sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.  

Poornima was a founder of Femingeer and is an advid public speaker who gives talks around the world on topics ranging from engineering to entrepreneurship. She's also given a TedX talk and hosts a monthly web show called Build. Sponsored by Pivotal Tracker. She's also been an entrepreneur in residence at 500 Startups and mentor in residence at Techstars and lecturer at Duke University's grad school engineering. She was the founding engineer at Mint.com. Where she helped build launch and scale the product until its acquisition in 2009. She's also published two books on how to transform the idea of software products and co-authored "Present: A Techies Guide to Public Speaking. She holds degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering science from Duke University. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Got a laundry list of questions that have gone unanswered when it comes to blockchain, bitcoin, and the myriad of cryptocurrencies out there?   Questions like the following: What’s going on with the boom and bust cycles? Are cryptocurrencies really here to stay? Are there really a myriad of applications for blockchain? And how can one get started playing around with the technology when bitcoin has such an expensive price tag, and blockchain is so challenging to develop on?   Well, we’re going to answer all these questions for you and more by kicking off this month with today’s Build episode that debunks a number of myths related to blockchain, bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies. In next week’s episode, we’ll share some of the cool applications that are making an impact in the market and prove the staying power of these technologies.   To help us out I’ve invited Audrey Chaing who is a crypto trader as well as a Blockchain analyst and consultant, and blogs on Blockchaing.     Here’s what you’ll learn from today’s episode:   How to go about explaining the differences between Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency in simple terms to friends and family How bitcoin works with public key and private key encryption — and what is public key and private key encryption Why People Think Bitcoin Transactions Are Anonymous Or For Criminals What The Real Value Is Behind Bitcoin Whether Bitcoin Will Replace Credit Cards And Cash Other Cryptocurrencies Besides Bitcoin How To Get Started Playing With Cryptocurrencies And The Blockchain -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- The Real Deal Behind Blockchain, Bitcoin, and Cryptocurrencies Transcript   Audrey Chaing:                            So congrats. How far along are you?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Thank you. Yeah, seven and a half months.   Audrey Chaing:                            Great.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     So just 10 more weeks to go.   Audrey Chaing:                            Awesome, awesome. Are you ready?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     To be honest, no. Kinda spent junior's college savings on Bitcoin.   Audrey Chaing:                            Well, you never know. By the end of this interview, it might be totally back up.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     That is true.                                                   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. You're probably wondering what's going on with Bitcoin and Blockchain, the boom and bust cycles, and whether cryptocurrencies are here to stay.                                                   Well, in today's episode we're going to unearth some of the common myths, and in a future episode we'll dive into some of the applications to let you know what's really here to stay.                                                   And to help us out, I have invited Audrey Chaing, who is a crypto trader as well as a Blockchain analyst and consultant. Thanks for joining us today, Audrey.   Audrey Chaing:                            Thank you for having me.   Difference Between Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. So, let's first talk about what's the major differences between these three: Bitcoin, Blockchain, and cryptocurrencies?   Audrey Chaing:                            Sure. So there is a common misconception that Blockchain is the same thing as Bitcoin, and that's actually not true. The reason why people get confused is because they were kind of invented at the same time. So in 2009, someone named Satoshi Nakamoto...now, this is a person or a group. We don't know. They're kind of anonymous. They came out with a white paper that describe the Bitcoin protocol. And so that was how Blockchain technology was born. But Blockchain is much bigger than just Bitcoin.                                                   So Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency but Blockchain refers to this technology.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Got it. And what got you interested in this?   Audrey Chaing:                            So basically, it has everything to do with everything I've done in my career. I studied computer science at MIT but graduated in the dotcom bust, so I ended up on Wall Street for about a decade. And then after that I founded two startups. So the technology, the finance, the startup entrepreneurial part, Blockchain kind of encompasses all those things.                                                   But specifically how I got started was back in 2013, I decided, "Hey, I might want to start my own companies." In order to do that, it would be good to refresh my programming skills because it had been a little while. So I took a Stanford online [MOOC 00:02:44] startup engineering, taught by [Balaji Srinivasan 00:02:47], who's pretty well known in the Blockchain space. And so our final project was to build a Kickstarter clone. And there was a leaderboard and you moved up on that by tweets and Bitcoin funding.                                                   And so friends and family, they're like, "Great. We want to support you. What the heck is Bitcoin?" And I'm like, "Don't worry. Just tell me in dollars and I'll trade it for you." And so that's how I got into doing that. And then I realized, "Hey, it's really volatile. I can trade this like anything else and try to make some money off of it."   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. Awesome. And so now, you are independent and you blog on Blockchaing.   Audrey Chaing:                            Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it's Blockchaing, and it's basically Blockchain and add a G, dot org. I just...my name actually is perfect for this.   Myth #1: Bitcoin Users Are Anonymous   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. Wonderful. So, on this show we love to debunk a number of myths and misconceptions. I am sure Bitcoin and Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are just ripe for this. So, let's start with the first myth, which is Bitcoin users are anonymous.   Audrey Chaing:                            Yeah, it's actually pseudonymous. People have that idea because there are these wallets that are this big string of numbers and letters, but since everything is on the Blockchain you can trace at any point. You know X wallet paid Y wallet at this time, this and that. So even though you don't know who necessarily who owns X wallet or Y wallet, you know that that happened and you can trace that. And actually, law enforcement has already started doing that.   How Bitcoin Works With Public Key and Private Key Encryption                                                   Sometimes it's really easy to out yourself as well, so there's public keys and private keys. If you post your public key somewhere, then that now is associated with you. Even if you don't think anyone can track you, then maybe they can actually. But that's why there are now privacy coins where that's much more of an anonymous thing.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Let's backtrack a little bit. What's public key?   Audrey Chaing:                            So, in cryptography there's a private key, public key. They're mathematically related, and they can be used to...For instance, I'm sending you an email and I don't want the whole world to see it in transmission, so what I can do is if you send me your public key and the public key's OK to share, I can take my message, encrypt it with the public key, send it over and it'll just be garbled, and then you can take your private key and decrypt it that way.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Nice. So it's a way to encrypt signals, messages, any sort of data?   Audrey Chaing:                            Mm-hmm.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     OK. So let's get back then to talking about some of these myths. Now, what's perpetuated this myth that Bitcoin users are anonymous?   Why People Think Bitcoin Transactions Are Anonymous Or For Criminals   Audrey Chaing:                            So, I think people think it's anonymous because there are transactions that are wallets, but there are no names or identities necessarily associated with them. So it's a long string of numbers. However, that's not fully true at least in the case of Bitcoin because, yes, you have these numbers that are not associated with people, but you can trace the movement of funds and kind of what happened with what.                                                   So, if wallet X decides to send 5 Bitcoin to wallet Y, you don't know who owns wallet X, you don't know who owns wallet Y, but you do see that it was sent. And there are many ways that you can kind of out yourself by accident, therefore someone knows that I own wallet Y for instance.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. So, another myth: Bitcoin is beyond the law and it's for criminals.   Audrey Chaing:                            Yeah. So there's a lot of people that talk about Bitcoin along with drug deals and things like that. There's good reason for this because there are things like Silk Road, which was a black marketplace that got shut down. But you know, having said that, the black market will always...it's been around a long time, will persist, and no matter what sort of medium you use, it'll still be there. I don't think that the levels have increased due specifically to cryptocurrency. And actually, the largest source of money laundering is the U.S. dollar.                                                   So there's that, but also on top of that there are a lot of legitimate companies getting very interested in Blockchain technology, not just Bitcoin, that's one thing which a lot of companies are actually invested in, but Blockchain technology as a whole, a lot of Fortune 500s, names that you would hear are investigating into Blockchain.   Myth #2: Bitcoin Has No Market Value   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. And we'll get into that in the next episode for sure. So, let's talk about another: Bitcoin has no value. It's not backed by anything.   Audrey Chaing:                            This is true. It is not backed by anything. Some people like to point to, "Well, you know, there was electricity put in, and that's proof of work, calculations." But you know what? A lot of things don't have intrinsic value like the U.S. dollar. It's just that the government says it's worth something, and we have all collectively agreed it's worth something.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     OK. So that's actually not a myth. That is true. It is-   Audrey Chaing:                            It is not backed by gold or anything like that, yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Got it. All right. The next one: Bitcoin is not secure.   Audrey Chaing:                            So, secure could mean a lot of different things. In one sense, Bitcoin is more secure because the whole...it's a distributed database, so a lot of people have copies, therefore you have no one point of attack. So in the Equifax half for instance, they were holding a lot of people's data. I know I was definitely affected. You were probably affected. But there's [nodes 00:08:15] everywhere. You can't just take down one and get everybody. You actually have to get over 51% to trick the system.                                                   In one case it's kind of more secure, but one thing that I do want people to understand is that we've become used to things being reversible, so if someone got your credit card number, they made a bunch of transactions, you can call your company and say, "You know what? That was not me. Can you reverse it? Can you credit me," right?   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Right.   Cryptocurrency Works Like Cash   Audrey Chaing:                            And we're all very used to that. That's not how it works in cryptocurrency. It's like cash. If someone steals it from you, it's gone. You can't be like, "Oh, can you just reverse that back."   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Right. OK. So it's basically...it's sunk cost. You're not gonna ever get it back.   Audrey Chaing:                            Basically, yeah, like cash.   Myth #3: Bitcoin Will Replace Credit Cards And Cash   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     OK. Next myth: Bitcoin will replace credit cards and cash.   Audrey Chaing:                            So, I don't think most people think that is the point of Bitcoin. So, the point of Bitcoin is that it's a store of value, and it's done a good job doing that. Having said that, there is potential for other cryptocurrencies to potentially be more of an everyday transactional...you go buy your coffee with it. Some include maybe Bitcoin cash or Litecoin. They're a little faster, a little cheaper.                                                   But one thing to keep in mind right now is that scalability is a huge problem. So if you're talking about these Blockchain systems, right? We're doing eight to 30 transactions per second, credit cards handle about 5,000 transactions per second, so it's like a really big difference. Bitcoin Energy Consumption Explained   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah. So actually, that brings up a good point. A lot of people have said that given how intensive each transaction is, Bitcoin can be a huge energy consumer. Is that true?   Audrey Chaing:                            Yeah, I think that's...there's people that have been running mining rigs in really cold places and it heats their home.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Oh, OK.   Audrey Chaing:                            Yeah, which is kind of clever. So yes, there is an energy cost. People are aware of it. There are a lot of other consensus mechanisms. So proof of work is just the first one, right? If we think about email when it first came out. You can complain, "Oh, this is not efficient," or whatever, but it was the very Version 1, so that's Bitcoin and proof of work and these whole calculation things and using up electricity.                                                   But there are a lot of other ways to reach consensus. Examples include proof of stake, and there's a lot of other ones in the works now where you're not actually calculating. And there's actually an interesting idea of what if you did proof of work but it actually did something? Because right now you're doing calculations but it's not really adding to anybody. If you did almost like a Mechanical Turk in that we're doing calculations but it's actually helping us solve something, then you could be doing two things at the same time.   Myth #4 Bitcoin And Blockchain Are The Same   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Got it. All right. And last one, which we talked about in the beginning: people think Bitcoin is the same as Blockchain.   Audrey Chaing:                            Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I understand why because in the media people usually talk about Bitcoin because of the price moves. People are interested in that, right? A lot of people haven't even heard of the term Blockchain, and when they do they think it's the same thing. But yeah, Bitcoin is one cryptocurrency. There are now over 1,500 cryptocurrencies. They are all using the Blockchain technology, but it's very possible to work with Blockchain and not even have a currency.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     OK. So what is the Blockchain technology, then?   Audrey Chaing:                            So that's basically...if you've heard of distributed ledger—   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Mm-hmm.   Audrey Chaing:                            That might be driving you. But at the very very base, it is a large database that everyone has a copy of.   Other Cryptocurrencies Besides Bitcoin   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Got it. All right. So, what other cryptocurrencies are out there?   Audrey Chaing:                            There are a lot, and I would recommend if you wanted to look into them, CoinMarketCap has a list of all of them basically. But some of the ones you may have heard of, like Ethereum is a really big one. Some quarked off of Bitcoin so there's Bitcoin cash, Bitcoin gold. There's any number of coins that exist and sell through ICOs, which I think we'll talk about later.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Yeah, great, thank you. So, for our audience out there who...they're gonna want to arm themselves and be able to tell fact from fiction, how can they explore Bitcoin, Blockchain and cryptocurrencies and know that they're getting the right information?   Audrey Chaing:                            Yeah, it's really hard because there is information out there but it is hard to say what's real and what's not, and the people really deep in the community, you look at things like Reddit and Twitter, but if you're just starting out...This is actually why I started writing because I didn't think there were very many good resources out there. But one that's quite good is Blockgeeks.com. They do introductory stuff all the way down to explaining zk-SNARKs.   How To Get Started With Cryptocurrencies                                                   So there's stuff out there. I think the best way to get learning is actually to just go buy some cryptocurrency, because once you have something on a line, you'll want to learn how it works.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Nice. And hopefully there's something that's cheaper than Bitcoin that we can all purchase.   Audrey Chaing:                            So here's another thing...another common misconception is that you need to buy one coin at a time. You really don't. You could do like .001 on any of these things.   Poornima Vijayashanker.:                     Oh. Very cool. Well thank you so much, Audrey, for helping us bust all of these myths and sharing your expertise on Bitcoin, Blockchain and cryptocurrencies. I know our audience out there is gonna get a lot of value out of this. If there's a question or a myth that we didn't answer today, be sure to let us know what it is in the comments below this video. We'll be sure to answer it. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where Audrey and I will talk about a number of applications that are hopefully going to stick around that you can get involved in when it comes to Blockchain and cryptocurrencies.                                                   Ciao for now. This episode of *Build* is brought to you our main sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. We'd also like to thank our Platinum Patreon Patrons: Corgibytes, the Develop[Her] Show, Dee Gill, and Jamie Hand.         

Remember Google Glass? Yeah it didn’t quite take off did it… It was just one example of a failed attempt to productize virtual reality. Its short lifespan along with a number of other products since the 90s has probably got you thinking that there is just a lot of buzz around augmented reality and virtual reality.   While the technologies seem exciting, you might be on the fence when it comes to investing your time and energy exploring the technology.   It doesn’t help that the cost associated with production and acquisition of the devices, and the limited toolset have made them both a challenge to tinker with.   But I have some good news for you: much of the market is changing! There some great applications that are disrupting businesses and industries like healthcare, and a number of resources making it easier to build.   In today’s Build episode we’re going to dive into the major differences and similarities between augmented reality (AR) versus virtual reality (VR). Then we’ll debunk the many myths around AR/VR. And in next week’s episode, we’ll share some of the cool applications that are coming on the market and a number of resources to help you get started!   To help us out, I’ve invited Rose Haft who is the CEO and Founder of Lumenora.   As you listen to today’s episode you’ll learn the following:   What are the major differences between augmented reality (AR) versus virtual reality (VR) Why products like Google Glass failed to take off and what new products are learning from its demise Why you haven’t heard from companies that are actually making a mark Why big companies like Facebook are investing in a more long-term strategy How Rose Haft got introduced to AR/VR and how her company Lumenora is approaching the market -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- Episode Transcript Poornima Vijayashanker:        Wondering what all the buzz is about when it comes to augmented reality and virtual reality? Well, stay tuned to find out more. 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. You've probably heard that augmented reality and virtual reality are the way of the future and maybe you're reluctant to join all the buzz. Well, I don't blame you. In today's episode we're going to debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to augmented reality and virtual reality and then in the future episode we're going to talk about some of its applications. To help us out, I've invited Rose Haft, who is the CEO and founder of Lumenora. Thanks for joining us today, Rose.   Rose Haft:          Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.   Are augmented reality and virtual reality the same?   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Why don't we just get started by introducing to our audience, in case they're not familiar, what exactly is the difference between augmented reality, AR, and virtual reality, VR?   Rose Haft:          Absolutely. Yeah, so augmented reality and virtual reality are a way to have a computer interface that's very close to the eye that allows for there to be a different way to interact with the computer than what you're used to today. Augmented reality makes it possible to see what's happening in the real world that everyone else can see, with a little bit of image overlay that will help to display text, or data. If you've heard of Magic Leap, it'll also help to display holograms and things that look very lifelike. The difference between augmented and virtual reality is that in virtual reality you have your own environment and you're not able to access any of the exterior world, so you're completely immersed inside of that environment. It makes it a little bit more difficult to see what's happening elsewhere, but there are a lot of really useful applications for being fully immersed and reasons why people really enjoy using it.   Why Rose Haft (CEO and Founder of Lumenora) Got Interested In Augmented And Virtual Reality   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Maybe you can tell us what got you interested in augmented and virtual reality and then we can talk about why you decided to start your company.   Rose Haft:          I got interested in augmented and virtual reality in high school. I knew I wanted to be an engineer and I had an opportunity to work as an intern at one of the local prototyping facilities. At that facility we were working on building advanced headsets for the military. I really had a chance to see how having a hands-free tool that could be worn can really do anything from help to save lives, as well as help to communicate silently between people. I thought it was really interesting, a different way of interacting in technology, than had ever been there before.   Why Building Headsets for Augmented And Virtual Reality Was Challenging And Led To Limited Product Adoption   Poornima Vijayashanker:        What inspired you to start your company Lumenora?   Rose Haft:          Yeah. After working at several companies, including working at Meta helping to design the Meta II, I realized that there were a lot of logistical and engineering reasons why people weren't able to build the headsets that I felt like were ideal and also why those reasons are also part of the reasons why people don't want to adopt them. I was studying at Stanford a little bit of biomedical engineering and how to use sensors, like you would in surgery, and I thought it'd be great to incorporate them into a headset. Again, there were logistical reasons to doing that. After I found a partner company that could help solve one of the major problems in the area, and with my unique background in design, knowing how to design things differently, was really a great match to build something that is more advanced, more capable, and people actually want to wear it and use it.   How Businesses Are Applying Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality To Their Business Processes   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Do you mind sharing the application of what you're working on?   Rose Haft:          Yeah. Right now, we're kind of fitting into the maintenance repair and operations space. There are over 200 companies internationally that are using it to do things like supply chain management, companies like BMW who build cars find it useful to make sure they're choosing the right parts and putting them together in the right way, and making sure that their quality process, you don't have to go back and double check work, they're doing it right and the first time.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Got it, so it's really a training platform—   Rose Haft:          Yep.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        For people, yeah.   Rose Haft:          We're adding in extra features and we're doing some fun and cutting edge things that will help to even more improve those industries, especially training. In order for people to learn skills, and trade crafts, and the majority of Americans who hold the same job title need to go to school to learn these things, and how to work on specific machines, and machine types. We'll be integrating a real-time training system where you can learn a new skill or a craft in real-time and you don't need to have the several years of school, so we'll be able to adopt robots faster, and self-driving cars, and those sort of things.   Why People Have Been Reluctant To Adopt Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality Products   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Very nice. You mentioned early on that there's been a lot of reluctance to adopting this new technology, AR and VR. Why is that?   Rose Haft:          There's a lot of reluctance for a variety of reasons. People haven't found that they're stylish enough, or cool enough, and also really haven't found the benefits. They've really only seen the detriments and pullbacks as far as feeling like their security is being threatened or their privacy would be threatened because of the ability to record and take in information. I think the use cases are just now starting to be developed. One of my favorites is there's a 3D graphing app, and so you can use it for calculus. I know we're doing some fun and cutting edge things that really will help the average everyday person meet typical goals and those sort of things and it'll make it better and easier to adopt once those use cases are there.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, and we'll hold that thought. We're going to dive into those use cases in the next episode. There's also a lot of myths being propagated right now and I think one of them, because of the lack of adoption, people just are saying that AR/VR is dead and there's not much going on. Is that true? Are people not building these headsets anymore? Are they no longer investing in the technology infrastructure?   Rose Haft:          Yeah, that's absolutely not true—   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK.   Rose Haft:          Whatsoever.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Why You Haven’t Heard From Companies That Are Actually Making A Mark In The Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality Market   Rose Haft:          There's still a lot of investing to try to find the right solutions and the right designs, so people can actually wear them and adopt them. I know companies like mine have tried to stay as much out of the media as possible, because people have spent billions of dollars trying to find the right solution, and as soon as you put something out there, people feel like they can help themselves. Working on companies like mine who are working on very proprietary things, or making sure that they're developing and building strength, and so we're doing a lot of things in the background that can't be seen quite yet, and eventually will come to mainstream once we really feel like we'll be able to offer something that people really want.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Are there any other myths that are being propagated, aside from the one around it being dead?   Rose Haft:          Yeah. People think they're ugly.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right.   What Led To The Demise Of The Google Glass And How New Products Are Learning From Its Failures   Rose Haft:          The glass hole is the scared term that's used and we're building something that will be a lot more sleek and stylish and have a lot more options in order to wear it and have it look different. I think the use cases that we're developing will be cool enough and necessary enough that people will want to adopt it anyways.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. You're seeing a lot of friction just in terms of the adoption because of change of behavior because people don't see this as prevalent, so that makes sense. There's already a number of big players in the market today. Facebook has Oculus. Google, like you mentioned, used to have Google Glass. What exactly is the difference between some of these big players, and maybe what you're building, and what you see other people building?   Rose Haft:          The main differences between each of the companies are the form factor and the tech-   Poornima Vijayashanker:        OK.   Rose Haft:          The technology that's being used to develop them. There are several different optical technologies that are used and those really make a big difference in what a headset looks like. Most of the virtual reality headsets have a screen like your cell phone that's in front of the eyes and there are lenses that help you to see an image clearly. That's one type of technology. Companies like Google have something called a beam splitter inside the Google Glass and while it's a smaller form factor, it has limited capabilities. Companies like Vuzix have something called a wave guide that has limitations around it as far as the brightness of the image, and the amount of the screen that's able to be filmed. That might be a very technical explanation, but-   Poornima Vijayashanker:        That's OK, we have a very technical audience.   Rose Haft:          Well, this is...I'm hoping to share-   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah.   Rose Haft:          Relevant information. The biggest difference between each of the systems is the way the computer image is generated so somebody can see it. Those are really the big three ones that you see right now. Meta has a direct reflection. I helped to come up with that design. I built a...Meta hired me because I had built a prototype and they thought my prototype was cool and they hired me on to help with that.   How You Can Separate The Fact From Fiction Around Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah, that's awesome. When our audience out there is trying to evaluate between fact and fiction when it comes down to augmented reality and virtual reality, what would you say to kind of arm them?   Rose Haft:          Yeah. In order to help understand the difference between fact and fiction in an augmented and virtual reality environment, a lot of companies are going out and giving a lot of information and showing pictures and those sort of things, without actually having a product. It's really important to look at how close is whatever is seen actually able to go out and be used in the world.   Also, companies that have a lot of hype, where they are getting the most press and it seems most exciting, aren't necessarily the ones who are building the most useful tools. I think it's kind of...Companies can be like people. If they're kind of showing off a whole lot, but not really putting anything behind the game, then there's probably a problem with it.                     Otherwise, I encourage your audience, everyone out there, to really learn the science behind what's happening. Part of the reason why we've been able to do things differently at Lumenora is because I knew the science, and I was able to go through and do things differently, because I knew the limitations of the methods trying to be implemented. Science, and also fact check, and double check if something's actually ready, or usable, or wearable.   Why Big Companies Like Facebook Are Investing In A More Long Term Strategy Around Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality   Companies like Facebook who have a five-year plan in order to build something and they've talked about that at F8 and those sort of things, they haven't necessarily released anything publicly to show what they're working on, and those are the companies that are more genuinely putting an effort into creating something useful before they go out and get credit for something they've not yet done.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. Well thank you so much, Rose. This has been really eye opening for us. I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing.   Rose Haft:          Absolutely.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Rose and I want to know, do you have any questions related to augmented reality and virtual reality? Let us know what they are in the comments below. 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 do a deeper dive into talking about some of the applications on augmented and virtual reality. Chow for now.                     This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.  

In the last episode of Build, we exposed a number of myths about current augmented reality and virtual reality trends, and how new products are evolving by learning from predecessors like Google Glass.   If the episode piqued your curiosity and left you wondering how you can get started or where you can find more resources, today’s episode is for you!   Rose Haft the CEO and Founder of Lumenora is back. Together we’re going to share some the applications of augmented reality and virtual reality that are here to stay, and how you can get started tinkering with the technology.   You’ll learn:   How 200+ companies are using augmented reality and virtual reality Why augmented reality and virtual reality isn’t just limited to industries like gaming but others like healthcare are adopting it The software tools and resources that are available today — making it easier for early adopters like you to start tinkering and developing applications! -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- Episode Transcript Poornima Vijayashanker:           In the previous episode of *Build*, we shared some of the most common myths and misconceptions related to augmented and virtual reality. If you missed the episode, I've included a link to it below. In today's episode, we're going to do a deeper dive into some of the applications of augmented and virtual reality, and talk about how you can get involved and your hands dirty using the technology. So, stay tuned.                     Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer, In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. In today's episode, we're back with Rose Halt, who is the CEO and founder of Lumenora, and we're gonna be doing a deeper dive into augmented and virtual reality, talking about some of the applications, as well as how you can get started using the technology. Thanks again for joining us Rose.   Rose Haft:               Yeah, thanks for having me.   How 200+ Companies Are Using Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, so, let's go ahead and dive in. Last time, we talked about some of the myths. This time, I want to talk about some of the applications, so maybe you can walk us through what you're seeing in terms of use cases for AR and VR.   Rose Haft:               Yeah, so even though people think that AR and VR is done. We talk about on the last episode, there are over 200 companies who are using it today.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Wow.   Rose Haft:               Which is pretty significant. They're using it to help reduce errors in production lines, helping to provide instructions where people might not have a lot of experience in a job, and helping to make sure that everyone is doing what they're supposed to do when they're supposed to. So, a lot of optimization.   How Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality Is Helping The Healthcare Industry   There are companies starting to work on Healthcare, trying to help to improve the patient-doctor experience, and that's another prominent one that's starting to take off. And then also in gaming. I'm sure you guys have all seen a lot of gaming videos of your friends on the internet, and so that's another one that people really like, and enjoy.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, I think the gaming one has been going on since the 90's, right? So, that's definitely one that's sort of here to stay. So, are there any other applications? I know I've seen some stuff around simulating things like surgeries, anything else that comes to mind?   Rose Haft:               Yeah, absolutely. So, on that surgery front, being able to train people and have the opportunity to practice something, before doing it in real life has been known to increase the likelihood of success. And so, people who are going into surgery it's really helpful to know the doctor has practiced a couple more times on a specific patient with similar body types, and expectations, and unique scenarios before they go in for a dangerous surgery. So we're really starting to see them being used to help humans make fewer errors in general, which is really interesting. As we're increasing the robotic technology to create machines, that can do things perfectly, we're also helping humans to do things perfectly.   Additional Applications And Use Cases For Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Well, I don't know if perfection is necessarily the goal, but that's good to hear that that's what they're aiming for. So, are these just trends, or are there more applications that you see coming down the pipeline?   Rose Haft:               Yeah, these definitely aren't trends. There are people who are starting to get to know and understand, and the right tools are being built now, from software and the hardware perspective, that will allow people to start adopting them. Today, I just had an interview with somebody who has tried using it in a business setting, and there's still some issues that they're running into even with billions of dollars being put into developing headsets. And so, as an engineer, I'm trying to...they say laziness is one of the virtues of being an engineer, and trying to do things right the first time, so as a startup, after people have put a lot of money in, we're able to take a hard look at some of the reasons why people aren't able to use them, and be able to put them design to prevent those flaws, and make them more adoptable.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, so it's gotta be a really high cost of production right? And for people in the audience who want to play with the technology, it costs like several thousands of dollars just to get a headset, and then of course there's a software being developed, so how are you seeing the cost come down, or how companies trying to bring down those production costs?   Rose Haft:               Yeah. So, companies like mine know the importance of these technologies. I've spent time in India and Peru, and I've seen how much a lack of similar tools has really made an impact on the world. And so, we're designing specifically to have a headset that can be used as functional, works great, and has a price point we can't fully disclose that yet, but ours won't take thousands of dollars to actually use and integrate with. We don't need to buy an expensive laptop in order to work with it. Our will be able to work out of the box, for about the cost of a cell phone, what you'd find now.   Software Languages And Platforms Compatible With Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality   Poornima Vijayashanker:           And what about the software that goes in it? Since, nothing yet is standardized, are company's thinking about this? How can our audience develop applications?   Rose Haft:               Yeah. So, Android is probably one of the easiest ways to get started. Android, if you know how to build apps, and there are a lot of tutorials, you can start to integrate with some of the same systems that will work on a phone, as well as a headset like ours. Most headset companies do integrate in that ecosystem. So, that really helps. Otherwise if you're more familiar with HTML or CSS, you can go to aframe.io, and there's also a Slack channel where you can get help learning how to use HTML and CSS to build applications using just regular web browser technology. It's a little more technical than that, but it's a good place to get started. And then, also Unity is another big skill that people can...another software platform that people can use in order to get started.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Oh, great. So, it's good to see that this same software platform is being leveraged, and it's not new languages or new frameworks that people have to adopt, except for maybe a couple things, like you mentioned, Unity.   Rose Haft:               Yup. So, I know there's a lot of different software languages to learn, and that can be very overwhelming. For the most part, all of them will talk to each other in some sort of way. And so, if you are wanting a specific language to write in, usually C or C++ is pretty universal, it'll allow allow you to plug in with one platform or another. Java, as well.   How To Deploy Software Application On Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Headsets   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, and what about the actual way to sort of put the application into these headsets, is there...is it all internet enabled? How does that work?   Rose Haft:               Yeah. So, every headset will have its own SDK that you can access and download, typically through the internet, and something you have to work directly with the company, and so it really depends on what you want to use. Android tends the easiest, because you can buy phones for less than $100, and you can start building and testing with that. And a lot of them are really functional and capable.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah. Maybe you can help us break down what SDK is.   Rose Haft:               Oh yeah. So, SDK is our software development kits, and so it'll have standardized code that will help you to talk to the hardware, or talk to other pieces of software, to make sure everything is compatible. For instance, with the different display systems, there are specific ways in which the display will be changed, so it has a coherent image, and that will be part of an SDK.   There’s A Market Need For More Software Infrastructure To Support Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality Products   Poornima Vijayashanker:           So, to draw an analogy to when mobile devices were first coming out. A lot of these platforms had emulators that you could put on your computer so that you didn't have to have every single device. You didn't have to have an Android phone, and a iPhone. Are there similar emulators being developed?   Rose Haft:               There should be. I haven't developed specifically for other headset companies. I'm trying to keep the IP stuff differently, but Android does a really good job with emulators, and it should work standardly, and each headset company will have an easy way to integrate, make it look the same on their headset, as well.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           OK, so maybe a market opportunity for some enterprising audience member out there.   Rose Haft:               Yeah, absolutely.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           But certainly, that opens the door for testing. I'm sure there's a lot of testing frameworks out there as well.   Rose Haft:               Yup.   Resources To Help Early Adopters Like You Get Started Tinkering and Building Augmented Reality And Virtual Reality Applications   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Wonderful. So, for those that want to get started, you already mentioned a few resources. Do you have any other resources out there that you can share with our audience?   Rose Haft:               Yeah I think if you're wanting to get started, it is really great to you find a mentor, or somebody else in the space who has worked, joined Slack channels and communities, and also talked to people who have been in the industry for a while, and find out what's worked, and what hasn't worked, what they need help with, and a lot of people are very willing to take the time to share knowledge, and information to help you move forward and get started. So, never feel ashamed to clarify, to ask for help, and to make sure that you're getting started and doing things in the best way.   Poornima Vijayashanker:           Yeah, wonderful. And we'll be sure to share those links with our audience out there. Thank you so much, Rose, for coming on the show today.   Rose Haft:               Yeah, 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 our next episode, and share this episode with your friends, your teammates, and your boss. And a 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.

All this month we’ve been talking about remote working as it relates to recruiting, training, and retaining remote works. We started out by tackling how to recruit remote workers for people who may be new to it. Then we discussed how to train, hold accountable, and retain remote workers.   In the final episode for this month, we’re going to address a BIG concern that often holds people back from recruiting and managing a remote team: the nature of the work that needs to be done.   Most hiring managers we talk to are OK with hiring a virtual assistant to handle day-to-day tasks. But when it comes to a mission critical project like launching a startup or handling very important client or customers, going remote seems too risky, and people opt for hiring a team on-site.   In today’s episode, we’ll talk about why it boils down changing your process depending on the nature of work your remote workers are doing.   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:   How to manage a remote team that is working on a mission critical project How customers and clients benefit from a team of remote workers Why facetime is still important for remote teams—especially when kicking off a project How to facilitate facetime amongst remote workers A simple first step for people who are on the fence about hiring remote workers -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## What A Remote Team Needs To Be Successful When Working On A Mission Critical Project Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:        In the last two episodes of *Build*, we shared a lot of the benefits of remote working. We also shared some best practices when it comes to recruiting and retaining employees and the processes you want to put in place to keep everybody productive.                     In today's episode we're going to share how these processes will change depending on the nature of work 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 Holly Cardew who is the CEO and founder of Pixc on remote working. Thanks for joining us Holly.   Holly Cardew:       Good to see you again.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Every episode of *Build* is inspired by amazing audience members like you, sharing your experiences and asking insightful questions. Today's episode is also inspired by an audience member, Kai. I want to start by reading an email that Kai sent me because I think it could help many of you who are out there.   How to manage a remote team that is working on a mission critical project                     Kai wrote, "Hi Poornima, I've been following your show since the pilot episode with Ben Congleton on building a remote team and recently caught the one you did with your team mate Megan as well. Thanks for revisiting this topic of remote working over the years. One thing I've been curious about is how processes change when you're managing a critical project versus a normal day to day? I know for things like startups, or mission critical projects, coordination appears easier when everybody's in the same location. I say "appears" because it can also be a huge distraction. What do you see are the trade offs and how does a remote team dynamic change between a critical project versus normal day to day tasks? Sincerely Kai."                     This is a great question Kai, and Holly and I are going to tackle it. So, if you're watching this episode, thank you for writing in. OK Holly, let's start with Kai's first question, which is, what are the trade offs when it comes to these mission critical tasks versus sort of the day to day?   Have remote workers be within a few time zones for mission critical projects   Holly Cardew:       I think mission critical tasks, you really need to understand what needs to be done and stick to that goal and that time zone. Also, understand that other people, aren't maybe in different time zones and you may need to stay up a bit late or go to bed, you know, I mean may not go to bed till 5 am. Whereas day to day tasks, it doesn't really matter when they happen in the week.                     For us, what we've really done is we've kept all our tech and product in Europe. So they're not in the same location, but they are in a similar time zone, so the time difference is really 4-5 hours, five hours max. Which allows everybody to communicate, but I think it can be beneficial, again to have somebody in another location in case there is a customer issue with the technology side.   Categorize tasks as asynchronous versus synchronous tasks to help remote workers collaborate   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. So what we did early on was actually break this up into asynchronism, what we like to call sort of those day to day tasks that people can do whenever they have availability, and then synchronism, where it's like you said, something that's customer facing, something that's critical, or something that requires a lot of coordination and figuring out that 3-5 hour time difference where everyone's kind of, be in the same day versus you have a problem, someone's asleep, you don't necessarily want to wake them up, right?                     If it's a customer facing issue than it can be a challenge, but I also like what you said about having people in different time zones in case it's a customer issue and then you've got more hands to kind of help out over the various time zones.   Holly Cardew:       Definitely.   How customers and clients benefit from a team of remote workers   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Do you have any, do you have a specific example you'd like to share with us?   Holly Cardew:       So as I mentioned, we definitely have taken product in Europe. We do have a project manager in the Philippines but that's OK because she understands that the rest of them are in that time zone, so she will work with that time zone. For our content and marketing, it's kind of, Europe but Western Europe and then flows over into America. That works absolutely fine.                     There's about, maximum there's eight hours difference, with social media included but they don't mind that because they've just set a time, each week to get the tasks done, but as you said, it's tasks that sort of come and flow. You don't need to do it at a certain time, it's not critical that you know, our social media post went up one hour difference, doesn't make that much difference to us as a B to B software company, but I think for customers, so customer service is really important because customers can not wait 12 hours. They can't wait eight, they need a response within 20 minutes.   Facetime is still important for remote teams—especially when kicking off a project   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. Now I will say that even aside from the time zones, another thing that I've found helpful is when you're kicking off a project, or you do feel like it's something really mission critical, it can be helpful to have people at the start of the project, all working together. Early on I will do either a retreat or maybe coordinate with some subset of the team, do you do anything like that at Pixc?   Holly Cardew:       We haven't yet. We've actually, we're talking at the moment about having our first meet up. Somewhere in Asia, so sent out a Google form with potential dates of what would work, but I think it would be really valuable for people. If you are located closely together, what we will do is try to meet up at conferences.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Oh perfect.   Holly Cardew:       Or, you know other events, or you know if I'm traveling to Indonesia I'll try and meet up with a team member, but for us we haven't yet done the in person thing yet.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Yeah. I think it's also good that you said you meet up with your employees, right. So, even if it's just a one on one or kind of a smaller group getting together that can be really valuable.   Holly Cardew:       Yeah, I've also said to them, like give them a budget to travel too. So if there's a lot of them in Asia, it's quite cheap to travel within Asia, so they could meet up for a dinner or lunch.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Oh, great.   Holly Cardew:       So it doesn't necessarily mean it's just for the project, it's again, links back to the culture, because if you create a good culture and they have a social gathering together, then when they do go away they sort of understand each other a bit more.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Right and it stills helps to kind of elongate that process and they feel like they're part of team and not just somebody working somewhere in some part of the world.   Holly Cardew:       Yeah. Definitely.   A simple first step for people who are on the fence about hiring remote workers   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Wonderful. Any final words of wisdom for our audience out there when it comes to recruiting remote talent and retaining them?   Holly Cardew:       I think when I speak to people and they're like I've never hired someone remote, what should I do? I think the first step is having a virtual assistant for yourself. So those tasks that you do every single day, that you could pass to someone else, just try it. Have someone 10 hours a week, or even five hours a week so it's one day a week, doing some of those tasks and you'll soon build a culture that works for them.                     The other thing is I would really think about them as not outsourcing or part of someone else's company. I stick with hiring individuals and not agency's or outsourcing companies. Then I send them birthday cakes and cards just because it makes them feel included in the bigger vision and bigger company and picture rather than just doing a task at hand.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Oh yeah, they're definitely contributing to the overall company so that's good. That's good that you recognize them. Well these are all great tips Holly. Thank you so much for joining us.   Holly Cardew:       Thank you.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        That's it for this week's episode of *Build*. Be sure to share this with your friends, your teammates and your boss, if you are thinking about putting in place a remote working culture. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode. Ciao for now!                     This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor PivotalTracker.  

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: Why remote working doesn’t work for some companies and cultures—impacting long-term productivity and retention of remote workers Best practices for training and onboarding remote workers How to hold remote workers accountable Why you need a communication escalation framework to keep your remote workers productive How to coach remote workers to be more resourceful Check out these additional resources on remote working: How To Build A Happy And Productive Remote Team How to Succeed In Your First Remote Working Position If you have a remote team, how do you train, retain, and hold your employees accountable? Let us know in the comments below. -- 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:   Remote employees won’t be as productive and progress will stagnate Communication between remote employees and remote teams will break down A remote team will be devoid of culture   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:   How do you know someone is a culture fit without a face-to-face meeting? Can you hire a remote worker for any role or only specific ones? How do you test a remote worker’s capabilities and competence? What is the best way to onboard and train a remote worker?   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:   The benefits of remote working for employers and employees The criteria you need to set to source candidates Roles that are well-suited to remote work How to suss out culture fit without a face-to-face meeting What to watch out for—red flags to spot early on when hiring remote workers Why it’s good to give people a test or trial project and how to structure it 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 employersPoornima 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 employeesPoornima 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 workersPoornima 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 candidatesPoornima 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 resourcefulHolly 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 workersHolly 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 candidatesPoornima 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:   Why pair programming may seem daunting but it’s very efficient How pair programming improves the quality of your code base and product What mob programming is Why it may seem inefficient to have everyone working on a single line of code at once with mob programming, but it’s actually very efficient when onboarding many new hires 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: Extreme Programming Explained How can I practice pair programming? Mob Programming 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.

Guest: Poornima Vijayashanker @poornima Full show notes are at https://developeronfire.com/podcast/episode-336-poornima-vijayashanker-maker-in-service

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:   How to design a first-day experience for your new hire Why making setup a cinch is a good thing and doesn’t mean you are spoon-feeding your new hire What to expect in terms of results from your new hire at the end of the first day and the first week The benefits your team and company will experience when you invest in onboarding new hires 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.

What's one of the most effective ways we can make a difference?According to Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer.com, it's our own ability to speak up and share our experiences – whether it's at work or a conference of 400+ people.As the founding engineer at Mint.com, Poornima helped build, launch, and scale the product until it was acquired by Intuit for $170 million.After the acquisition, Poornima began speaking and sharing her experiences within the tech industry. Once people started coming up to her and sharing what an impact her talks had, Poornima realized what a powerful platform public speaking was – giving her a chance to make a difference by sharing her story while opening up professional opportunities that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. Since then, she's spoken somewhere between 500-1000 times to audiences of over 400 people at conferences and companies around the country, including at TEDx and Salesforce. In today's episode, you'll learn:What pushed her to start speaking and get out of her comfort zoneWhy she thinks EVERYONE needs to learn to speak up for themselves, especially at workHow people with zero public speaking experience can take their first stepsHow she overcomes her own stage-fright, and how she's helped other people overcome their own imposter syndrome and fear of public speakingShe also goes into the proactive steps she took to be able to get in front of 400+ people at SalesforceI hope you enjoy this conversation with Poornima. She's super smart, has a ton of insights, and was even generous enough to offer THSB listeners a free copy of her book, Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking.Topics Discussed in This Episode:[00:02:36] How Poornima got started with public speaking[00:13:06] The fear of public speaking, and what people can do to get past it[00:16:31] Why people should speak, even if they aren't sure they have anything new or unique to say[00:19:10] Poornima's experience with stage fright[00:22:28] Steps for people who want to get started with public speaking[00:28:25] How you can use personal experiences to find topics to speak on[00:36:32] Why Poornima is involved in encouraging women and minorities to speak out[00:39:47] How Poornima got invited to speak at Salesforce[00:44:10] One vital step that people who want to get into public speaking can take[00:45:28] Why a people-first approach is important[00:48:49] The biggest impact that public speaking has had on Poornima[00:53:02] The importance of having a mentor or partner

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: Product Habits Why It’s Easier For Product Teams To Cram Features & Bugs Into Each Release Instead of Cutting Back Tech Debt: The Cost of Putting “Quick Fixes” Into Our Software Product Product Debt: What Is Product Debt And Why You Need To Prioritize Paying It Down How Long Does It Take To Get A Startup Company Off The Ground How Much Time And Money It’s Going To Take To Productize Your Idea My Nightmares With Engineering Estimates Story Points, T-shirt Sizing and Time Buckets: How Tech Companies Do Engineering Estimates Deadline That Are Doomed From The Beginning No One Likes A Creep   ## 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:   How to perform each step of the EAT method — Explore, Adjust, and Task What you CANNOT do with this approach How this approach reduces ambiguity, which is the #1 cause of delays and scope creep 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! -- 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:   Product Habits Why It’s Easier For Product Teams To Cram Features & Bugs Into Each Release Instead of Cutting Back Tech Debt: The Cost of Putting “Quick Fixes” Into Our Software Product Product Debt: What Is Product Debt And Why You Need To Prioritize Paying It Down How Long Does It Take To Get A Startup Company Off The Ground How Much Time And Money It’s Going To Take To Productize Your Idea My Nightmares With Engineering Estimates Story Points, T-shirt Sizing and Time Buckets: How Tech Companies Do Engineering Estimates Deadline That Are Doomed From The Beginning No One Likes A Creep   ## 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:   Why we suck at estimating even if we’ve been doing it for a while Why we’re surprised each time our product estimates miss the mark What happens if we decide to “pad” our estimates What happens when we get rid of estimating altogether Why a task we think a task is 80% complete but really it’s more like 50% complete Check out these additional resources on estimating stories for your product: Product Habits Why It’s Easier For Product Teams To Cram Features & Bugs Into Each Release Instead of Cutting Back Tech Debt: The Cost of Putting “Quick Fixes” Into Our Software Product Product Debt: What Is Product Debt And Why You Need To Prioritize Paying It Down How Long Does It Take To Get A Startup Company Off The Ground How Much Time And Money It’s Going To Take To Productize Your Idea My Nightmares With Engineering Estimates Story Points, T-shirt Sizing and Time Buckets: How Tech Companies Do Engineering Estimates Deadline That Are Doomed From The Beginning No One Likes A Creep -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## 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:   Why it’s important to start with a business case — just like you would for any product, process or policy change in a company Why you can’t expect immediate results, but it’s OK to celebrate incremental progress What to do when people within your organization say no to your proposal The microchanges you can into practice daily as you lead and work with teams 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/). --  ## 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:   Why we may shy away from talking about diversity and inclusion How shaming people and companies doesn’t help the cause Why awareness isn’t enough — how to shift to being more process oriented Why it’s hard to take action individually and how to get support How to know if diversity and inclusion are worth it   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: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Android Developers Site  iOS Human Interface Guidelines  Android Accessibility Scanner Lighthouse  -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- ## 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: Why thinking about accessibility is not just one person’s job, but a team effort How to integrate accessibility into your product development process How to engage users and discover communities that are ready and willing to test products for you!   Here are some additional resources to checkout that Laura mentioned in the video: Web Accessibility Udacity Course A11ycasts with Rob Dodson - YouTube series 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: What accessibility is and how it’s different from usability How accessibility influences user adoption of products How companies will benefit by incorporating accessibility into product development process, priorities, and core values Examples of common accessibility issues that impact all of us at various moments in our lives How to do an accessibility audit for your product and the 4 important principles to consider each time Here are some additional resources to checkout that Laura mentions in the episode: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ Vox Media Accessibility Checklist: http://accessibility.voxmedia.com/ 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:   Some of the uncomfortable activities you’re going to have to do find that first investor How to approach the topic of check size How to leverage that first check and attract additional investors who may have been on the fence What the investment partners at XFactor Ventures are looking for and the types of startups they have already invested in   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: How Danielle and Ooshma learned to keep their spirits up despite all the NOs they received How to be politely persistent with investors who won’t bother taking a meeting with you The various tests investors put first time founder through How to maintain a relationship with an investors even after they say NO -- 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!

Ever heard of a little app called Mint.com? Poornima Vijayashanker was the founding engineer and convinced her boss that the name he picked wouldn't get the market share he was looking for. After she successfully grew Mint, she exited after it was acquired by Intuit. Poornima is the Founder of Femgineer and now mentors other developers and founders on how to build better software. In this episode, we chat with her about the importance of selling your ideas so that they can grow. You can find her on Twitter at @poornima and on Femgineer.com. 

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: Why Erica and her partners at XFactor are putting their money where their mouth is and starting a fund to invest in female founders and mix-gendered teams What the XFactor investment partners and other angels look for versus venture capitalists, and how much they are willing to invest Why competitors will come and go, and you cannot let their actions intimidate you or direct your business goals Why only you as a founder, can decide when is the right time to raise for your business In the next two episodes we’ll explore handling all the rejections you receive from investors, how to motivate yourself to keep going, and what it’s going to take to get that first check! --  Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   ## Startup Funding: When It Does And Doesn’t Make Sense To Fundraise For Your Startup Transcript   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Last time, we talked about how as a first-time founder, you don't necessarily need to immediately rush out and get investment to get your tech product off the ground. We discovered some alternate ways of funding your product development and company growth. If you missed that episode, I've included it in the link below this video.   In today's episode, we're going to dive in a little bit deeper, and talk about when it makes sense to go out for that angel investment, and then how do you transition from getting capital from angels to eventually getting it from venture capitalists, and what you need to do in the interim to make sure you're growing your company. So stick around.   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, I invite innovators, and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.   What Compels Startup Founders To Fundraise   One myth a lot of founders fall prey to is the need to constantly fundraise. They're worried that if they don't, their competition is going to swoop right in and outpace them. Or their business is just going to stop growing, and even worse than that, people might not think that they are actually onto a big idea.   To debunk these myths and more, I've invited Erica Brescia, who is the COO and co-founder of Bitnami. Erica has also recently joined XFactor as an investment partner. For those of you who aren't familiar, XFactor is an early-stage investment firm that's looking to invest in female founders and mixed-gender teams. Thanks again for joining us.   Erica Brescia:      Thanks for having me!   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah! I know we talked a little bit in the last segment, but let's just quickly do a refresher, tell us a little bit about your background and what you do at Bitnami.   Erica Brescia:      Sure. Bitnami automates the packaging and maintenance process for server software for containerized, cloud, and behind-the-firewall deployments. We're most known right now for the Bitnami Application Catalog, which contains over 150 different pieces of server software, ranging from business schools, like content management systems, more project management systems, to development tools like GitLab and Jenkins for building out your development processes and pipeline, to stacks of things for building applications, like Node, or Rails, or Django. We work with all of the major cloud providers, and have over a million deployments a month of the apps we package across all the platforms that we support.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Awesome. In addition to Bitnami, you recently joined XFactor as an investment partner.   Erica Brescia:      I did, yes.   The Difference Between Angel Investors And Venture Capitalists   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah! We talked a little bit about that last time, and I want to pick up the conversation from our last time and dive a little bit more into not only what does XFactor do, but this whole position between angels and venture capitalists. How do you guys think of XFactor? Are you considering yourselves as angels or VCs? Would it help to start with defining angels and VCs?   Erica Brescia:      Sure. I mean, I tend to think of angels as primarily investing their own capital, and VCs are investing other people's capital. We all actually have our own funds in the fund as well, so we're LPs in addition to being the investment partners.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         What does that mean?   Erica Brescia:      That means that we're the people who put money into the fund, as the limited partners, who just put money in the fund, and then they step away, and they entrust, basically, the team of investment partners to invest that capital in companies that will produce ventures that yield returns.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Where is that money coming from? Is that your own hard-earned money, or is that from somewhere else?   Erica Brescia:      In the case of the LPs for the XFactor fund, it's from a range of different people. Some of them have just been very successful in business. Some may be managing endowments or trusts, or other investment vehicles, and they invest both in the stock market and in VC and angel funds as part of their diversification strategy.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Got it. I think some of you have also contributed personal funds, right?   Erica Brescia:      Yes. We have put our own funds into the plan as well.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         That's important to note. Yeah.   Erica Brescia:      You've got to put your money where your mouth is, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Great! No, I certainly appreciate you guys doing that.   Erica Brescia:      Plus, honestly, I think we're going to make money off of it! So why would you not do that?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Exactly!   Erica Brescia:      That is the whole point.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. You guys are operating a little bit like angels, but a little bit like VCs as well, but let's dive into more of a traditional VC model. What does that look like?   What Seed Stage Investors Are Really Looking For And The Size Of Check They Write   Erica Brescia:      Sure. The distinction there is interesting, because I would say there's seed-stage financing, which a lot of people think of as coming from angels a lot, but VC funds do as well. Those are typically much smaller rounds and much earlier stage. The company probably has something built, probably has some users, probably can show some traction, but they're usually not raising huge amounts of money, at least not by Silicon Valley standards, which are different than the rest of the world.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. Let's get some ranges. Because I know some seeds can get crazy.   Erica Brescia:      Huge. Yes.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         So let's do a more middle-of-the-road seed. What would that look like?   Erica Brescia:      These days, I would say they're usually between $500K and $2 million. I know that's a wide range, sometimes it's smaller, sometimes it's bigger, but the fundraisings that we're participating in are usually somewhere around there. We have had some companies raise significantly more than that, and we've almost gone in more at like a Series A stage. But typically you're raising $1 million or $2million to get your idea off the ground and show a little bit more traction, before you go and raise at a Series A. Those used to be maybe $2 or $3 million. Now, most of the time, you're looking at maybe $6, $7, even $10 or $15 million as a Series A, which we certainly see in the cloud and container space in particular, which is where I'm focused with Bitnami.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK. That makes sense. Now, I'm not going to dive into microfunds and syndicates, and all that stuff. We're going to do that in a later episode. But let's go back to you, and let's talk a little bit about how you initially funded Bitnami.   How To Initially Fund Your Startup When You Cannot Attract Investment   Erica Brescia:      Customers.   Poornima Vijayashanker:        Customers!   Erica Brescia:     We sold stuff. Yeah.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. When was this, by the way?   Erica Brescia:      We started with a company called BitRock over 10 years ago, and BitRock built some really interesting technology around application packaging and deployment, which has become the foundation of Bitnami. We're very unique, I would say, for a Silicon Valley company. We developed a package software product. We sold it to customers, and we generated money that way.                     Then we started providing a subscription service to a lot of software companies that needed us to build, we called them "stacks" of software, so their products could be installed and distributed very easily, and we worked with a lot of the biggest names in open source, in those days. So we had that money coming in—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         If you don't mind sharing, how big were some of those contracts?   Erica Brescia:      They were in the tens of thousands of dollars a year. So reasonably sized, but we now, in retrospect, we charged far too little. But that's one of the lessons that you learn as a founder, you're always underpricing yourself in the early days.   So we did that, and built up the company that way. Then we decided to evolve into Bitnami. We went through Y Combinator in 2013—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         So before you did that, you actually had revenue coming in?   Erica Brescia:      Yes.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Give us a range of how big you were at that size?   Erica Brescia:      We had 12 people, and seven figures in revenue, when we—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Oh! That's fabulous!   Erica Brescia:      —went through Y Combinator.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. OK. So why even bother going to—   Erica Brescia:      That's a great question! It was a subject of much debate, but again, interesting story, I suppose. My co-founder's wife had gone through Y Combinator with her own company, and had a great experience with it. And we knew that we wanted to send the company on a different trajectory—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Which was?   Erica Brescia:      Growth.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK. OK!   Erica Brescia:      We wanted to build a huge business, and the model that we'd had previously was really what we talked in the last episode about, more of a lifestyle business. Right? We built a solid business, but that's not what we were there to do. We wanted to build a huge and very meaningful company. And we felt like Y Combinator was the right way to do that.                  It gave us a lot of focus, and helped us make some interesting and difficult decisions. It also helped us a lot with hiring in the early days, and bringing more folks to the team. We've been on a pretty healthy  trajectory since then. Over 75 people. I don't give out revenue numbers, but we're profitable and growing, and doing well.                     All of that money, except for a million dollars, which we still have sitting in the bank, has come in through customers. And that million dollars we raised after going through Y Combinator. We brought in some angel investors whom we really liked, for different reasons. Some of them have a lot of experience in building companies, specifically in our space, and we felt like they could help us a lot with that.                     A couple of them are VCs who invested personally in us, because we didn't want to raise a VC fund, and a few were overseas venture investors, but they make seed stage investments. One from Japan, and one from China. And that was purely because we plan on going into those markets, and we thought it would make sense to have some people over there with a vested interest in our success.                     Y Combinator served as a good catalyst to bring that round together-   Poornima Vijayashanker:         How big was that round?   Erica Brescia:      It was just a million dollars?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Oh! OK. But you were already in the seven-figure revenue at that point, when you raised that million.   Erica Brescia:      Exactly.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         OK.   Erica Brescia:      And that money is still sitting in the bank, and we've added a healthy amount to it, and—   Poornima Vijayashanker:         That was what year?   Erica Brescia:      2013.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Oh! It's been a while. It's been four years.   Erica Brescia:      Yep.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Now, interestingly enough, you have that million, you're raising revenue, and you had grown without a lot of outside capital. I mean, you were already growing, so in that span of time, weren't you afraid that some competitor was just going to swoop right in and go out and raise $10 million or $100 million dollars, and put you out of business?   Don’t Let Competitors Intimidate You Into Fundraising For Your Startup   Erica Brescia:      What's actually funny about that question is we had a bunch of competitors do that, and they all went out of business..   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Oh, OK! Yeah!   Erica Brescia:      OK! Some spectacularly so. One raised $40 million, had huge names. One of the people on their board tried to come and intimidate me, and say I could never compete with—it was actually a woman running that company, too. But I won't name her, because that's not good for anyone.                     Yeah. We had a lot of companies come and raise money, but the model wasn't there yet. And that's why we didn't raise, either, right? There's a time, and we talked about this in the last episode. It's my belief that in most cases, you're better off raising when you have product-market fit. We had that at small scale, but we hadn't found what was really going to fuel exceptional growth of the company. It took us a while to get there, and a bunch of other companies tried to come in and do that, and they all went bust.                     I mean, there is a time and place when I think it does make sense, and when you do have to worry about competitors, because the truth is, once a big name competitor raises a big round, it's really hard to get anyone else to invest in you. I think Docker's a pretty good example of that in my space, right? They have tons of money. Nobody's going to invest in another container startup. Why would you do that? It doesn't make sense for investors.                     It is something to consider, but I think a lot of people spend way too much time worrying about their competitors, and not enough time worrying about their own business.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. Or their customers.   Erica Brescia:      Yeah! Or their customers. Exactly. So, yeah, that matters, but you need to do what's right for you, and what's right for what you want out of your life and your business. You should ask yourself those questions. Taking on VC is taking on a lot of additional responsibility, too—   What Kind Of Return Venture Capitalists Look For   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Like what?   Erica Brescia:      Well, they're expecting a certain level of return, right? A $100 million exit is not something a VS wants, where it might be completely life changing for you, if you don't have venture capital in the company. If you're taking venture capital, you're committing to running the company for at least 5–10 years, providing they don't push you out, which happens sometimes, too, if you're not doing things the way they want.                     You're committing to managing a board, with outside parties who are going to have sometimes divergent interests from you. It could even be the case that the fund cycles are usually 10 years, and they have to return the capital to their limited partners, which we talked about earlier. They might need to get out, and want to push you to sell when you don't want to. They might want you to sell to somebody you don't want to.                     There are a lot of great things that come from venture capital, if you partner with the right people. Obviously, you get the capital you need to fuel the growth of your business, and that can be incredibly important, especially to support go-to-market activities, or SaaS business models, where customer acquisition costs might be high, but the LTV is huge. There are reasons to take money.                    I'm not against that. But you also need to understand what you're signing up for, and what it really means, and that there may be an alternative path for you if that's not the path that makes the sense for you. If you don't want to run this company for 5–10 years, and you don't expect to sell it for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, don't take venture capital. Startups That Focused On Growing Their Business First   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. Some folks in our audience might be thinking, "Erica, that's fabulous for you and Bitnami, and all of the success, but I could never do that. I couldn't just sit and wait for my business to grow organically." Are there other examples of companies here in the Valley, that you're familiar with, who have done a similar approach? I know I can think of a couple, but I'm curious—   Erica Brescia:      Absolutely! Well, Atlassian, they're in the Valley now, but they came from Australia, and that's a spectacular story. They really couldn't raise, because they were in Australia, and especially back then, the VC climate in Australia was almost nonexistent. They raised very late, and a lot of it was secondary to the employees, and they've done spectacularly well. GitHub's another example. They raised very, very late in the process, in a very big round, and that gave them a lot of flexibility to do other things.                     We've seen that happen a lot. It really depends. Again, I think, going back to what I said before about product-market fit. It's my view that the best time to raise is when you just need fuel for the engine. You already know how the engine works, and it's already built, and the machine is there, and you know, "If I put X in, I'm going to get Y out." Right? That's when you can really take advantage of venture capital, and that's when it can really make a difference.                    I'm not saying take a long time to build your company like I did. I would certainly do a lot of things differently this time around, but a lot of it just has to do with where the business is, and what the capital's going to be used for.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         It's been a four-year period, right? Where you haven't taken outside investment. You took the initial million. But in that period of time, how has not taking capital, or not thinking about fundraising, how has that helped you and Bitnami?   Erica Brescia:      Well, several ways. I think the most important thing is focus. Not having $10 or $20 or $50 million in the bank makes you focus on what's really going to move the business forward. It's really easy, and I have seen this countless times with companies that I will not name. They raise a ton of money, and they go out and hire a ton of people, and everything falls apart.                     Because humans are humans, right? These are not just cogs in the machine, especially when you're trying to build a breakthrough or game-changing product. You need incredibly smart people. They're going to have strong personalities. They're going to have past experiences from other companies. And you need to be able to get those people to work well together. So many startups have failed in doing that, and it's led to their own demise, or at least slowed them down a lot, and really burned a lot of bridges with fantastic employees.   I'd say it's allowed us to build out the infrastructure to responsibly scale the team, and it's helped us to focus, again, on making the right investments in terms of where we're spending our time. It's also great for negotiating business deals, I will tell you. That doesn't come up a lot—   How To Compel Customers To Do Business With Your Startup   Poornima Vijayashanker:         How so?   Erica Brescia:      I was in meetings, even earlier this week, and these are quite big, multimillion-dollar-a-year deals, and they were asking some questions about what the business model looked like, and I could look at these people with a straight face and say like, "Look, we're not VC backed. My company needs to make money. You want me to be around. This needs to make sense for us, financially."                     That drives a lot of my decision making. I'm very, very involved in the corporate and business development stuff that we do. I need to do deals that make sense for my business. For some reason, it's a lot easier for people to get their heads around that when you don't have venture capital, which is kind of a funny thing, right?   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Well, people understand where you're coming from, and what resources you have at that level.   Erica Brescia:      Yeah! I'm not BSing them. "I have to pay people, and you're going to get a lot of value out of this, and you need to pay me, and I'm not going to do it on a bet that the relationship itself is going to benefit me enough, because that wouldn't be responsible business." That's what I go to all the time. It's not responsible business, you're not doing it. I think being bootstrapped and funding through customers really helps you think through that and make very good business decisions. We say no to all kinds of things, too. And I think that's easier, as a result of that.                    The one other aspect I'd say is, we don't have to manage investors. It takes a lot of time to build investor relationships, which I do do that anyway, because we may raise in the future. But also just to raise funding, to go through the diligence process, and then to manage a board of directors that involves VCs, again, who might have competing priorities, or other things going on.                    Again, we don't get some of the pixie dust you might get if you're VC funded, and sometimes we have to have interesting conversations with procurement departments, and show them our financials, to prove that we've got a great business, and that they can feel comfortable working with us, but it saves a lot of time and overhead.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah, that's interesting. So you feel, because you're in the B2B space, the enterprise space, some companies may feel like, "Oh, you're not VC backed, so you might go out of business sooner." But what you're saying is, "Actually, we've got customers. We're going to stick around because we've got real revenues coming in, so no need to worry about this."   Erica Brescia:      Yeah. And I can point to, we do business with Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Google. All these big companies. It's gotten a lot easier, now.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Right. You've got the credibility.   Erica Brescia:      Exactly. And we've got a track record. We've not just been around for a year, and we have an established team of senior people, and we've proven that we can execute, and we can deliver. And what often happens is we'll start with a smaller relationship, and it grows over time. After you get your foot in the door, what they care about is do you deliver on your commitments, not whether or not you have a VC in the company.   Keeping Your Options Open When It Comes To Investment   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Awesome. Now, I know you said, "Never say never." So you are thinking about capital, and then your future. How are you thinking about attracting that VC capital?   Erica Brescia:      Let me be clear: we haven't decided to raise capital, but it's a discussion that we're having currently between my CFO, my co-founder, me, and some of the other people on the executive team, because we're launching this new enterprise business. We're incredibly lean as a company right now.                     I told you we have in the mid-70s in terms of employees. Over 50 of those are in engineering and product. So the business team is quite lean, and we have very, very little sales on the sales side. Building on an enterprise business means I need a whole new go-to-market plan that involves field people, inside sales, solutions architects, and support people, and a bunch of other folks. Account executives, all these things.                    That's very capital intensive to build. We can do it off of cash flow, actually. We're in that fortunate position, but at the same time, we might grow a little bit more slowly, and especially hire more slowly, than we would if we had, say, $15 or $20 million in the bank. So we're starting to think through the tradeoffs, and what might make sense there.                     I've been in the Valley now long enough, I know a lot of VCs. There's several whom I like and respect quite a bit, and I still develop relationships with them, and we talk about the industry in general, and Bitnami, and where we're going. I think it's a little bit different than a company that's just coming out of nowhere. We have people who know us, who know the business, who have said that they're interested. So when the time comes, it's more of a matter of sitting down with people who are already friendly and interested in the company, and talking through what makes the most sense.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         It's a partnership.   Erica Brescia:      Mm-hmm, absolutely.   Poornima Vijayashanker:         Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you for sharing your experience with us today, Erica. I know our audience is going to get a lot out of this episode.   Erica Brescia:      Thank you so much!   Poornima Vijayashanker:         That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll dive in deeper with some of Erica's co-investors and explore more topics around funding your startup. Ciao for now!   Voiceover:          This episode of *Build*is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.  

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:   Why investment may not be applicable to the type of business you are building and alternate approaches to funding your startup The questions investors ask themselves before they will respond to a meeting request or write a startup a check When startups are “too early” to fundraise and why the definition of “too early” is inconsistent — who really gets funded early and why The work that startup founders and teams must do, if they are keen on attracting investment 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:   Why Erica and her partners at XFactor are putting their money where their mouth is and starting a fund to invest in female founders and mix-gendered teams What the XFactor investment partners and other angels look for versus venture capitalists, and how much they are willing to invest Why competitors will come and go, and you cannot let their actions intimidate you or direct your business goals Why only you as a founder, can decide when is the right time to raise for your business     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 r

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:   The tools and processes to use to stay productive and on top of your projects and tasks How to handle working across multiple time zones How to communicate more effectively with your teammates across a number of channels How to train new hires when you can’t sit right next to them How you can cultivate a great company culture across continents   Here’s another great source to check out on managing your day-to-day when remote working, from our friends at Skillcrush.   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:   Get people to adopt design sprints Convey the number # 1 benefit of a product design sprint What to do if all else fails and you just can’t get over the pushback Make product design sprints work for larger teams Convey who does and doesn’t need to be involved in a product design sprint Highlight how a product design sprint is different from lean startup methodologies and Agile   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:   What is a design sprint When does it make sense to a product design sprint What do each of the days look like How constraining the time, energy and money you spend on a problem leads to clarity How a product design sprint can benefit your overall product development process   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:   Why our perception of who or what we think it takes to be in a role is often wrong, and why we are more capable of learning and growing in a new role than we realize When it comes to leadership, it’s OK to take time to discover your own style Why the comfort and well-defined nature of our current role makes a transition harder and make us feel less accomplished in the beginning In the episode Jean mentions the book: The Manager's Path, check it out here.  -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- Transcript for What Stops Us From Transitioning Into A Leadership Role   Poornima Vijayashanker: Have you been in your current role for a while and maybe you're considering a transition from being an individual contributor to a leader, and you're not sure if it's right for you? Well, in today's *Build* episode, we're going to explore some of the tradeoffs that aren't talked about, so stay tuned.              Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Now one myth that I came across early in my career was the transition from being an individual contributor to a team leader. I struggled with this transition because I worried about my skills getting rusty and whether or not I had the skill set to actually lead people. So if you're grappling with this, we're going to cover it in today's episode. To help us out, I've invited Jean Hsu, who is an engineering leadership coach. Thanks for joining us today, Jean.   Jean Hsu: Thanks for having me.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah. You and I met a couple months ago at a event. I'm really curious to know a little bit more about your background. If you can walk us through what drew you into tech and ultimately led to what you're doing today.   Jean Hsu: Sure. I went to school for computer science. I actually went to a liberal arts school. A few years in, I started trying to figure out what I wanted to do and what I really enjoyed was the coding and the projects and the—I didn't really know anything about applications, what the applications were going to be, or what software engineering was as a job, but I really loved the classes. I think that when people talk about how to attract women to tech, a lot of the conversations are actually, they don't seem as relevant to me because I really loved the actual coding itself, and I didn't know anything about what I would do after I graduate.   Poornima Vijayashanker: So where did you land after college?   Jean Hsu: I had interned at Google the summer before I graduated, and then I ended up taking a full-time offer at Google that started right after I graduated. I moved up to Mountain View and I was there for about a year and a half. Then I quit and wanted to see what else was out there, and kind of had the sense that Mountain View and the Google campus is a little bit of a bubble, and so I started to dabble in Android development. I ended up at Pulse and did some of the Android development there. Then after that—I was there for about a year and then I ended up at the Obvious Corporation, which later became Medium. I worked on their first prototype. Then I was there for about five and a half years.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, wow.   Jean Hsu:   And then I left about six months ago.   Transition from engineer To engineering manager   Poornima Vijayashanker: So what catapulted you to strike out on your own?   Jean Hsu:   It was kind of the right time to make a big change. I don't know if it's like, I have two kids. I have an almost two-year-old and a four-and-a-half-year-old and that's very, it's not stable, but there's sort of a monotony in taking care of them. I had been at Medium for five and a half years, so I think there was a part of me that just really wanted a really big change and I was ready to kind of jump in the deep end again and figure something out that was completely new to me.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Now when you're at Medium, that's when you did your transition, right, from being an engineer to an engineering manager.   Jean Hsu:   That's right, yeah.   Our perception of who or what we think it takes to be in a role   Poornima Vijayashanker: What kind of prompted you to even consider this transition? Because a lot of people just think, “I'm happy kind of coding away. Why rock the boat?”   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, I mean for me I was pretty happy coding away, but I think I wanted to see where I could be more impactful. I don't know that I really chose it for myself. I was sort of, I wanted to have more impact and influence. Sometimes I was stepping into tech lead or project lead roles. I think at some point it was like everyone kind of knew that this was kind of the path I was headed and I was almost the last person to know. It was interesting because when I made that switch and started to take on a few direct reports, I think everyone was like, “Oh, it should have happened like a long time ago.”   Poornima Vijayashanker: What do you think they saw in you that maybe took you a while to see in yourself?   Jean Hsu:   I don't know. I guess I didn't really know what a manager did. Even at the time at Medium it wasn't called manager. I think they still call it a group lead, so it was very much this mentor, advocate, coach role, which is sort of, what I'm doing now is very similar to that. I think it was that people saw that in me, that they felt like they could talk to me about things and that I would help them solve their problems. I was never very much of a command and control, top-down type manager, which is maybe what I thought managers did.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, so maybe it was your perception or, “My misperception of this is what a manager is, so clearly I'm not a manager because that's not what I want to do,” when really you've naturally been doing a lot of great tasks or I guess things that managers would do.   Jean Hsu:   Right, yeah, like when you, if you ask me like, “Oh, do I want to help people and support them and help them solve their problems,” like, “Yeah.”   Poornima Vijayashanker: Right, but not maybe the “I want to enforce strict process or—”   Jean Hsu:   Right, like I'm just going to tell you what to do every day.   Why we think we aren’t capable of leading   Poornima Vijayashanker: Got it. Tell us some of your concerns, then, going in, aside from this “I don't know if I'm capable of being a manager or what a manager role entails.” What were some concerns with that?   Jean Hsu:   I mean my transition was pretty gradual. But as I got more and more in it, I definitely had this concern that it was too early to go 100% in that direction.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Why?   Jean Hsu:   I mean I think a lot of it is the tech industry. I sort of have this sense that people who don't look like me, specifically white males, if they are, they look young and they're in a management position, people tend to give them more the benefit of the doubt and think, “Oh, that's someone who is like so talented that he got promoted into management.” I sort of worried the opposite would happen to me where people would look at me and say, “Oh, she doesn't even have that much technical experience,” or like, “She looks really young. She came out of a boot camp,” or something, whereas I really had like a decade full of experience. I definitely had that anxiety of how will I be perceived once I leave this company.   Poornima Vijayashanker: And how did you handle that perception, kind of get over it?   Jean Hsu:   That’s a good question. I think that a lot of it was sort of—I mean I also had the sort of struggle of do I then count as someone who's like nontechnical anymore. You see these statistics of like, “Oh, 70% of women leave their technical roles.” I’m like, “Am I contributing to that?”              But I think what I landed on is sort of like the whole point is that you should be able to do what you feel, like is your calling, and that you want to do and not that I'm contributing to the statistic that we want to go down, not up. I think that's part of how I kind of came to terms with it. Then when I was thinking about how to, like if I was leaving the IC work too early, what my manager helped me focus on was what would I get out of doing more of it.              He's like, “Well, if you want to do VP eng or a head of engineering type role, I feel like you've already demonstrated that you can do that. Even if it's areas that you're not familiar with, you can work with engineers to figure it out, you've done that before, and so what would you get out of it.” I was like, “Oh, I guess I just…” It's sort of this feeling of like I should do it, I should do more technical work, not that I really wanted to or that I was drawn to do more of it.   Poornima Vijayashanker: It's interesting that he led you down that path of what would it look like in your current role if you were to do more of maybe the same, or where would that kind of take you longer term, and is that the kind of work that you want to do.   Jean Hsu:   Right, and he was very open with me and saying like, “OK, well, you know what? I understand that you may want to go, kind of like shift back a little bit, but for this quarter we really need you here and let's reassess.” It felt very like a temporary, not temporary, but it was like an ongoing conversation. It wasn't like if I wanted to go back into IC work, I'd have to leave the company. I always had that advocate in him.   How long it really takes to transition into a leadership role   Poornima Vijayashanker: So you ultimately decided to take the choice and go from being an individual contributor, an IC, into a leadership. What were the first few months like in that transition?   Jean Hsu:   It was kind of a long transition. I'd say it was like over maybe two years. The first few months I mean I definitely had this sense of like, I don't have time to get my work done because when you're responsible for both the coding work and being responsible for teams or people, it's really hard to have that, like make your time.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Right, contact switching.   Jean Hsu:   So I definitely felt like it was easy to just say, “Oh, I had a day full of meetings. I didn't get any work done.” That’s a very, very common mindset to have when you make that transition.   When we don’t have something tangible to point to we feel unaccomplished   Poornima Vijayashanker: I think for me when I went from being an engineer to a founder, the hardest thing was I'm no longer going to have something to point to at the end of the day because before I could build something and deploy it and be like, “Look, what I built,” and at the end of the day I was like, “Yeah, I talked to five people.”   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, I started keeping, in the times where I felt like the transition was the roughest I started keeping a log of what is the one thing that I felt was most impactful that I did that day, and sometimes I kind of had to make it up. I was, “Oh, I had a one-on-one with this engineer, and maybe she thinks about herself fundamentally differently now and is now going to interact with people in a slightly different way.” You kind of have to take those where you can get them.   Poornima Vijayashanker: It's squishy and you don't see the results immediately and it’s developing a level of comfort with that. I think that's one of the harder pieces and where people get demotivated when they're not seeing their results fast enough versus with code it can be very instantaneous.   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, and I think management success or being a leader is a little bit more subjective and the feedback loop is a lot longer.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah.   Jean Hsu:   I mean it could be, I mean if you're just talking about actual feedback that you get, that's, I don't know, at companies that kind of have—can I curse on here?   Poornima Vijayashanker: Of course.   Jean Hsu:   —have their shit together, it’s like six months. Every six months you get some feedback on how you're doing, the official formal feedback loop. But beyond that you have the one-on-one. That's a very individual relationship. I think for a lot of people they don't really see the impact of their work. One of the things I've been thinking about is for engineering work for the most part your impact is somewhat proportional to the work you put in. If you spend two months building a system with a team, that's two months that you put in. Hopefully it's an important thing that you've done. Then the management work sometimes you can do some tweaking or some restocking up front that can have really big impact that people might not trace back to you, and so you sort of have to see that loop, that feedback loop for yourself.   Managing and leading your peers   Poornima Vijayashanker: Were you ever in a situation where you also went from being an engineer with a bunch of teammates to then being their manager and having them as direct reports?   Jean Hsu:   Mmm-hmm. Most of my early direct reports were new grads. In some ways that was sort of easier. I had just been there eight years ago and so I had a very good sense of like, “Oh, this is kind of where you are now, and here's the type of support you need.” I'd say as a tech lead it was sometimes a little bit more difficult, especially when I was suddenly responsible for managing the work of people who were more senior than me, that I feel like I kind of took a very hands-off approach, which sometimes was like, there’s just miscommunication. But it is something I feel like especially as a manager you have to navigate, like how, it's OK to be friendly with people. I mean obviously you want to be friendly with people in the workplace, but how much you can be like good friends outside of work.   Poornima Vijayashanker: And how to be authoritative.   Jean Hsu:   Right, and navigating that was a little bit tricky to me. Figuring out if someone invited me to something, “Should I go?” I’m like, “What? If I did something, who should I invite?” In some ways I just didn't hang out with people at work who were on the engineering team because it was like, I felt like I had to invite 30 people. I don't want to invite 30 people.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Right, so you want to be careful about playing favorites and stuff like that.   Jean Hsu:   Right. I think I was especially sensitive to that, because I had seen it, I'd seen it happen. People who are friends go to Vegas together and then you're just like, “Whoa, I understand you’re friends, but it's hard to say that that's completely separate from your work.”   Poornima Vijayashanker: What about the boss factor? I know for myself as an older sister bossiness is just totally normal for me. But did you have a sense of like, “How do I go and be more of an authoritative figure or disciplinarian” sometimes?   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, most of my—that kind of stuff was in one-on-ones. I feel like one of the areas that I kind of grew into was to bring that to a more group setting and a lot of my feedback would be around like, “Jean has,” like, “We want to hear more from her, like we want…” People wanted to hear more from me. They knew that I was, kind of like, I had an opinion but I wasn't like—   Poornima Vijayashanker: Voicing it.   Jean Hsu:   Voicing it. Actually after I had to figure out that I was going to leave and do my own thing, I kind of became more unintimidated. I was sort of just saying whatever I wanted to say in meetings, which probably actually made me better at my job.   Poornima Vijayashanker: What do you think kind of got you to that level aside from putting in your notice? Did you have a mentor that kind of helped you see these were hurdles or things that were holding you back as you were doing the transition into a leadership role?   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, I mean I had a lot of peer support and my own manager was very helpful and kind of providing that feedback in an ongoing basis. I think for me it was also seeing that when I spoke up in meetings, because one of my pet peeves is like inefficient meetings and—   Poornima Vijayashanker: I agree.   Jean Hsu:   One of the things I would start to do a few years in was like, “OK, I'm just going to get up and start to facilitate the meeting and get people on track and kind of cut people off,” and that came out of a facilitation role that we had at Medium, but sometimes there’s unstructured meetings so I kind of just take that role. The first few times it was like, “I don't know if this is OK. Do people think I'm being overbearing?” But once I started getting feedback of like, “Oh like, thank God you were there to do that,” or people would start electing me to be the facilitator—   Poornima Vijayashanker: You're doing the things they’re thinking of doing, yeah.   Jean Hsu:   Right. I was like, “Why do I just sit here with this sinking feeling of like, ‘Ugh, this meeting, why don't I do something about it.’’”   Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh, that's great, so you were, yeah, naturally gravitating towards taking the reins and steering people in the direction. It wasn't as if you were having one-on-ones with your boss, your manager every week and saying, “I have this problem. How do I deal with it?” You naturally saw opportunities and thought, “I'm going to dip my toe in and see what happens.”   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, I think there was probably a long way I could have gone before. One of my goals—actually I never achieved this—was for people to tell, for my manager to get feedback about me that I was over the top because I knew there was a long way to go.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Oh god, yeah. I always push people for that. It’s like yeah, push to a level of aggressiveness and then they’ll know.   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, because I could tell that it was really myself holding me back and there was so far from where I was and where that was really going to be a problem, and so I kind of wanted to see what was the range there.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Did you ever hit the—   Jean Hsu:   No I did not, I left before.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Something new to aspire to then.   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, maybe.   The choice to stay with the known path   Poornima Vijayashanker: What do you think you've gotten out of the—now, what is it, a year, two years since you've been a leader—what do you think you've gotten out of that experience that maybe you wouldn't have gotten had you stuck to your individual contributor role?   Jean Hsu:   I think there's equal—I was going to say impact and influence, but I feel like even in the IC track there's ways to achieve that and to lead also.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, we’ll get to that. Let’s talk about the leadership.   Jean Hsu:   As a manager, I felt like it's definitely pretty exhausting to be the person sort of taking care of people and supporting them, but there's a lot of rewards there too, which is like you know that these people have someone who they feel safe coming to and there's issues. I don’t know. It's just like a level of influence that, what I had from my manager, just being able to extend that to everyone else, that was really, that really meant a lot to me.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Any impact on the product or the company that you can speak of?   Jean Hsu:   In terms of the company a lot of my role was also doing engineering operations work, so kind of like team-wide processes, taking what was working on my team or other teams and kind of expanding them to be part of, more of the whole engineering team’s processes. Then something I also saw at Medium was engineering was the largest team. A lot of times engineering would pilot something and then it would work really well and so we’d expand it to the rest of the company. That was kind of cool too, to see that level of like, “Hey, like what's going on over there? They seem to be like pretty well supported.”   Poornima Vijayashanker: Then coming back to the question that you proposed. If you had stayed in your individual contributor role, how do you think it would have manifested itself?   Jean Hsu:   I don't think that was ever really for me, but I think that once I could see that I was capable of doing it, that also made me much more comfortable to switch to the management track, because I really felt like for a while that I wasn't cut out to do the hardcore infrastructure platform work, and they're kind of going that way as my career route. Then I did spend like a quarter or two, really diving deep into platform work, and I could see the path there. Once I could see the path and I was like, “OK, I can see this, if I don't do people management and some of the other things I'm doing and I just focus on this, I could see how I could get to where this person is in five years or 10 years.” It was interesting because just seeing that helped me kind of be comfortable with moving to the management track more fully.   Poornima Vijayashanker: You mentioned there being opportunities for leadership for individual contributors. So for folks who might in our audience choose to stay as individual contributors for the long haul of their career, what do those opportunities look like?   Jean Hsu:   I mean there's a lot of different, even in the individual contributor, I mean some people include tech lead as part of that track. I think in the more purely individual contributor track you can still expand your influence and you can be the architect of larger, larger and larger things or just be able to coordinate. I mean it becomes less individual even though you're still doing the work.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Sure, you’re just divvying it up or directing people, but maybe not responsible for their career.   Understanding the path of a new role   Jean Hsu:   That's right, or you're thinking more about the high-level technical strategy of the company or—I mean, that I think eventually leads to architect or CTO type roles, whereas once I had kind of figured out the paths, I didn't really have a sort of canonical like VP eng, like, “Oh, this is what a VP eng does, and this is what a CTO does.” Had worked at Google where you have no visibility, to those people, Pulse, which we were just all kind of figuring things out, and then Medium where my manager was the head of engineering and it was very much like a hybrid VP eng/CTO role. But once I had figured out what that actually meant, it was pretty clear to me that the path that appealed to me most was sort of the VP eng route.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Yeah, it's nice when you have a little bit more transparency.   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, because otherwise it's just like, “I don't, I don’t know,” like, “I don't know where I'm going because I don't even know what the options are.”   Poornima Vijayashanker: That's a good final set of words for our audience, is getting a sense of what the various tracks look like before you pre-select or make the decision to not participate, just kind of get your facts straight, get a sense of what each role is like.   Jean Hsu:   Yeah, the book *The Manager’s Path* was really good for that because she, Camille, the author, she lays out a lot of the—I like how she lays it out because at the end she talks about all the core things that a company needs and then the different combinations of roles that they use to achieve them, because VP, eng, and CTO can actually mean very different things depending on the company you’re at.   Poornima Vijayashanker: Nice. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much Jean for sharing all this awesome information. I know our audience out there is going to get a lot out of this. For those of you now in the audience, Jean and I would like to know: have you recently done a transition maybe from being an individual contributor to a manager or a leader? What were some of the concerns you had, and how did you go about handling that transition? Let us know in the comments below this video.              That's it for today's episode of *Build*. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode, where we'll dive in a little bit deeper and talk about how you want to manage your concerns around your skills, getting rusty when you go from being that individual contributor to a leader. Ciao for now.   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.

A redesign is a great way to reinvent your brand, get a leg up on the competition, and revisit those clunky and outdated workflows.   While we may be eager to jump right in, we have to be careful about what is actually going to help us accomplish our business goals.   In today’s Build Tip, I’m joined by Leslie Yang who is a Senior Product Designer at Pivotal Labs. Leslie and I are going to talk about how much to include in a redesign and what you need to do before you start a redesign.   You’ll learn:   The hidden risks of jumping into a redesign and how to avoid them What happens when we redesign too many pieces of the product The type of metrics you need to be tracking for each piece of the product you redesign   Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- Transcript for Product Re-design: What To Do Before You Redesign Your Product   Ronan: I'm not sure about this, Poornima.   Poornima: What? What? What's going on?   Ronan: We've redesigned the entire landing page, the onboarding workflow, and the customer checkout experience. From the analytics, I can't tell which of these redesigns actually moved the needle.   Poornima: Did you redo them all at once?   Ronan: That's what I thought I was asked to do.   Poornima: I think we're going to need to talk about how much to redesign in today's *Build* tip.                                                   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, and I've got a new *Build* tip for you. Today, I'm joined by Leslie Yang, who is Senior Product Designer at Pivotal Labs. Leslie and I are going to dig into how much to include in a redesign and what you need to do before you start a redesign. Thanks for joining us, Leslie.   Leslie Yang: Thanks for having me.   Poornima: Let's first talk about why teams even want to do a redesign.   Leslie Yang: Totally. The ones that I can think of are three. One is you have your company and you really want to have brand refresh. You want to be out there in the market and you want people to get excited. The second thing, as a company, you want to get a leg up on the competition so you really feel like if I defined myself in the market against our competitors, we will have a winning advantage. The third thing is maybe you put your product out for a few years and you're feeling like all these workflows are pretty clunky, so we want to make sure we simplify it and take a step back and look at that, too.   Poornima: I know companies are really eager to do a redesign. What happens if they jump in too fast?   Leslie Yang: Totally. There is a lot of hidden risks involved. The number one thing is that companies can invest a lot of money and time into the visual design and improving that at the detriment of the user experience and that's always a bad call.   Poornima: Got it. How can they avoid doing that?   Leslie Yang: Sure. One of the things they can do is take a look at your workflows. If they're already doing really well for your company, don't change them. Don't fix what's already working really well. Definitely do user research to test to make sure that a redesign is something that people actually would find value in. Then you want to make sure that your design patterns are consistent across web, and mobile, and everywhere else, people are able to use the app.   Poornima: What does it mean, like design patterns are consistent?   Leslie Yang: Design patterns are the interactions are going to be the same ones you would experience similar in mobile versus web.   Poornima: What's an example of that?   Leslie Yang: For example if you're using Yelp. My experience on Yelp for mobile, if I'm going to see a list of search results, I'm on web, I should see something very similar to that.   Poornima: Got it. Consistent user experience.   Leslie Yang: Absolutely.   Poornima: What else?   Leslie Yang: Let me think. You should definitely work on developing a style guide that will work across all parts of your app.   Poornima: Great. If you have those four things nailed down, then it makes sense to start the redesign?   Leslie Yang: Yeah. It's definitely worth looking at it from that point.   Poornima: You mentioned a lot of times you want to revisit those clunky workflows. How can you do that in a way that's not going to end up causing you to go down a rabbit hole?   Leslie Yang: Oh, definitely. What you really want to do is work with product to look at your metrics. Find those areas where there's some hidden pains and work on improving those areas first.   Poornima: You look at the drop-off points and then go from there.   Leslie Yang: Absolutely. Yeah.   Poornima: One new insight that I learned in this conversation is a lot of people spend time doing visual design versus actually investing in the workflows. How can you make sure that that's not what's happening?   Leslie Yang: Well, a big thing is you need to look at your data. You look at your qualitative data and your quantitative data. From looking at that, you can figure out where in the user experience you want to improve that experience. Then you work on the visual design last.   Poornima: It's definitely the priority of workflow first, visual design second.   Leslie Yang: Yes.   Poornima: Now, let's go back to our initial example where Ronan had, bless his heart, changed a lot of things all at once. He redesigned the landing site. He redesigned the onboarding and finally the checkout and sometimes it makes sense to do them all at once if you've got the resources. But, in his case, things just weren't working out.   Leslie Yang: Yeah, totally. I think what would really help Ronan in those moments is if he had permanent metrics for each of those different experiences that he was looking to test and understand.   Poornima: For example, like the landing site, the metric for the landing is—   Leslie Yang: It's just checking to see how many people have had signed up for the site.   Poornima: Then for the onboarding—   Leslie Yang: It's improving the user experience from signup to becoming an active user.   Poornima: Right. Then the final checkout is monetize.   Leslie Yang: Monetize.   Poornima: For Ronan's case, I think where he probably did a lot of redesign within each, like changing a number of elements in the landing site, changing a number of elements within onboarding, and finally checkout. He doesn't know within each what's working. But then overall, not having those metrics siloed also made it confusing.   Leslie Yang: Exactly. In a specific workflow, if you're going to change something, change one thing at a time and then have some good metrics to test to see if it's successful or not.   Poornima: Well, thank you so much, Leslie, for sharing these tips with us today. I know our audience out there is going to get a lot of benefit when they consider doing a redesign next.   Leslie Yang: Thanks so much for having me.   Poornima: Yeah. Now, Leslie and I would like to know if you've done a redesign recently, what did you consider redesigning and how did it turn out? Let us know in the comments below this video. OK. That's it for today's *Build* tip. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more episodes of *Build* and *Build* tips like this one, and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help and support in producing this episode. Ciao for now.                                                   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.

In today's episode, we're talking to Poornima Vijayashanker, a founding engineer at Mint—the personal finance app that'd go on to be acquired by Intuit in 2009 for $170 Million dollars. As one of the company's first engineers, Poornima had a huge influence on building the product and growing it with her college friend and founder, Aaron Patzer. As the daughter of an engineer, Poornima began learning to code at a young age—and was a very early adopter of the internet back when it was brand new. During her time working at Mint, Poornima was one of just a small number of women who were vocal in the tech world. She started speaking, advocating for women in tech, and in 2007 she started her blog, called Femgineer. Her blog began as a side project—starting with the goal of sharing lessons learned helping to build Mint, capturing all of her experiences as a woman in tech, and offering up actionable educational content for her readers that wanted to become developers, themselves. Now, Femgineer has grown into so much more—free resources, courses, books, videos, and her own podcast called Build.

All this month on Build, we’ve been talking about project management. First, we shared two ground rules you need to set for yourself to get through a software project successfully, and in the last episode, we shared strategies for handling new ideas and unexpected challenges that may derail your project.   But you’re probably left wondering, what do you do to get through the last 20% of a project? Especially when the deadline changes, and it’s clear that teammates are starting to burn out and become demotivated? Is it even possible to get through it and successfully ship?   And if you are able to get through those hurdles and successfully ship, what next?   In today’s Build episode, Jen Leech who is the VP of Engineering at Truss, and I are going to share proven strategies to get you through that last 20% and successfully ship!   You’ll learn:   - Why the last 20% of a project is really a lie! - How to avoid the complacency that comes with a deadline that are very far away in the future. - What to do when the deadline gets pushed up or back. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   ##Project Management: How To Keep Your Team Motivated And Successfully Ship transcript   Poornima: We've been talking about how to manage your first high-stakes project. We started by alleviating some of your anxieties, and then we talked about how to manage situations where people want to change course or bring up new ideas. In today's final episode on this topic, we're going to talk about how to keep your team motivated to help you ship your product. So stay tuned.                                                   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by PivotalTracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions when it comes to building products, companies, and your career in tech. So finishing that 20% of any project can be challenging. People get burnt out and demotivated. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how you can keep them motivated and get them to successfully ship. And to help us out, Jen Leech is back. You'll remember Jen is a VP of engineering at Truss, a software consultant. Thanks for joining us, Jen.   Jen Leech: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.   Why people get demotivated and burn out during the last 20% of a project   Poornima: So you've done a lot of projects throughout your career, and you know as well as anybody out there that that last 20% is the hardest. People get demotivated, they burn out. So let's talk about why this happens to begin with.   Jen Leech: Yeah. So really the fundamental reason that this happens is that the last 20% is never actually 20%. It's the 20% that you imagined when you thought about the project. But in terms of the amount of work involved, it's usually the most tedious and painstaking tasks that are reserved towards the end. When you get towards the end of the project, that's when new stakeholders start showing up and having ideas about things that need to happen on the project that weren't already there. So the final 20% ends up being like another 80%. So four times as big as you thought it was going to be. So that can be demotivating for people. And people who thought—if they really thought they were towards the last 20%, then it's especially demotivating because they suddenly see the work explode in front of their eyes when they hadn't really thought that it was going to be that much more.   How to handle project scope creep   Poornima: So there's a number of things that are causing the project to get bigger towards the end. One of them you mentioned, scope creep. How do we handle the situation?   Jen Leech: Yeah. So this is the point in the project at which you need to get really aggressive about defining exactly what you're trying to deliver and why, and for whom, and digging into every request that comes in and understanding how that impacts the final project. So the process of digging into that involves really having a good sense of who the users are, who the stakeholders are, and talking with those people as much as you possibly can. If a person comes in and wants to see a particular feature, you need to really understand why they want that feature, whether it's something that they dreamed of as part of the project from the beginning. That's something that they thought would be really wonderful for users, or whether it was something they determined through recent user's testing is going to actually dramatically impact the target market for this product.                                                   Understanding where those ideas come from, the business impact of those ideas, how well vetted the idea is in terms of hard data, and then from there you can parametrize whether, "OK. This has been vetted. It's really clear how it connects to our business interests. It's a great path towards our goal. We need to get this particular thing in. Do we need to cut any other features? Are the other features irrelevant now?" You know, how does that change the whole scope of the project? So that's one angle.                                                   Another angle is, "This idea is something that sounds pretty great. I love the idea. We haven't tested it. What's the quickest path to create a test to try to validate this hypothesis. Can we create a little feature? Can we create a mini version of this thing? Do we need to have a fully fledged version of this thing. How do we gather information to inform our direction so that we can make sure that we're going on the right course?"   Poornima: I really like what you said about being aggressive with pushing back, especially when it's going to expand the scope and it's not something that has a clear business goal versus the thing that has a very clear direction. The challenge though for many of us, is if that is an important stakeholder coming in then we worry about what will happen if we push back. So how do you navigate that conversation?   Jen Leech: Yeah. So I feel as though many of the tactics that we described in the last episode apply here. So when someone comes in and they have their idea, how they want to see something go, they're not going to be happy if they feel like you're shooting them down without having thoroughly considered the idea. And if you begin to really investigate that idea with them by asking questions to reveal assumptions about the idea, following the idea through to its ultimate conclusion. That can clarify both for you and also the other stakeholder at the same time, the aspects of that idea that are things that you should run with that are going to improve the product and that are maybe relatively low cost. And maybe there are aspects of that that you can leave on the table for now, and you can tease those things apart.                                                   And if you go through that process collaboratively with the person who brings the idea in, then at the end of the conversation they're going to both feel like they've been heard, that you have really fully considered their idea, and very likely they will be glad at the things that you pulled out and left on the table. And you have facilitated the process of helping them see what the most valuable nuggets of that idea are and that's a huge value to bring to a project. What to do when you’re burnt out working on a project   Poornima: But here's the deal. I am so exhausted. It's been three weeks on this project. I don't even have the energy to facilitate that conversation because I'm borderline burnt out and this is maybe the second or third request that this stakeholder has done. What do I do?   Jen Leech: Well to be honest, you should probably walk out of the room.   Poornima: Yeah, OK. Politely maybe?   Jen Leech: Politely. Politely walk out of the room. When you truly are burnt out, and you truly exhausted your emotional reserves, that's when it's time for somebody else to step in and take that role. And you should expect that that may happen some point in time and prepare for it. And so the preparing-for-it process is all about sharing your load with other people on the team, teaching other people on the team to do what you do. So on this particular project I have been referring to from last year, one of the things that I did on that team is I asked individuals from the team to rotate through the team facilitator role.                                                   So I would ask everyone from the team, whoever they were, to run sprint plannings, to run retrospectives. We would have design discussions where we would have design exploration, and then design critique. We would pair discussions where we...they weren't exactly brainstorming. Not like the “everyone puts sticky notes up” kind of brainstorming thing. It's not like that. But the exploration and exploding of an idea to gather as much as you can. Then somebody would go and write those ideas up, and then we would get back together to make a decision.                                                   All those processes have some kind of facilitation involved. And we would have everyone from the team facilitate those processes. Then when it came time, such that somebody was out sick, somebody needed to take a break, or was on vacation, those processes continued to occur without interruption and they vary a little bit and that's fine. And each person who has taken that role then is also much more invested in the team, and a much better contributor to the process. So essentially you need to produce your best factor. I'm sorry. Improve your best factor by increasing the number of people who have that skillset.   Poornima: Now the challenge with doing this though is there's a lot of handoffs. Which means a lot of setup and tear down, right? Like if I'm handing something over to you, I might say, "Here are the things we talked about before." I mean, like you said it's great for the bus factor, but it is not so great when it comes to that added investment of, "OK. Now I need to talk to Jen, and then Jen needs to talk to so and so." And each time they're doing that, that's an additional time cost.   Jen Leech: So you're referring to handing off responsibilities. So one thing that I discovered is that...so part of the handoff process involves creating a set of really simple, well-defined processes that are easy for anyone to follow. And each time a new person stepped into the role, they would refer to those processes and say, "Hm. I don't fully understand X." And then we would augment the process to cover, "OK, so somebody didn't understand and need an explanation for ..." And we use these process documents to hand off the roles. So eventually it didn't really require a conversation.   Poornima: OK. But what about people who might game the system? Like, say somebody is a stakeholder, right? They know, "OK, Poornima. She's kind of a pushover. So when she's the facilitator next time, I'm going to make sure I get my ideas in because Jen, she's really good and aggressive. I'm never going to get my ideas passed through her." How do you handle those kind of—   Jen Leech: Well you know, what ends up happening is that although one person is designated to make sure the processes are happening, everyone in the room eventually becomes a facilitator. And the facilitator role is really just about setting the stage. And if everyone in the room has rotated through that role, everyone in the room is trying to make it happen. And you no longer have a single point of failure. Let's say that facilitator doesn't show up that day, or they're not feeling very well. Someone else just does it because everyone's done it.   Poornima: OK. So do you feel like there's a level of accountability then where people wouldn't necessarily be able to come in and game the system?   Jen Leech: Yeah. Because the more people who...every time someone steps up and begins running the system, that really clarifies why there's value with facilitating a collaboration in a way that includes everyone's opinion, for example. The more people facilitate it, the more they understand the value in it, and then the more they reinforce it whenever they're in a discussion.   How to handle changing deadlines for a software project   Poornima: So there's that dreaded deadline. And sometimes it gets moved up or it gets pushed back. In the event that it gets moved up, we're kind of scrambling. In the event that it gets pushed back, we start procrastinating. So how do we hold ourselves to that deadline?   Jen Leech: I actually think that the case where it's moved up is the easier case. Yeah. So when a deadline gets moved up, assuming that you're working with humans, you have resource constraints. So the first thing that I look at is the project scope. And if you have defined what your deliverables are, the things that you absolutely have in your project, then you can look at those and think, "Well are there ways that I could deliver that in a way that is slightly simpler, or in a way that maybe doesn't handle quite the data throughput that we're going to need to handle?" Because maybe in the first week maybe we don't really need to handle that data throughput.                                                   So having the deadline moved up can actually reduce you to be more aggressive in pairing down what you're delivering in a way that can actually really help. And if the pairing down process is something you bring to stakeholders and they say, "Oh, but we really need all these features." Then you have hard data that you can point to and say ... Especially if you're using a project tracker system like PivotalTracker, which is what we use, then you get estimates for the amount of work that the team can do in a sustainable basis, and projections for how much they'll be able to complete by a certain amount of time.                                                   And those are real data-based estimates. So, didn't intend to pitch Pivotal here, but I actually, I love their company. They do some great things. So then you can bring that to the table and then have a really clear, honest discussion about, "Here's the what the team can do. Here's the features we can deliver. What do you think? How do we solve this problem?" Again, trying to solve it together. When the deadline gets moved out, that's when it gets more difficult.   Poornima: Right. People start procrastinating.   Jen Leech: Exactly, exactly. You already have people who are thinking of the last 20% as 20% when it's actually 80%. And then all of sudden when you move the deadline out, then it's so easy to—   Poornima: Check out.   How to manage a software project when the deadline is far away Jen Leech: Relax a little bit. To think, "Oh, well. That feature isn't so big," and not realizing that you're misestimating the amount of work that's involved. So one of the things that I try to do, especially...so this works for both when deadlines are moved out, and when a deadline is being set for you that's actually really far in the future.                                                   So as an example, we had a deadline last year that was nine months in the future. So we...what I did is I created an internal milestones document. So I created a bunch of internal deadlines for the team that we should be aiming to hit, and if we weren't hitting those things then we should be reconsidering what we're doing. That helped a lot to focus the team and to keep us on track. And then when you build out intermediate milestones then you can set an internal deadline for completion that's even months ahead of when you think it's going to be. And create that paired-down, really lean version of the product that is going to maybe validate the hypothesis you have about what you're building and why you're trying to build it, and add extra business value to the project for the company by saying, "OK, so you asked us to build this. You want it by December. How do you know that's the right thing to build?"                                                   So you get to then have a version that lets people play with it enough so that if you're building the wrong thing, you can change it before the real deadline, and even though the business has told you they want X by date Z, if you give them a smaller version earlier and discover they were wrong, they will be singing your praises to high heaven. That's what they really want. What they really want is the answer that's going to serve their customers. And if that's what you're keeping in mind, then you're going to have a really successful project.   What to do after you’ve successfully shipped your software project   Poornima: Awesome. So you've done these kind of shorter shipping dates with the milestones. So you're kind of doing it iteratively, you're shipping periodically. What do you do though, right after maybe that first or second time that you've shipped? Because I think a lot people forget. They're like, "Ship. Time to go on vacation." It's like, "Hold up here." Right? Because you've broken it into milestones, there is another one coming up. There's another sprint, release, whatever you like to call it.   Jen Leech: Right. Right. Well it depends on what you've shipped. I mean if you really shipped your true milestone, you should probably go and have a party. Like celebrating your results has real value to it. Aside from that, you're getting ready to collect data about what you've built. And this is part of the process that I think is sometimes...although we talk in our industry a lot about gathering research and being product driven, and making sure that we're building for the actual users, however I think that...I've seen fairly often that people feel as though they've built a great product. "Great, let's move on." And they can sometimes forget who all the users are. Can sometimes forget what it means to be successful.                                                   And as an example...and then maybe not gather enough data. And that's a huge failure mode that I'm constantly trying to correct for. The one example is, I talked about a validation system that somebody might build in one of your earlier episodes and we came up with an idea for this validation system which was based on real user experience from the previous system the company built. We built this new design, we rolled it out, and it was basically working. It was basically...it was allowing us to quickly and easily specify checks on data that we had generated. It was doing it in a way that didn't cause us to repeat ourselves too frequently in the code. It was doing it in such a way that people who were not engineers could author the validations and look at the results. We were able to say with a higher degree of certainty that the data was correct.                                                   However, at the end of the day, because it was serving these fundamental use cases that we knew we had, that maybe the previous system had not solved these use cases well. So it was already better. We knew that. But we could have dug in a bit more. And we could have dug in a bit more by going back to the users and saying, "OK, do you want to use this? When you use it, what are the things that really irritate you?" And dig into those and get a good sense of why your baby's ugly. It sometimes is painful to do that.   Poornima: Yeah. Because you just shipped and you just had that party, and nobody wants to have a downer after that.   Jen Leech: Yeah. Exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah and you want to celebrate. But then after that, kind of pull your boots back on. Get back out there and be like, "OK. We were wrong. How were we wrong?" And that's the thing is that every time I ship a product, my first question is, "OK. Let's assume we're wrong. Let's find out how."   Poornima: Make it a game a little bit.   Jen Leech: Yeah. Well, you know, and if you come from the assumption that you're always going to have it wrong, then that's how you get it right. If you ever come from the assumption that you were right, it's guaranteed that you're going to miss how you're wrong.   Poornima: Or maybe that situation, but there's a new situation you can't apply that same assumption.   Jen Leech: It's new. Situations change. There's going to be data left on the table if you don't go back.   Poornima: Right. Yeah that's fantastic. Well thank you so much, Jen. I know I can talk to you about project management forever. But I think this is a great place to stop and I know you've given our audience a lot of awesome strategies. So thank you.   Jen Leech: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.   Poornima: So any final words for our audience out there?   Jen Leech: Yes. So I...Poornima mentioned that we run a consultancy, Truss. And we do consulting so we build all sort of different kinds of software, we do infrastructure, we work with big data, we work with highly sensitive data for the government including healthcare data, things that are highly regulated. We solve a lot of different kinds of problems and we would absolutely love to help you solve yours. So if you have a hard problem to solve, please come hit us up. You can find us online at Truss.works, and we have a form that you can fill out there to request a quote. Thank you.

In the last Build episode, we talked shared two ground rules you need to set for yourself to get through a software project successfully. But we know that managing our own anxieties is only half the battle to keeping the project on course, the other is navigating new ideas or unanticipated challenges.   Many of our teammates have ideas and solutions that can help. They are eager to have their ideas heard, so they speak up. While others are shy and worried about speaking up. But their insights and ideas can save the project!   As the project lead you know it’s important to hear your teammates out to uncover challenges early on and prevent them from derailing your progress. But how do you encourage and instill confidence in the introverted ones, and is there ever a point where you can stop entertaining new ideas and start building? -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. --  ##Project Management: How to Respond to New Ideas in the Middle of a Software Project Transcript                   Poornima: In the last episode, we addressed a number of anxieties that come up when you're managing your first high-stakes project. If you missed the episode, the link to it is below this video.                                                   Today we're gonna tackle how do you handle getting blindsided by your teammates when there are new ideas or challenges on a project you're working on. So stay tuned to find out more.                                                   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, I host innovators, and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.                                                   We'll continue our conversation about managing your first high-stakes project with Jen Leech, who is the VP of Engineering at Truss, which is a software consultancy. Thanks again for joining us, Jen.   Jen Leech: Sure, absolutely.   How to respond to brand new ideas that may cause you to miss your software project’s deadline   Poornima: So, Jen, based on our conversation last week, I know you're awesome at listening to people, incorporating their feedback, and putting a plan into action, but there comes that time usually in the middle or towards the end of the project where somebody's got a brand-new idea and you are worried about the deadline and making progress. Do you have any rules or mantras for how to handle this situation?   Jen Leech: Yeah. In general, I love it when people bring new ideas to the table. That's what I want. That means that they're engaged, they're thinking creatively, that they feel some investment in the project. I wanna encourage that as much as possible.                                                   If the idea that they're bringing to the table is a simple one, it's great. It's pretty easy to think about, pretty easy to reason about, and you can go with it or not go with it and move forward. The complexity comes in when the idea they're bringing to the table is something that is a much larger idea, or it has implications beyond the implementation of that idea itself. In those cases, I don't always know what the results would be of implementing that idea. As someone who's experienced leading projects, I may have an intuition for it. I may be wrong, following along from my last episode.   How to teach teammates to think through their ideas and the impact it will have on a software project                                                   But the thing that I do in that situation is I ask the person who's presenting the idea to take their idea and follow it through to its ultimate conclusion. So that means asking them to say, "OK, so..." Using the example from our last episode, of a microservices architecture, I say, "Well, we have problems A, B, and C, and D in the system. And I think that a microservices architecture is gonna solve it." And then, as a project lead, I can say to them, "OK, well so let's say that we move forward with that. What are the implications for the project? Does it mean that we're gonna have more service support? Does it mean that we are going to have to have a different team structure? Does it mean that we are going to have new work in our backlog that wasn't there already? What is that work?"                                                   And then ask them to think through their problem. In the case of microservices architecture, that might go something like, "Well, that means that we have to make sure that these units that we're turning into microservices are independently deployable, they're independently testable, that they have a well-defined interface, that that interface is versioned, that we have someone who is keeping track of what all of the requirements are from consumers of the interface." So you might need to have a product manager. The list of potential implication gets bigger and bigger, and then all of a sudden you need an entire team to manage this one component.                                                   And then, we can look at that and say, "If this does solve the things that you're saying it solves, it's the cost of potentially increasing our headcount by x. Justify that benefit. Or are there other ways we can get the same benefit?"                                                   Essentially asking the person to walk through all of the implications from the leadership perspective.   When it makes sense to adopt a new idea in the middle of a software project   Poornima: From their idea that they're putting out there.   Jen Leech: Correct. Think about what that really means for the company as a whole. Then it facilitates them realizing assumptions that they have made or costs that they have envisaged, and when you get to the end of it, either you're on the same page and you say, "That was a great idea, we should totally do that." Or you're on the same page and you say, "We should not do this." And you've gotten there together. So that means that the person who's brought these ideas to the table both feels like their idea has really been heard, and if it was an idea that you should not move forward with, they've convinced themselves. Then you can both move forward with whatever you agree is the right course of action.   How to instill confidence in teammates who are shy or reluctant to share their ideas   Poornima: I think some people would be up to that challenge, they may even think through their idea, but you've got a lot of people who are, just say, eager beavers. They may be new to the team, maybe they don't know this whole process or policies and just kind of blurt out in a meeting, like, "I've got an idea." Is that an appropriate time to say, "That's fantastic you have an idea, here's how we operate. We do X, Y, and Z. So let's have you walk through the implications, etc.?"   Jen Leech: That's a really good question. Sometimes a meeting is the right time to walk through that—depends on the meeting.   Poornima: Sure.   Jen Leech: A lot of times it's not. And in those cases then I'll usually say, "Oh, Kimmy, let's take that offline. Can we talk about that later?" And talk about it independently. However, through failure I have discovered that when bringing new people onto the team, they often need a little bit of intro. In this particular project that I was describing from last year, there were some new people that came into the team, stepped into these processes, started presenting new ideas, and then all of a sudden were blindsided when people started really probing into their ideas, and they weren't expecting it.                                                   So then I had to take a step back and then I realized that I haven't given them the appropriate context. And I sat them down and I said, "Hey, I realize I didn't explain this, but in this team you should expect that we're gonna really thoroughly look at new ideas that are brought to the table, and we're gonna investigate them."   Poornima: I'd imagine it takes a lot of confidence even to just put an idea out there, so having it be shot down is going to impact people.   Jen Leech: Yeah, absolutely. What I started doing is I started having onboarding conversations, essentially, with new people who came onto the team to explain that we investigate ideas that are brought to the table really thoroughly, and that we do that with everyone. And it's not any particular person, there's not good, there's no bad, we just wanna understand what this idea means.                                                   The particular person who I was talking to in this case hadn't yet seen somebody else go through the same process. Later on as we went through the process of exploring new ideas then it became more normalized. But I began having onboarding conversations with new people on the team to help them understand that we really investigate ideas really deeply, and that that's normal, and it's not to be taken personally.   When do you stop entertaining new ideas, building a consensus, and get to work on your software project   Poornima: So it's great that people are proposing ideas and that you're investigating them, but you remember from last time, we told our audience we would tackle this question. There's gotta be a point where you stop investigating, you've gotta stop consensus building or talking about the ideas, start making decisions and put a plan in place. So let's pick up that question.   Jen Leech: It depends on the problem but there are a few different approaches that you can use. One approach that I enjoy using is that of framing whatever question that we're looking at in terms of a hypothesis. And saying, "Well, right now we think we're trying to solve problem X." And then when you really target the problem you're trying to solve, it's easier to hone in on the specifics of does this solve that problem. Then, either it does or doesn't, then you can move on to the next thing.                                                   When you're dealing with something more complex, let's say you're dealing with a system that is sufficiently complex such that you can't really say for sure what the result is gonna be, and furthermore, maybe you're trying to solve problems A, B, C, D, E, and F. Then there are a couple approaches I use in that circumstance. One is to say, "Let's build a quick and dirty prototype. Let's try it. Give it a limited amount of time, and see what happens." So you build out something very quickly. Ideally, you could do it in under a day, but it depends on what it is. And hopefully you've got your tools in place so you can do that. Maybe a week, but time box it.                                                   At the end of it you then bring it back to the table and say, "Does it look to us like it's gonna be solving these problems? And what did we learn from the process?"   Poornima: So constraining the problem will hopefully constrain the conversation, and then creating a time box around when something is due will also create those constraints so that you stop that consensus building and get down to work.   Jen Leech: Yeah. And finding every piece of work you do, in terms of here are the problems we think we're trying to solve, here are the solutions we think might work, and make everything an experiment, a discovery of new information. And the discovery, at the end of the day, might be does this work for our customers.                                                   As you frame it in terms of exploration and discovery, then it becomes natural to not have to have 100% solution. Because what you're doing is finding out.   Poornima: It's fantastic that you're making this a discovery and that you wanna get out there and explore more, but there's always that time where we think we've done a lot and still something comes up. Maybe even a customer says, "You didn't think through this enough." Or somebody on your team brings it up. What do you do in those moments?   Why it’s OK to constrain the problem space in your software project   Jen Leech: Right. I think of this as the curve ball question. You think that you have the right hypothesis, you think you have a good solution, and then all of a sudden something comes up that you didn't expect and you find that maybe what you've put together does not satisfy a certain circumstance or certain constraints.                                                   In that circumstance, I think of it as having a new problem to solve. And when you have a new problem to solve the first question that I ask is, "How can I learn more about this problem? Who is on the team that knows about this? Who is in the organization that knows about this?" Maybe there's somebody in the finance department that can answer a question that we have. Who in the community can we talk to about this?                                                   It's interesting because I find that taking a problem and expanding it beyond the scope of the team is something that I don't see nearly as often as I would expect, considering the fact that you have, clearly, a limited amount of information within the team.   Poornima: Limited brains.   Jen Leech: Limited brains, limited experience. And so it would seem completely natural to open questions up to a larger audience. And yet, it's easy for people to stay in their own little group and not necessarily bring in outside opinions.                                                   This tactic is all about seeking new information. One example of this is when building this system that I was building last year. Some of the people who are gonna be using the system were data scientists. Some of them were experts on the data that we were processing.                                                   Whenever a new component or a new feature came to the table as something that we needed to come up with a new design for, the first thing we would do is have kind of like a brainstorming session, but really more like an information gathering session where we would bring in everyone from the company, who might potentially have a real interest in the result or be a potential user of the product, and say all of the problems that they've ever had in this area that they want solutions to.                                                   As an example, we were designing validations on data and we needed to understand a validation system existed before at this company. What did we like about that? What did we not like about it? And we had people who were not engineers, but who had to understand the correct use of the data, come to the room and tell us what their problems were.                                                   This is a lot like user research. And then that led to a collection of problems that we eventually may have realized existed, but hadn't really framed as the problem that we were trying to solve here. And it dramatically impacted the design that we came up with.   Poornima: Let's do another example for our audience kind of playing that out.   Jen Leech: Another really, really good example is that we were using a tool for building the system that wasn't an open-source tool that had been built by Airbnb. It turned out that we had some questions about the right usage pattern, the right deployment pattern, some questions about how they manage the flow of data between nodes. And, coincidentally, it turns out that Airbnb was in the next building over.   Poornima: Oh, great. That's a great building by the way.   Jen Leech: Yeah, lucky. We contacted the maintainer of the co-depository and asked him if he would be willing to come and talk with us. And he said sure. So he came over and had an hour long conversation about how Airbnb uses the tool and various critiques and pluses and minuses of using it one way or another. And at the end of the conversation we had a much better idea of what things we were doing with it were good and we should keep on doing, and which things we needed to change. And it was about an hour of time for a huge improvement.   Poornima: I feel like this also helps you from causing more bugs because you know how to use the tool, or going through that drama of, "I don't know how this works."   Jen Leech: It saves you an immense amount of time to just ask the right questions to people who know things.   Poornima: That's fantastic. Thank you again for sharing these rules with us, Jen.   Jen Leech: Absolutely.  

So you got tasked with managing your first high-stakes software project? Like handling tech debt, breaking up a monolithic code base into a microservices architecture, or something else?   Congratulations!   Are you excited?   Maybe a little nervous?   Or maybe you’re really nervous because you need to deliver on a tight deadline, and there is a lot on the line like your relationship with customers, revenue, and most importantly your job!   Fear not because all this month on *Build*, we’re going to be tackling the topic of how to manage your first high-stakes software project.   In today’s episode, I’m joined by Jen Leech who is a VP of Engineering at Truss. Jen and I dig into some valuable strategies that will address and alleviate your anxieties around managing your first high-stakes software project.   Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:   Two valuable rules that will save you from concocting stories and creating unnecessary drama around a project. How to prevent ideas from being shot down instantly, and instead share them in a way that will pique your teammate’s curiosity and foster an effective dialogue around them. Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   Project Management: The Ground Rules You Need to Set to Get Through a Software Project Successfully Transcript   Poornima: You got tasked with your first high-stakes project. Are you excited? Maybe a little nervous? Or maybe really nervous because you're worried about the tight deadlines, the revenue, and your job? Fear not, because we're going to cover a number of ways to address and alleviate your anxieties in today's episode of *Build*, so stick around.                                                   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode, innovators and I debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. One misconception I had early on in my career, when I was managing my first project, was that I was the only one who was a nervous wreck. I worried about meeting deadlines, budget, and shipping it. I thought everyone else had their act together and it was just me. Well, it turns out it was all a façade and some people were just better at hiding it than I was.                                                   In today's episode, we're going to be addressing a number of anxieties that come up when you're managing your first high-stakes project. In future episodes, we'll talk about how to keep your team motivated to stay on course and successfully ship. To help us out, I've invited Jen Leech, who is the VP of Engineering at Truss. Thanks for joining us today Jen.   Jen: Absolutely. A pleasure to be here.   Poornima: You and I met a few months back when we were both speaking and I remember you talking about your first high-stakes project last year, but before we dive into, that let's start with your career. What got you interested in tech and eventually inspired you to start your own company?   Jen Leech: I wouldn't say that I ever got into tech; I would say I started there. I have always really, really loved math and science. I started coding when I was 10 and it was the natural place for me to be, that's where I was. However, I found that in industry I didn't always find the things that I wanted in my work environment, so I started Truss to create the work environment that I wanted to be in.   Poornima: What kind of environment where you looking to create?   Jen Leech: I wanted an environment that would enable me to ride for the leadership positions that I felt that I wanted to be in. I also wanted it to be an environment that was really empowering to all employees to arrive to their greatest potential, to bring to bear the greatest contributions that they could to the business, rather than necessarily trying to constrain or confine them to some limited pigeonhole of what the business thinks is best for it, which often limits the business potential itself.   Poornima: Nice. Tell us what Truss does.   Jen Leech: Truss is a consultancy. We do various software projects; our capabilities range from infrastructure and dev ops through to application development, to architecture, and we also do some management consulting. Really what that is, is a representation of the fact that our staff have a really broad skill set and we rotate roles on any project that we are on up and down the stack and across the stack. We feel as though that's one version of dogfooding that enables us to provide better service for anything we build.   Poornima: Maybe some of our viewers out there don't know what dogfooding is—what's that all about?   Jen Leech: Dogfooding is an industry term for if you are building a product you had damn well better try it yourself. Let's say that you put out a bowl of food for someone and you've never tasted it; it might actually be completely awful but if you make yourself eat it, then you have a sense of, "Oh, I should make that better," and the customer gets the benefit.   A day in the life of a VP of Engineering   Poornima: What do you do on a day-to-day basis as a VP of Engineering?   Jen Leech: As part of the dogfooding principle, I do the same work that our engineers do on a day-to-day basis insofar as I do client work. About three to four days a week I work onsite with clients. Then, what I do with the rest of my time is really the VP of Engineering kind of work. I define processes that dictate how the engineering organization operates, including things like our leveling process for how we help engineers move forward with their career, how we do peer reviews. We implemented a salary transparency policy at our company, and rolled that out in association with doing market analysis, and making sure that we had equal pay across our organization. I do all of those things as well as institute client engagement processes for making sure that we set expectations properly, making sure that we learn from our experiences with clients, etc.   Poornima: Last year, you got tasked with managing your first high-stakes project. Let's dive into that. I know you were initially pretty excited about it, right?   Jen Leech: Sure. I love a challenge.   Poornima: Who was on your team with you?   Jen Leech: This is where a client project, the project had been attempted a couple of times. It was for a V architecture of a big data-processing pipeline. The pipeline that they had, that they were already using at the company, was an MVP version of the pipeline and it had proved to be very difficult to change. It was very monolithic and it was slow to test any changes, slow to make any changes, very difficult to understand the code.   Poornima: Let's break that down. MVP is?   Jen Leech: Minimum viable product.   Poornima: Like a prototype?   Jen Leech: That's correct.   Poornima: Then, you mentioned that it was monolithic. What does that mean?   Jen Leech: Monolithic, that means that the code base that was used to process the pipeline was, in this case, two very large code bases that had become highly interconnected and so large in number of lines of code and the amount of time that it took to test any changes that it became very difficult to make any changes at all for fear of breaking the system.   Poornima: Probably like a lot of interdependencies?   Jen Leech: Correct.   Poornima: You fix one thing something else breaks and so on.   Jen Leech: Right and you would have things like a part of the code base had several-thousand-line-long python scripts essentially that you make one change in the middle and it wasn't really clear what would happen further down.   Poornima: Got it. What was the suggested course of action to fix that?   Jen Leech: When we came in—I didn't answer your earlier question—   Poornima: Go ahead.   Jen Leech: I should do that. The team that they pulled together, they asked me to lead the team and the people on the team included the company CTO, a director of engineering, a senior engineer, a data scientist, and one other Truss engineer, so a relatively small team, but a crack team. Our early discussions were attended by the COO and the VP of Engineering, so you can tell this is something they cared about.   Poornima: Very nice. How did you corral all of them and give them a sense of, “Here's what our prescription is to fixing this monolithic code base?”   How team dynamics impact the quality of the solutions   Jen Leech: I've read a lot of research on collaboration. I care a lot about building the best product that you can with the team that you have. The research that I have read talks a lot about the dynamic in the team, and how conversation occurs between people on the team, and how that impacts the solutions that the team comes up with. One really interesting result from that research is that if you have a team of, let's say, five people, one person on the team has a really high IQ, they're a genius, that team does not do as well as a team of five people who all have average IQs but who all listen to each other really well.   Poornima: Interesting. Why is that?   Jen Leech: Good question. The research did not necessarily try to explain why that was the result. However, what it did was they said repeatedly if you take a team and you measure how well they take turns in conversation, how well they integrate in all the ideas from everyone who's participating, that those metrics will predict the quality of the solution much more strongly than average IQ, as an example.   Poornima: Now, I'm not a mind reader but I assumed you were excited but also maybe a little bit nervous because you said there were a lot of C-level executives there, a lot of senior folks on the team that had a vested stake in it. How did you get over that initial hurdle? Did you set any ground rules or a framework?   Jen Leech: We had a really tight timeline and I wanted to try to get the best I could from the team, and we actually had to have a working prototype within four weeks. We're talking about working prototype, which was deployed and running real data, and on a big data processing pipeline.   Poornima: Why such a tight timeline, by the way?   Jen Leech: That was because for two reasons. One business needs, the company needed to increase the number of clients they had per, essentially, deployed resource. There we have a cost, scale at cost-scaling issue here. Then also, they had tried to do this project a couple of times already. They had given themselves, let's say, maybe six months to do it but burned away five of those months so this was last—   Poornima: Got it, they came to you. How did you take on this project or why did you take on this project? It's pretty tight.   Jen Leech: I didn't have a choice insofar as I showed up in a meeting room and they said, "Hey Jen, you're leading this project," which to be honest I don't mind. I think that's fun. That's part of why I do what I do. It became clear that I needed to make sure that the team was going to be extremely productive and simultaneously come up with a really good solution to the problem. I came up with some little tricks that I did internally to make sure that the team stayed on the right track and that I was facilitating the collaboration process toward the most effective result.   Poornima: Now, did you share these tricks with the other people on the team or are these just for yourself?   Jen Leech:  I did not, actually. I didn't even fully coalesce them into a collection of things until hindsight 20/20, then I flipped back and I said, "Oh, I did these things. That was effective, that worked."   Poornima: How are you consistent about enforcing them? That's another thing, right? We make these rules, these tricks for ourselves, but sometimes we don't ever hold ourselves accountable.   Jen Leech: I found that whenever I deployed them, the conversation was more effective and so in a way it was really easy—   Poornima: The feedback to you.   Jen Leech: To enforce them because everyone in the room felt the effect and I found that people would come up to me after the discussions and say, "Wow, that was such an effective discussion. Like, that was great. I don't know what you did but ...," that kind of thing. It was self-reinforcing. When stress levels increased or when people were tired then sometimes I would forget and things would degrade a little bit. Then I'd step back and be like, "Oh yeah, I should do that thing again." It was easy to try to keep doing it because it was better.   Poornima: Let's tackle the first rule that you had for yourself.   Rule #1: State facts not opinions   Jen Leech: The first rule that I came up with was, for me, personally one of the biggest changes in how I participated in these discussions it was to say, "State facts not opinions."   Poornima: That's a great one. Can you give us an example of what that looks like in practice?   Jen Leech: Sure. Really this is about separating your ego from the ideas that you're putting forth. It's a mechanic that allows you to shed light on an idea without becoming so attached to it that if it's a bad idea, you have difficulty letting go. As an example, let's say that you want to suggest to a team that maybe a micro services architecture is the right solution for a problem that you have. You could walk into the room and say, "Hey, a microservices architecture, that's going to solve problems A, B, C, and D for us. We should do it. I think it's totally going to work. What's the next step?" You're excited, that's great. Being excited is great; however, you've immediately just jumped into that idea with your full heart and soul in a way at the get go. If for some reason your idea isn't necessarily the best idea, then if someone comes back to you and says, "Ah, maybe that's not the best idea," then all of a sudden your hopes are dashed, that's not so great.                                                   You could take the same idea and you can walk into a room and you could say, "I think that a microservice architecture could be interesting to look at. My understanding is that it should give us A, B, C, or D, or maybe all four. Does that sound right? Do you think that we would actually get those things from microservice architecture in this situation? And would there be any problems introduced by pursuing a microservices solution to this problem?" Then, in that situation you are saying, "Here's some information. This is something we should examine. Let's examine it together." Then, when someone comes into the room and says, "Well, you know? I think that maybe it won't do C for us because in this situation that condition doesn't apply." Then you have a dialogue and when you investigate that problem, it's no longer your idea or their idea, you're trying to find the truth.   Poornima: I know our audience out there is going to be really curious to know how do you go from that conversation to making a final decision so that you're not stuck consensus building. We're going to cover that in the next episode, so stay tuned for that, but let's move on. What's another rule that you gave for yourself as you were managing this project?   Rule #2: Say to yourself, “Maybe they’re right”   Jen Leech: Another rule that I created was...that first rule was for your bringing an idea to the table, that perspective. The second one was the same thing...similar idea but from a listener's perspective of saying—it was a mantra I used and it was, "Maybe they're right."   Poornima: I love this one because it does a lot of good for you in that you're not concocting stories and a lot of drama, I think, around a project also gets dispelled because you're giving people the benefit of the doubt but it's so hard to do in practice.   Jen Leech: That's why it's a mantra.   Poornima: Let's talk about some examples that you had to use it in or that our viewers would have to use it.   Jen Leech: In this microservices architecture example, so someone comes to you and says, "Hey, you know? I think that a microservices architecture might solve our problem." Let's say, you as a listener have built microservices, you've transitioned from a monolithic code bases to microservices 20 times and you have a lot of context. You could say, "Hmm, nah. No, I don't think so." You could just say, "Based on my experience, I think you're wrong."                                                   This tactic is about putting that on its head and saying to yourself, "Maybe they're right," puts yourself into their shoes. Once you're in their shoes and saying, "Well, maybe they're right," then you can say, "OK, well why do you think that a microservices architecture is the right solution to this problem? What specific problems does it solve for us?" Then it leads you in a path of thinking through their suggestion and as you do that it may reveal things that maybe you didn't realize they were trying to solve. Maybe they have a different problem in mind to solve than what you do. When you realize that they're trying to solve a different problem you're like, "Maybe it does solve that problem in a way I hadn't thought about. Maybe if we use it in this one particular instance it will solve a different problem that I thought we had."   Poornima: That's great. It helps you get over the assumptions of the problem that you thought or it gives you more context to see how deep of a problem it is.   Jen Leech: It reveals your assumptions, it reveals the other person's assumptions, and it opens you up to be a much better listener, and simultaneously also validates the other person's ideas, which may be one of the more importance of that interaction, in fact.   Poornima: I feel like both these mantras, rules, whatever you like to call them are great for like 99% of the situations we have when we're managing that high-stakes project, so thank you so much, Jen, for sharing them.   Jen Leech: Absolutely.  

As if preparing and delivering a presentation to your peers isn’t nerve-wracking enough… you also have to worry about the Q&A period at the end of your talk!   You’re worried about people asking not one but TWO questions! Having to decipher those questions that are really just comments. Then there is THE dreaded question: the question you don’t know the answer to.   You don’t want to appear stupid in front of your audience!   Truth is that the Q&A period can leave many first-time public speakers feeling like they need to know everything before they give a talk!   But you don’t, and we’re going to debunk this myth and more in today’s Build Tip.   I’m joined by Lara Hogan who is the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and Author of Demystifying Public Speaking. Together we’ll be sharing a number of strategies to help you get ready for ANY question you receive during your next Q&A session after a presentation or team meeting. You’ll also learn some techniques to calm your nerves, engage your audience, and keep them wanting more! -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA. -- Episode Transcript Poornima:  Whether you're new to public speaking or you've been doing it for a very long time, there's gonna come a point at the end of your talk, and right before that Q&A, where your nerves are gonna flare up.                                 You're gonna be thinking, "What questions are people asking?" Or, "How do you respond to a question that you don't know the answer to?"                                 Well in today's *Build* Tip, I'm gonna cover answers to these questions and more. Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. And today I'm joined by Lara Hogan, who is the author of *Demystifying Public Speaking*, and a lover of donuts.   Lara: Absolutely.   Poornima: Yeah. So Lara, you and I have given a lot of technical talks through our careers, and gotten to this point where maybe we're not as nervous giving the talk. But at the end, there's that Q&A period. Right?   Lara: Right.   Poornima: Where we can't anticipate all the questions. Those wonderful two-parters. People who do comments instead of questions.   Lara: Absolutely.   Poornima: Or you just don't know what the answer's gonna be.   Lara: Totally.   Poornima: So, let's kinda walk through each of these. Let’s start with the first where you just don't have a sense of what the questions are gonna be.   Lara: Yeah.   How To Prepare For A Q&A Session   Poornima: Do you have a technique that you use?   Lara: Absolutely. So I like to just in general have a feedback crew of three to five people. And hopefully they're people who you know well enough to make sure they're gonna give you good critical feedback.   Poornima: Yeah.   Lara: 'Cause it's not worth it to just get feedback from people who you're not sure are gonna help you actually get better.                                 So at the end of your practice run, maybe with that feedback crew, maybe they've helped give you some feedback about your body language, about your words that you used, etc. Ask them to help you do a practice Q&A.   Poornima: OK.   Lara: Yeah.   Poornima: That's great.   Lara: I love to make sure I have a mix of people, maybe people who are new to the topic, maybe people who are really familiar with it, or know the audience really well.   Poornima: Mm-hmm.   Lara: 'Cause they can help you level up your game, and get some practice to reduce those nerves.   Poornima: Yeah.   Lara: That when you're finally on stage you're like, "I've done this before."   Poornima: Sure. And do you feel like the questions that they ask are usually indicative of what the audience is gonna ask?   Lara: I try to ask for two different kinds of questions. One's just like a stereotypical, “If you were in the audience for real, what might you ask”?   Poornima: Yeah.   Lara: But if they're your friends, they're gonna be nice, normal questions.   Poornima: Right.   Lara: I also like to add a version two, which is like, “Let's get weird.”   Poornima: Yeah.   Lara: Give me that statement that's not actually a question. Or like totally intentionally misunderstand the point that I'm trying to make, and ask me that question.   Poornima: Mm-hmm.   Lara: That way I have some practice in knowing how to handle those really sticky moments.   Poornima: So doing this in a practice session and dealing with peers, you're probably gonna feel pretty good.   Lara: Yeah.   How To Respond To A Question That Is Really Just A Comment   Poornima: But what do you do in that moment where you may get that comment that's a question? How do you respond?   Lara: Totally. I think it depends on the situation. I want to remind everybody, your audience is rooting for you. Whenever you get that, "This is more of a statement than a question." I promise it's not just you feeling the weirdness of that, it's the whole of the audience, too. And you're still in a position of power. You still have control over the room.   Poornima: Mm-hmm.   Lara: And your whole goal is to teach people something new. And make sure that they are leveling them up in whatever the topic is that you're talking about.                                 You have completely, a complete opportunity to be like, "Thanks for that. Here is how I would either reframe it, turn it into a better question, or answer the question, that you think you really wanted." Provide the information to the audience, too.   Poornima: Mm-hmm.   Lara: Yeah.   What To Do If You Get Asked A Question From Someone Who Is Online   Poornima: That's good. Now I also know a lot of times there are questions that come up where the audience isn't present, they might come up from audio, video, somebody might have written one in, Twitter, whatever. How do you facilitate those kind of questions?   Lara: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think—I hope—it helps to have a good moderator.   Poornima: Uh-huh.   Lara: To make sure that someone can actually help you navigate especially as multiple different sources of information giving you those questions.   Poornima: Yep.   Lara: But by and large, I just try to scan them, and kind of see which ones are the most relevant to my topic.   Poornima: Yeah.   Lara: Or which ones are gonna help me give an answer that will actually level up the entire audience who's listening in.   Poornima: Nice. I like what you said. So you're gonna filtering, but in a way that's gonna benefit the audience.   Lara: Yeah.   Poornima: Not just filtering for the sake of filtering.   Lara: Absolutely. Yeah.   What To  Do When You Don’t Know The Answer To A Question   Poornima: So let's talk about the last, the dreaded question, that you don't know the answer to.   Lara: Oh, those are my favorite. Yeah.   Poornima: Yeah.   Lara: I found that just in general in my career, not just in conference settings, but as for standing up in front of my team, or my boss.   Poornima: Sure, meetings.   Lara: Yeah. You have to be able to say, "I don't know."   Poornima: Yeah.   Lara: And you can do it gracefully. Just saying, "I don't know," doesn't mean that you're bad at your job. It doesn't mean that you didn't do all the—no one human can possibly know all there is to know about the topic on which you're speaking. So I like to practice also with that feedback crew saying, "I don't know." And in a really graceful and helpful way.   Poornima: Mm-hmm.   Lara: So maybe like "I don't know. I'll follow up later." And like respond on Twitter when I finally do the research on their answer.   Poornima: Yeah.   Lara: I might just be like, "I don't know. That's a great question. Come find me at the break and we can talk more about it." And my absolute favorite one is to be like, "You know, I don't know the answer to that question, but does anybody else in the audience know the answer to that question could you raise your hand? You should go talk to that person."   Poornima: Yeah. That's great.   Lara: Just totally punt on it.   Poornima: Yeah. No, that's fair. Awesome. Well thank you so much, Lara, for joining us.   Lara: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.   Poornima: Yeah. And thanks all of you for tuning in today. And special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode.                                 If you've enjoyed this episode, then please subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you have friends out there who are nervous about Q&A, be sure to share this episode with them. Bye for now.   Lara: Thanks so much.   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.

All this month we’ve been focused on the theme of pitching. We started out by talking about why many creative problem solvers shy away from pitching, leaving it up to CEOs, founders, and sales people. But, pitching is a really valuable skill that all of us need to hone in order for people hear us out, adopt our ideas, and believe in our solutions.   To help you embrace pitching, we shared the most common mistakes people make when pitching and how to overcome them. Then mentioned that the most effective and authentic pitches boil down to a powerful technique many of already do every day, storytelling. We covered why storytelling is powerful, how to condense a story down, and weave in our credibility.   By now you hopefully understand the importance of pitching, but you might be worried about having to pitch different audiences, and what to do in a setting where you only have 5 minutes or as much as 50 minutes to pitch.   Don’t worry Marie Perruchet and I have you covered! In this final segment on pitching, we’re  going to share the various types of pitches you need to prepare.   You’ll learn:   - What to include in a long pitch - How to condense a long pitch into a pitch that is five minutes or less - How to modify your pitch to address different audiences - How to practice your pitch, so you deliver it effectively Need more help with your pitch? Reach out to Marie on Twitter or on her website. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/). -- Episode Transcript   Poornima: Hey guys, we've been talking about pitching. I previously talked about the common mistakes people make when it comes to pitching, as well as some techniques to help you pitch in a way that resonates with your personality. If you missed either of those segments, check out the links to them below. In today's final segment, I'm gonna dive into the various types of pitches you need to prepare.                                                   Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker, I'm your host Poornima Vijayashanker. Each episode of *Build* consists of a series of conversations I host with innovators, and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech.                                                   I'm joined again by Marie Perruchet, who is the author of the latest book, *One Perfect Pitch*, and in today's final segment we're gonna dive into the various types of pitches you need to prepare. Now Marie, we are all pretty familiar with the elevator pitch, right? It's 30 to 90 seconds, and everyone obsesses about it. But in your book, you actually talk about having a lot of different types of pitches, or different lengths, right? Having even a longer pitch, and then whittling it down to that elevator pitch. So let's start by talking about why you should have a longer pitch, and what to put in it.   What to include in a long pitch   Marie Perruchet: Yes Poornima, people get fixed on the idea that they should have just one pitch, but actually you need many pitches, because they should be tailored to people you're talking to. If you're pitching a bid to see a company, or a bid to be company, it's gonna be a different pitch you know. If your software is addressing different industries, your story should start with a different character.                                                   And the reason why I say that you should have a longer pitch, is that you should accommodate it, and make it flexible depending on the situation, and that over time, depending on the data points that you get, you rearrange your pitch. Also, why it's important to have a longer pitch, is that you can actually break it down and share the parts that you want to share, depending on the time you have, types of setting, the timing, the location; so many components that you have to include when you're presenting.   Poornima: Got it. So in a longer pitch, let's say we wanted to build our longest pitch, and it was what? Would it be like 15 minutes, or 10 minutes?   Marie Perruchet: It can be an hour, it can be two hours.   Poornima: OK, yeah.   Marie Perruchet: It can be five minutes. But definitely a great pitch would include a hook, a great hook, how you catch attention from people. It should talk about the problem, all the momentum, the achievement, or the breaking news, you know, what's new about your product. Talk about the solution, telling why you're the best at doing what you do. You know, great team, great founder's experience, you've had those awards in design, you learned to build the Siri technology.                                                   Talk about your key differentiators, because so many other companies, all building the same product, or as advanced as you are, or you are belonging to a group and everybody's competing for funding. So you should be able to tell what makes you different and better than the others, and then you end talking, maybe about the market, or talking about the go-to market strategies, and finishing with an ask. You know, how do you want people to help you to build, and share, and keep working at your product.   Poornima: Got it. So your longest pitch has every single element that you talk about in your book, and all those various pieces.   Marie Perruchet: Yes.   How to condense a long pitch into a pitch that is five minutes or less   Poornima: So now, taking things away, that feels scary, 'cause it's like, "Well, yeah, the award was important." Or, having this one key player on the team was really important, so how do you know what to take away for those shorter pitches?   Marie Perruchet: As the minimal available product, you have to test your pitch. And what's important here, and people usually don't pay attention, you should listen. You should listen how people reformulate their pitch, and that was one of my early techniques. You know, when I came to Silicon Valley eight years ago I had no pitch. And what I would do is that, at the time, helping founders, helping them, talking to them, explaining what I was trying to do, and telling them, "Hey, what do you think? What did you hear? Could you articulate what I've just said? What makes sense, is it simple enough? Does it make you think of something else?" So trying to have those open questions.                                                  And then, as you take down notes, if you're quick enough or used to that, or you can actually record with your phone, you know, videotape or just taking your voice recording, and then you replay it to yourself later on. And you see which words people are using. And you know, politicians, they do the same. They test it, and they see what the press picks up. And so, then you have to pick it up again, and then replay it, and practice it again, until, you know, the one day your pitch will be perfectly tailored to the person you're pitching to.   Poornima: Got it. OK, so see how people reformulate your pitch, and what are the highlights that they talk about when they do, and then that will help you kind of condense it down.   Marie Perruchet: Yes.   Poornima: Nice. Do you have an example from any of your readers, or companies that you've coached, where they went from a long pitch to a shorter one?   Marie Perruchet: Yes. So I worked with a company called Autodesk, and we worked with their marketers, and they would send me their pitch and I would review those pitches. And most of the pitches, they're very long, and include information that is not relevant to their audience, or they don't have a very specific call to action. So, I would go over and actually shorten the pieces that were not relevant, and then have them rewrite their pitch so that it would be a little bit more focused.                                                   We start with founders, but also engineers and designers. What we do is that, if they have a 50-slide, or even 25-slide presentation, I'd listen to them, so that's kind of a first run. And then I tell them, "OK, this is what I think is important to highlight, depending on the time we have, and your target audience." And then I have them reformulate it and reframe it, and it gets much easier after we have them practice as well.   Poornima: What are some of the common things that you ask people to take out?   Marie Perruchet: Usually when I work with founders, but also engineers and designers, I like to focus on the story, you know, what makes them passionate about what they're doing, what drew them to work on developing that product or that project, because what I like is that understanding people perspective. They see things that I don't see, and this is from a more technical perspective, and what they do can actually change your situation. So I wanna know what drives them, and what are the problems that they've identified. And then they can share it with others. But you have to be able to communicate it in a very short and concise way, 'cause you know, I've been in the room with investors, entrepreneurs, and after 20 seconds they're being interrupted. So you have to give it right away.   Poornima: Got it. And so what are those pieces that you've seen over and over again, that people might put in that bloat their pitch, that you like to remove?   Marie Perruchet: The pieces that I like to remove is repetition, is rambling, is talking too much about the 50 features and characteristics of their products. I just want to hear about three features, and really defining features. Engineers tend to overwhelm you with too many details, they think that you wanna know more, so you have to understand and tell as much as possible, but this choice, you have to make it for people. You cannot let people make their choice for yourself. You have to work ahead. So don't overwhelm people with too many details, too many features.                                                   Don't talk too much about yourself, but make it relevant how much your past experience is gonna be relevant to lead that team into building the next product. And also I would say, be very concise, and don't beat around the bush from the very first few seconds, or from the very first few lines of your pitch. Go straight away, dive into your pitch right away.   How to modify your pitch to address different audiences   Poornima: In your book you also talk about the importance of having pitches that are tailored to your audience. So question to you, how do you figure out who's in the audience, and then how do you go about doing that tailoring?   Marie Perruchet: You absolutely have no excuses for not knowing who's in your audience.   Poornima: OK, good.   Marie Perruchet: There's so many ways today, on the internet, to get information, and pull information about people, their taste, their location, what they're doing. If you're working in a company, you have to ask your workmates, you know, what a person likes, or is it a great timing for you to pitch to them, getting as much information internally. And also, for example, if you're speaking at a conference, you have to know beforehand, you know, the profession, the level of expectations. When I run a workshop, usually I send a survey before, through Google Docs, and ask people, you know, your expectations, how much they're knowledgeable, so it's great, kind of a quiz to engage people, and making them feel that what you're gonna say is going to be for them.   Poornima: Yeah, I think that's really important, tailoring it to the audience, and doing your homework ahead of time, to knowing what that audience is. Now, I do know a lot of times people get overwhelmed because they think, "OK, my audience is going to be a bunch of engineers, and there's a lot of different levels of engineers. How do I whittle it down to, maybe the beginner, versus the advanced, etc." So walk us through how you would whittle it down, once you have an idea of who's gonna be in the audience.   Marie Perruchet: So you cannot address everyone in the room, but who are the people, the target audience, who's gonna be the most relevant to grow your product or your business. So maybe you would pick a couple, or maybe three examples, you know, three case stories that is going to appeal and help the audience think that you're trying to relate to their own problems.                                                   So let's say, today when you pitched the interview to me, Poornima, you know we are both women, both interested into public speaking, we love video and talking about skills that can be relevant to specific audience. So already you had me there, 'cause I knew you knew me, I can see you did your homework and research, and took the time and effort to make it relevant. Because we are all busy, we have less, and less time, we have very short attention span. So right away you have to be extremely precise, and be relevant, to engage, and actually instigate people to listen and keep listening to what you have to say.   Poornima: I really like what you said about, you can't address everyone in the room, 'cause I know a lot of people try to please everyone, and they're just...it's not gonna happen. So yeah, definitely tailoring it, making sure it's relevant, to even a handful of people, can be really valuable. I know the last thing that you talk about when it comes to preparing, is actually doing the preparation practice. Walk us through what you recommend when it comes to practicing your pitch.   Marie Perruchet: Many founders and entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, they wait for the last minute to practice their pitch. I've worked with this head of a Google Glass competitor, Japanese CEO. We practice, and I say, "OK, you have to practice at least 20 times." He said, "No, I will practice 200 times."   Poornima: Oh, wow.   Marie Perruchet: And I was quite impressed, because the reason why you have to practice, and it's one of my signature exercise that I do during the corporate trainings, is that I have people line up, like speed dating, but they have to pitch for a minute, and then they switch and then they do it again. And I can tell you, the first few minutes, people are bored, and then the pitch ends after 20 seconds. But then, after they do it like four of five times, I have to yell and tell them you have to stop. 'Cause first, you know, they get inspiration, they get idea, and they go straight to the point. They cut to the chase, and they don't give information that's not relevant anymore, because they see that effect that they have on the face of their audience. So practice is very important. Also, practicing in a room, meaning that every time that I go and speak to a conference I arrive an hour before, to do the recognition of the room, knowing where I'm gonna walk, where I'm gonna get closer to my audience so that I don't ostracize part of the room, because otherwise that part will leave the room, and as a speaker, you don't want that.                                                   And I would say the third advice that I would give, is practicing using the technology. So you can use your tablet, you can use your phone; so you record it, and that's OK, to look at yourself. I know we are all the worst judges of ourselves, but then you play it with the sound and no image, without the sound with the image, and you can see and correct all your filler words, your repetitions, the “ehm, uhm,” but also if you're flapping your arms, if you keep touching your nose, or playing with your rings. And then, over time, maybe you're not gonna change overnight, but you learn how to be aware, what are the mistakes, where you can improve, and then manage it over time, and manage that anxiety of public speaking, but also knowing that your story cannot be perfect from the very first day. It takes time and it needs adjustment, you need to tailor it, and also understanding that it's for your audience, it's not for yourself.   How to practice your pitch, so you deliver it effectively   Poornima: That's great Marie. So how do you know when it's ready to go?   Marie Perruchet: How do you know if your pitch is ready to go? Don't wait. You have to do it right now, and start practicing with your friends, with a colleague. Great way to say is, "I have an idea, I have to present it to the management, to a partner, I'd love to get your feedback." Make sure that the person is qualified to give your feedback, not everybody is able to do that. But, "Hey, can I have a few minutes of your time? I'd like to run a few ideas." And then, take notes, or videotape or record with your phone what they've just told you. You have to be able to listen. Integrate that feedback, and then replace it in your next pitch. But don't wait, you know, the previous night before your presentation, to pitch. You have to practice beforehand, because also what's important, is that you will see the journey, and it will give you a lot of confidence.   Poornima: Yeah, I think that's valuable. And as you record yourself, you do see that progression. So, I know for a lot of people that I coach, they then realize they have made a lot of progress, because it's been captured.   Marie Perruchet: Absolutely.   Poornima: Well thank you so much Marie, for joining us, and I know our audience out there is gonna get a lot out of these segments. And be sure, audience, to check out Marie's book, *One Perfect Pitch*. And for people who wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way?   Marie Perruchet: To me what's important, is impact. I'd love to hear from you guys, you know, check the book, dive into the exercises, learn how to work around a method, and get back to me, tell me how it impacted your work. Whether it helped you refresh your ideas, your communication, pushed you to pitch more. I'd love to hear you, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Marie Perruchet. You can follow me on Twitter, send me messages through Instagram as well. You know, I love text messages, so please get in touch, I'd love to hear from you.   Poornima: That's it for our episode on pitching. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next *Build* episode, and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode. Ciao for now.                                                  This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.  

One of the reasons people don’t like pitching is because they feel like they have to be someone else. They have to abandon their personality, get into character, and speak in a way they normally wouldn’t in order to impress a colleague, customer, or investor.   However, people on the receiving end of the pitch are going to see through and disengage quickly. A sales-y pitch is one that isn’t rehearsed and the person pitching hasn’t taken the time to figure out how to engage their audience.   What we don’t realize is that we don’t need to change who we are or how we speak to engage audiences. Many of us are already practicing a powerful pitching technique in our everyday lives, storytelling. And when we deliver stories in a conversational approach we come off as clear and authentic.   But we may still be opposed to starting a pitch with a story. We worry about it being too long or short, and the theme and details resonating with the audience.   Well in today’s Build episode, Marie Perruchet author of One Perfect Pitch: How to Sell Your Idea, Your Product, Your Business or Yourself is back.   You’ll learn the following from Marie:   - Why storytelling is a powerful technique for pitching - How you can tell a great story in a business setting - How to condense a long story so that it is short and to the point - How to weave your credibility into a story - Why most demos fail – hint: it’s because they fail to walk an audience through a story - How to incorporate an ASK into your pitch -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.   Episode Transcript Poornima: Hey, guys. I'm back today talking about pitching. In the last segment, I covered a lot of the mistakes that people make when pitching. If you missed out, I highly recommend you check it out. The link to the video is below this one. Today I'm gonna dive into how to pitch in a way that resonates with your personality.                                                   Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of a series of conversations I host with innovators, and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Today we're gonna continue the conversation around pitching, and I'm joined by Marie Perruchet, who is the author of the latest book, *One Perfect Pitch*. Thanks again for joining us today, Marie.   Marie: Great to be here.   Why storytelling is a powerful technique for pitching   Poornima: Last week we were talking about a number of mistakes people make when it comes to pitching. Now I want to shift gears and talk about how we can pitch in a way that resonates with our personality so that we feel effective as people who are pitching. I know one of the techniques that you talk about in your book is storytelling. But a lot of people have an aversion to starting a pitch with a story, because they're not sure how to craft one. They worry about whether it's too long or too short, and they want to make sure that it really resonates with the audience. So let's just start by talking about why storytelling is an effective technique to start your pitch with.   Marie Perruchet: I love storytelling. You're born and then your parents, your family, reads you stories. I grew up with stories from Charles Perrault, from Brothers Grimm. You know Cinderella...the first story of Cinderella was found in the fifth century in China. And since then you have more than 1,400 versions of Cinderella. Take Japan, the Japanese telling stories using animation. Think about in China there was this guy who would hang around and sell candies and actually would tell stories to sell more candies. And so if you're thinking about the story of immigration in the U.S., the show and tell that kids learn how to do at school, the kids would talk about their fluffy toy. That was a great way to have kids from immigrants who wouldn't speak the same language unite around a story. And when you think of what storytelling is today for technology companies, which is the main industry here in Silicon Valley but also blossoming in other countries, storytelling talks about transformation, and that's what technology companies are doing, transforming a certain industry.   How you can tell a great story in a business setting                                                   So storytelling is a very powerful technique because it's something that people know already, they grew up with that. Every weekend you're telling your friends stories, how you got away from a parking ticket, or how, in my case, I have lost my passports, or how the toast you did for your friend's wedding didn't go so well. So we all know how to tell stories, except in a business perspective, in a business setting, it has to be very short because we can not spend hours telling stories.                                                   So how do you tell a great story? First, think of the pitch meet being a mini story that creates emotion. So stories are a way to start and that's the method I describe in my book. You start with the problem, talk about the solution, and then finish with an ask that is the transformation.                                                   A great image to remember is the image of the rainbow. There's the rainbow, there's the storm, that's the problem. The rainbow, talk about the solution, and then supposedly there's a pot of gold, which is the transformation. So whenever you want to tell a story, there should be a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you know the James Bond movies, they all start with something that grips you to your seat. Think about the Cinderella story, at the end there's a transformation. That's what storytelling is about. There's a problem, there's tension in the beginning, there's a resolution. That's what we want to hear because it creates a tension, it creates an emotion, and we want to follow up.   Poornima: OK, so for our audience out there, start with the problem, and that will present a good tension point to hook the audience right from the beginning.   Marie Perruchet: Absolutely.   Poornima: Now, I know another concern is having the story be too long or too short. How do you recommend it being just the right length for the pitch that you're doing?   Marie Perruchet: People shouldn't worry so much because a story takes time to craft and to refine. Anyone is able to tell a story for an hour, for two hours, but it takes a lot of practice to chop it to maybe a minute. And there's so much you can tell in a minute. The radio pieces I used to tell would be a minute long, and there's so much you can tell in structure. So people shouldn't be worried about that because the story changes over time and you should practice it.   How to condense a long story so that it is short and to the point   Poornima: So how do you condense that hour-long story down to a minute? Do you have an example?   Marie Perruchet: I advise founders, engineers, and designers to take a page, write their story, look at it, and then eliminate two thirds. And those two thirds should be anything that's not relevant or that's not gonna interest their audience. Anything that's not precise, that doesn't have data or numbers, you should get rid of it. Any personal opinions shouldn't be there. That's the first step.                                                   The second step, when you want to know about your story you should focus on different parts like they're LEGO parts, because each part should be breakable. Imagine yourself at a cocktail party, you start pitching and somebody comes and interrupts you. So you should be able to tell those parts very separately and if you put them together they work very well. So think about what's your hook, how do you start your story? How do you differentiate yourself? How do you bring up the solution? Talk about your team.                                                   So each segment should be a minute long. And it's very easy. If you're taking your Word document, there's a word count. It should be between, I believe, 150 words per minute. You can use your calculator in the toolkit for the Word document to calculate it. And then you practice it and you should be very slow, very articulate, especially if, like me, you're non-native English speakers, so that people can get used to your accent.   How to weave your credibility into a story   Poornima: Nice. Now, I know another thing you talk about is credibility and leading with it. How do you recommend people lead with that credibility?   Marie Perruchet: I'm gonna give you an example. When I meet people and they don't know me or they want to question my expertise, I tell them that I'm an award-winning journalist, worked for the BBC in three countries. I've also written a book at McGraw-Hill on the art of writing your pitch called *One Perfect Pitch*. You are establishing credibility giving examples or giving awards or giving achievements to people about what you've been doing in the past so that you can create trust.   Poornima: Right. Now, I meet a lot of people who often will tell me their credibility and they'll mention things that maybe happened 5 or 10 years ago that may not be relevant to the work that they're doing now. So how do you create credibility when you're just getting something off the ground?   Marie Perruchet: I worked with engineers, with founders and designers to create credibility from the ground, and when you think that nothing happened in the past 10 years, yes, something did happen. But you need to really look into it and work and find out, what you're doing today, you didn't get up in the morning and start it. It comes from somewhere and I want to know that. I want to know why you and why not somebody else. One great way to do it is ask your friends, "Why do you think I'm so passionate? Why do you think I'm working every day for 12 hours a day and building and developing my product or my startup?" Ask people you've met with or you've worked with, "This is what I'm doing right now, but I'm unsure, I have doubts. What would be the reason why I should pursue it? Could you help me and shed some light?" Understanding what is your path, your passion, for me, writing a book has been very transformative because I could find out why I was so passionate about storytelling and that storytelling has been with me my entire life.   Why most product demos given during pitches fail   Poornima: Now, I know another technique is the proof is in the product. Especially for those of us who are engineers and designers, we like to have something tangible to show. Can you talk about demoing a product? I'll admit, I've done a lot of terrible demos in my past. How would you recommend people have an effective demo of their product?   Marie Perruchet: Yes, people tend to overlook their demo. They work on their questions, they work at telling what they're good at, sometimes telling about the problem if it's great, but they think, "OK, I'm just gonna do the demo on the fly." But the demo should be extremely prepared because if you need Wi-Fi, you don't know any technical issues. I lived in India, I know about electricity cuts happening all the time. So you never know and you want to be prepared. So don't depend first on your demo to explain your product.                                                   The second thing would be have somebody else handling all the technicalities so that you don't have to worry about that. And the third thing would be, of course, practicing your demo. We worked with a client who was presenting a product to Samsung, and what we did is that we took it from...it's like a journey or taking a trip from A to Z. From the moment you have to click on the button to get into the software to the moment you have to scroll down the menu, you have to show all that. Maybe you have to spend 20 minutes or 30 minutes, keep it maybe under 10 minutes. A couple of minutes is great, but you have to go step by step so that the person understands from their user's perspective what they have to do to get to the product.   Poornima: Yeah, I like what you said about the user's perspective, and I know in your book you talk about even presenting a scenario. Not just like, "Oh, let me show you my product, and here's how you sign up, and here's how you get started," but having a very directed workflow maybe based on a specific use case.   Marie Perruchet: Yes, so you can also do that. If you can show the product, people always like to see something tangible. When you're bargaining in certain countries, you want to show the dollars, the euros, the money that you have. What you can do if you don't have the product with you, you can pick a name. This is Kate, this is Andrew, this is Jane. Jane starts her morning that way. This is what her journey looks like. This is her problem, this is the problem she faced, and this is how our solution helps her transform her day.   Poornima: Nice, so yeah, that's very relatable and that comes back to incorporating storytelling into your demo.   Marie Perruchet: Yes, because behind every product there's a team, there's a leader, and we want to know the struggles your team are going through to give birth to that product.   How to incorporate an ASK into your pitch   Poornima: And finally, there's the ask, which you talk about incorporating into your pitch. But again, depending on backgrounds, you both feel like that can be really sales-y or sleazy. So walk us through why it's important to have an ask at the end of your pitch and how to craft one.   Marie Perruchet: To me, a sales-y pitch is a pitch where people have it rehearsed, and they don't really connect and they only talk about themselves. So an ask at the end of the pitch is another great way to reconnect with the person if by any chance you've lost her or him during your presentation.                                                   So why finishing by an ask? Because every story has an end. And you're telling this story, imagine you've created a tension, you've got people very excited about the problem because they felt, "Oh, they're relating to my own problem, they brought us a solution." But then, nothing happens at the end of your story. You leave them in a state of anxiety. So people, if they've been seduced and excited by your idea, they want to help. So you have to give them clear directions.                                                   For example, "Hey, I'd like to have an intro to that person to support my project. I need more resources. What can you do to help me fund that project?" Be extremely clear, and I know in American English it's much easier. In certain countries, you don't want to be so direct, but find a way to have your team or the person or your subject act on something. Just don't leave it like this because people want to help. They want you to be successful, so what can you give them so that they can help you?   Poornima: That's fantastic. Thank you, Marie. This has been really helpful.                                                   Now Marie and I want to learn from you. What additional techniques have you tried that have worked as you've been pitching your ideas? Let us know in the comments below and the first three people to respond are gonna receive an autographed copy of *One Perfect Pitch* from Marie.                                                   That's it for this segment. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next and final segment on this topic of pitching, where we'll talk about the various types of pitches you need to prepare. Ciao for now!                                                   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.

Have you ever had an idea for something, like a process or product that you wanted to improve? But instead of sharing your idea with others like your friends or co-workers, you just kept it to yourself because the thought of having to “pitch it” felt icky and salesy? Many of us who are creative problem solvers feel this way. Since pitching doesn’t come naturally to us, we just leave it up to CEOs, founders, and sales people. However, pitching is a really valuable skill that all of us need to hone, because only if we pitch our ideas will people hear us out, adopt them, and believe in our solutions. In today’s episode of Build, we’re going to tackle a number of misconceptions people have about pitching as well as the common mistakes people make while delivering them. In future episodes, we’ll talk about how you can pitch in a way that resonates with your personality and the various types of pitches you need to prepare because it turns out that an elevator pitch isn’t enough! To help us out, I've invited Marie Perruchet (http://www.oneperfectpitch.com/about-us), who is the author of the latest book, One Perfect Pitch: How to Sell Your Idea, Your Product, Your Business or Yourself (https://www.amazon.com/One-Perfect-Pitch-Business-Yourself/dp/0071837590). Even if you don’t plan on pitching anything in the near future, chances are someone is going to pitch something to you: a project or a product, and you need to be able to filter the best from the worst! So I highly recommend you watch this episode to learn: - Why no one is a natural when it comes to pitching - How to get over the discomfort of pitching - Why you can’t stop at the first NO You’ll also learn the 3 most common mistakes people make while pitching and how to avoid them such as: - Not taking the time to make people care enough about your idea. - Not realizing that most pitches are shared. - Overwhelming people with data. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/). Episode Transcript Poornima: Pitching an idea feels icky and salesy and for those of us who are creative problem solvers; it doesn't come naturally to us. So, we just end up not doing it all together, leaving it up instead to founders, CEOs, and sales people. However, pitching is a really valuable skill that all of us need to hone, because only if we pitch our ideas will people hear us out, adopt them, and believe in our solutions. Today, we're going to tackle a number of misconceptions and mistakes that people make when it comes to pitching and in future segments, we're going to talk about how you can pitch in a way that resonates with your personality and the various types of pitches you need to have prepared.                                                   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of a series of conversations I host with innovators and together we debunk a number of myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Today we're going to be diving into the misconceptions around pitching and to help us out, I've invited Marie Perruchet, who is the author of the latest book, *One Perfect Pitch: How to Sell Your Idea, Your Product, Your Business or Yourself*. Thanks for joining us, Marie.   Marie Perruchet: Thanks for having me, Poornima.   Poornima: We met at a conference earlier this year, and as I recall it, your background is not in tech. So, walk us through your background and what lured you into tech.   Marie Perruchet: My name's Marie. I grew up in Normandy, originally from South Korea, born there and was adopted to French parents. Because I always loved traveling, my first career was actually being a journalist.   Poornima: OK.   Marie Perruchet: I was a radio journalist and I started out from Brussels, then I decided to move further and I worked for the French National Radio from New Delhi in India covering politics, earthquake, and two years later I thought it would be great to also work from one of larger clients in Asia, so I moved to Shanghai where I worked for the BBC. And then after, that was my big turning point, because I moved to Silicon Valley. In the beginning, I was covering some tech, but mainly it was for the Presidential elections for former President Obama, end of 2008. You know, when you arrive here, you realize that first you don't have to use VPN to get access to information coming from China. But also that everybody is embracing entrepreneurship and that means that you have a laptop, you have a Wifi connection, and you have an idea, and you want to see if you can put it through and then push it to the market.                                                   I thought it was very exciting, so I thought, "OK, what's going on here? What can I do?" I always loved helping people tell their own story through the media, but at the time, it was a big explosion about the platforms. How do you communicate your company's story, how you can communicate about yourself, how do you go for funding? And I started helping entrepreneurs and startup founders communicate that story to the world and also to investors here, but also users and partners. I mentored at different incubators, including 500 startups, mentored at Japanese, Korean, Chinese incubators here and then starting having my own clients helping them communicate their idea for funding, but also on their website, on social media. And I'm going to corporate training where I brought these large companies here, because you know internally you also need to be able to present your ideas effectively in very short formats, because people they have very short attention spans.   Poornima: Yeah. That's a lot of great work that you've done around pitching. What then inspired you to go from doing that work to writing the book, *One Perfect Pitch*?   Marie Perruchet: So, you know when you're a journalist, you think that down the road you're going to write a book at some point.   Poornima: OK.   Marie Perruchet: But I was not a journalist anymore. And what happened is that I was featured in the *Wall Street Journal* for my work and McGraw-Hill they actually pitched the book idea to me.   Poornima: Oh, that's great.   Marie Perruchet: Yes. And I said yes, even without knowing what it means to write a book.   Why People Find Pitching Uncomfortable   Poornima: So, I know a lot of people don't enjoy pitching, they don't feel like they're good at it, they're not a natural, they might be shy or introverted. How do you help people get over those situations?   Marie Perruchet: First of all, people should think about why they're so uncomfortable pitching. And it has to do with...you know, think about your business ahead. So, it takes a lot of time to think about it and it takes a lot of preparation knowing your user, what your business does, your brand identity, your identity. So, that's why it's very important to think ahead about what you're trying to convey. And then when you're confident about your idea, it makes it much easier to be able to pitch your idea. The second thing is also practice. Don't wait for the last minute for people to feed you questions to pitch, because here it's very competitive. People are coming from all over the world to go for funding, look for funding, but also trying to get and acquire users and customers. And I would say the sort of thing that I tell people who feel shy, “OK, maybe you're doing this presentation, maybe you're pitching, maybe it doesn't go so well as you think, but you have to keep going back to the stage in the room and keep pitching until your idea goes through.” So, you can't stop at the first “no.” You have to keep doing it.   Poornima: Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point.   Marie Perruchet: Of course, if you're looking on the internet, if you're looking at great speakers, think about in 1988 at the Democratic Convention, there was the Arkansas governor called Bill Clinton. He was a very, very bad presenter at the time, but you know how much money he makes today while speaking. So, nobody's ever a natural. There are techniques and you need to acquire those techniques to feel more comfortable and manage your anxiety.   Pitching Mistake #1: Not taking the time to make people care about your idea.   Poornima: There's also a number of mistakes that people make when they are pitching and you cover some of them in your book. The first one is not taking the time to make people care about what it is you're talking about. So, what exactly does that mean, and how do you make people care?   Marie Perruchet: How do you make people care when you're trying to convey an idea? You have to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. So it means that you have to have empathy because maybe you got that idea from the closet of your room or from your garage or from your basement if you're living on the East Coast or in any other countries, but you know you have to understand how your product, your service is solving a problem for the person who may buy that product from you. And that's why when you're a founder because you're so entrenched in the work, you need to take some perspective and really put yourself in the shoes of your audience.   Pitching Mistake #2: Not realizing that pitches are shared.   Poornima: We also have people in our audience who are very technical, and a lot of times when they are presenting an idea, the get really bogged down in that jargon, which may not be comprehendible by somebody who is not technical or on the business side or has some other expertise. So, how would you explain to them how to manage that?   Marie Perruchet: So, they should think about how to make their pitch simple, because whoever they're going to pitch it to, that person is going to pitch the idea to somebody else. So that's why they have to make it simple. For many founders, their biggest problem is knowing where to start their pitch. And in my book, I describe three ways to start your pitch. The first one is telling how you're solving your tech problem. No, the first one is telling about the problem that you're trying to solve. So putting yourself in the shoes of the person. Another way to start your technical pitch is talking about the breaking news. What's the latest about your product or your idea? Maybe you've just debugged something in your software or you've just released a new product. Something that makes it exciting for people. And the third way to start your pitch, when it's a technical pitch as well, is talking about all the achievements that your team has achieved in the past week or in the past month, so that's a great way to grab the attention of your audience.   Poornima: Yeah. Now, I know another thing you mention in the book is having a universal story, right? And this is something you can start your pitch with. So, walk us through, what exactly is a universal story?   Marie Perruchet: I recommend founders to start with a universal story, because that's how they find something that they can have related to what they're doing, meaning that founders think that what they are doing is very unique and very special, but if you're looking around, you realize that maybe 10 companies are doing the same thing as you're doing.   Poornima: Sure. Yep.   Marie Perruchet: And when you're thinking about the people who are going to buy your product or your service, they cannot just be your family or your close friends. You have to understand that hey, this product could be used in that country in that segment, in that market and make it relevant for everyone.   Poornima: Do you have an example of a reader or somebody that you coached to come up with a universal story that you could share with us?   Marie Perruchet: Yes. I've coached a company that were developing sensors and those sensors were actually bees and those bees were able to detect some substance, illegal substances for example, and what we found out is that the founder, his grandpa was actually the largest exporter of honey from Turkey. And so everybody understand honey, everybody understand bees, so that's where universal, because it's a common in plain English in English language that people can use to convey their ideas.   Poornima: Got it. So you started with that, and then talked about the sensors rather than starting with sensors, which people may or may not understand anyway.   Marie Perruchet: Exactly. Because you always have to think that people are going to pitch for you, as I'm pitching about himself today. I need to be able to understand and the more simple you make it, the easier it travels.   Pitching Mistake #3: Overwhelming people with data.   Poornima: Yep. So simplicity's important, but I know a lot of us in tech love information and data. One of the things that you talk about in your book is sometimes we don't present enough information or the data that we share isn't the most relevant or can be confusing. How do you recommend people decide on how much information is enough and how to present data that's valuable?   Marie Perruchet: Well, I love data. Most of the time, people they tend to overwhelm people with data, so you have to maybe—for example, if you're thinking about a slide presentation—just maybe one data per slide, that's enough. Not 50 data per slide.   Poornima: Yeah.   Marie Perruchet: And also, when they're saying, "Oh, not enough data," what they mean is that they're not precise enough. Sounds like high level or it's too much jargon, but we don't really picture in our mind what it means, so the more precise you are with your data, the better it is. For example, in a span of three weeks, our traffic increased by 50%. So that's very precise, instead of saying that, "We've got great traction in developing our product." That doesn't mean anything.   Poornima: Got it. And so showing kind of the growth trend could be one way of representing it. Are there other techniques that you talk about?   Marie Perruchet: To talk about traction?   Poornima: Mm-hmm.   Marie Perruchet: You can say traction in a short amount of time, saying like in a month, required X number of users. That could be another way to show it, so growth, but also, “Our application has been number one for six consecutive weeks or six consecutive months at the Apple Store in three countries.” And you're not bragging but you're just stating the facts and it gives context to people because imagine what you're pitching, other companies are also pitching. So how do we get the right context to make a decision about should we have the next meeting?   Poornima: Got it. Well, thank you so much Marie. This has been fantastic. Now Marie and I want to know, are there mistakes that we haven't covered in this segment, that you're worried about making? Let us know what they are in the comments below and we'll be sure to address them.                                                   OK, that's it for this segment. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next segment where we'll continue the conversation and dive into how to create a pitch that resonates with your personality. Ciao for now.   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker.

Love Your Work listener Gustav Dybeck is a design student from Sweden. He has an opportunity to do an internship for about 9 months, and he wants to make the most of it before he starts his career. You may have heard a clip a couple of episodes back on Gustav's favorite moment on Love Your Work. He was in Medellin awhile back, and since I originally pursued a career in design, Gustav was interested in hearing what I thought he should do for his internship. So, we talked about it in a cafe. A quick warning, there's a lot of background noise in this. It's was an off-the-cuff idea to record our conversation, so this episode is a bit of an experiment. We'll talk about: Experiences abroad: do they really make you more innovative? Working for prestigious firms: is it really worth it? If you don't pursue a prestigious firm, what should you pursue? What one experience did I personally have early in my career that completely changed my perspective about what I wanted to accomplish in design? Join Love Your Work Elite Some levels of Love Your Work Elite now include a video (and audio) Masterclass with Poornima Vijayashanker. Poornima was engineer #1 at Mint, and shows you how make money off your idea from day one. Sign up at lywelite.com. Feedback? Questions? Comments? I love to hear anything and everything from you. Tweet at me @kadavy, or email me david@kadavy.net.     Sponsors http://pistollake.com/loveyourwork Show Notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-internship-advice/

All this month, Joy Dixon and I have been digging into the theme of working on side projects that you’re passionate about. We started out by talking about how to keep your day job and pursue your passion project on the side, and last week we talked about how to keep your passion project moving along when you physically can’t.   In today’s final episode, on side projects for this month, we’re going to talk about how to keep your passion project growing despite challenges.   When we’re just getting started all the passion we have for our side project makes us feel like we can tackle small challenges that come up every day. But over time we start to uncover bigger challenges like funding, dealing with regulations, lacking experience, and missing self-imposed deadlines and milestones.   When we hit one of these challenges we feel stuck. Our side project stops growing, and again we’re tempted to quit.   Instead of giving up, it might be time to re-evaluate the direction and purpose of our side project.   In today’s episode Joy is going to share how she responded to all the challenges she ran into while setting up and growing her side project Mosaic Presence. You’ll learn:   How to embrace not being ready Why you need to build a support system for your side project Why Keep Your Side Project Alive Even If It’s Not Growing Why Our Self-Imposed Deadlines Slip And Having A Day Job Helps When They Do How to re-evaluate the direction and purpose of our side project instead of giving up on it   Know someone who is starting a side project? Please share this episode with them!     Transcript   Poornima: Previously, Joy and I dug into why it's totally OK to keep your day job and pursue a side project. We also talked about how to manage your time and your energy. If you missed either of those segments, I highly recommend you check them out. I've included the links to both of them below this video.                                 In today's segment, we're gonna tackle the final topic: how to continue growing your side project, despite the bumps.                                 Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of conversations I have with innovators. Together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. Thank you, Joy, for joining us again.   Joy Dixon: Hey, great to be here.   Poornima: It's been two, two and a half years since you started Mosaic Presence. Surely you've hit some bumps along the way.   Joy Dixon: Yes.   Poornima: In those bumps, as you were experiencing them, how did you respond to them?   Joy Dixon: I took them all as learning opportunities. There was a lot I didn't know. I was very clear about being in the classroom. Very clear about teaching code. But a lot of the other parts of it—like creating my business, incorporating all those different I's and T's—I did not know about those. I really just took it in stride. I was like, "OK, cool. Now let me jot it down and I can share this with the next person."   Poornima: That's awesome. That kind of answers my next question, which is, what did you learn from that? It sounds like you learned a lot.   Joy Dixon: Totally. I learned a lot, how to actually set your business up, how to establish it, how many, where the offices are in the city of Oakland who are like, "Go and file this paperwork." So I really just took it all as a big learning opportunity and it's just really great. It was really great.   How To Embrace Not Being Ready   Poornima: One of the things we talked early on about was being ready. Since you didn't know all this stuff, it didn't make you feel like you weren't ready to do it?   Joy Dixon: No. That thing called Google has really instilled a lot of confidence in me. I would really just go Google. So many people put out so much great material, like yourself.   Poornima: Thank you.   Joy Dixon: Right?   Poornima: Yeah.   Joy Dixon: So you can just follow along, learn some things. It's really easy to just keep moving forward.   Why You Need To Build A Support System For Your Side Project   Poornima: Nice. When you did hit those bumps, in hindsight we're like, "Oh yeah, it was a learning opportunity." But they sting in that moment, right? It's like, this is really difficult. Yeah, I'm sure I'm gonna look back and learn on this. How did you manage that moment when the bump hits you?   Joy Dixon: When the bump hit me, I leaned on my loved ones. Honestly. My best friend, my inner circle. Because the bump hit, and it was a really big bump. Yes, without a doubt, on this side of it, it's a learning opportunity. But in the midst of, and I remember the exact moment when there was so many things coming at me, but the exact moment is when my MacBook Pro just went blank. And I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is it right?" That was the moment that I pretty much lost it. 'Cause I was like, everything was rolling and even I hit bumps I could still manage. But I was like, "Everything is on this machine." Thank goodness for the people in my life, really.   Poornima: Building a support.   Joy Dixon: I would tell people, have that support system. They don't have to be in the same field you are, they just have to support you. That's really so important.   Poornima: Nice. Again, because we're in that moment, we think, "OK, we can get through this." But there comes a time where we keep hitting those tough bumps. And it can kind of phase us, right?   Joy Dixon: Yes.   Why Keep Your Side Project Alive Even If It’s Not Growing   Poornima: Why did you decide to keep going in spite of?   Joy Dixon: Really what I did, was I stopped and I looked at what was really causing a lot of the pain for me. It was really my timeline. It was my timeline. 'Cause I had said, I wanted this completed by this. When I initially opened up Mosaic Presence and started doing it, I was like, "Oh. Four months. I'll be done. It'll be up and running. I'll have 30 students two weeks after that." Right?   Poornima: Yeah.   Joy Dixon: None of that came to fruition. It was really, "Wow." Sad to learn how to let go and just keep moving forward. Have a direction, but not be attached to the outcome. That was really what made it easier to go through the process, 'cause it was really my struggle and my holding on tight and wanting things to go my way that was really causing all of my extra pain.   Poornima: I like what you said about the timeline, 'cause this is something I talk to a lot of founders about. Those who are both technical and nontechnical. It's just, “We anticipate it taking three months, six months,” it ends up taking—heaven forbid—a year.   Joy Dixon: Yes.   Why Our Self-Imposed Deadlines Slip And Having A Day Job Helps When They Do   Poornima: Sometimes 18 months. I think going back to the overall theme, that's kind of why it's nice to have that day job, to have a little bit of a footing and continue that side, because you don't know how tumultuous it's going to be. I think that's hard for people to wrap their head around, "Why would it take double the time? Why wouldn't it be done tomorrow? Why can't I just fix this thing with one pixel? Why is this not a five-minute fix? Why is this a five-day or a five-month sort of thing?"   Joy Dixon: It really is so true. And that's so good to put that out there for everybody to really understand that. Having a day job made it easier for me to get through those times. Because one of the things I really was concerned about with Mosaic Presence and actually starting it was the energy that I brought to it. I wanted everything to have a certain level of peace and calm. Just to create a great learning environment.                                 I wanted my students to be my number one. I wanted to serve my students. I didn't want to all of a sudden see them walk through the door, "OK, you're the rent." You know, I didn't want to look at them like that. I really wanted to look at them as, "Well, I'm really trying to expand your opportunities. I really want to be in community with you. That's how I want to see you, and that's how I want you to feel in this classroom." I wanted to talk all that extra pressure off of them and off of myself. That's why I maintain the full-time job.   How To Re-evaluate The Direction And Purpose Of Your Side Project Instead Of Giving Up On It   Poornima: Let's talk about the learnings, 'cause there is that moment where you can look back and you can say, "I learned something." How has that caused you to change course?   Joy Dixon: Really, the timeline is the main thing. The timeline and allowing it to just unfold. Instead as opposed to being super directed about, "I want this to happen, this way, at this time.” Now it's more of an unfolding as I go through Mosaic presence. The amazing parts about this is all these opportunities are coming to me.   Poornima: Yeah.   Joy Dixon: I'm not out there actively seeking. I'm allowing things to just happen and transpire.   Poornima: Sure.   Joy Dixon: It definitely is challenging. It is really challenging. Like I said, I'm Type A.   Poornima: Yeah. I was just gonna say, as a, I shouldn't say recovering, as a present Type A, I think part of the challenge is, and also having been a software engineer, when you see something done and it's shipped, that's when you get this great sense of like, "I accomplished something." But when stuff isn't, then it causes you to, "Oh my God. I gotta do all these other things now to make this thing happen because this deadline has been pushed." There's this level of unease. When you said, learning to sit with it, I think that's the challenge. Learning to let go, that's the challenge. When it doesn't happen, we don't have that nice to-do list checked off. We don't have that thing to show, so we don't have that sense of accomplishment.   Joy Dixon: Yes. That was really it. It's about redefining success. Really. 'Cause is it the journey? Or is it the destination?   Poornima: Yeah.   Joy Dixon: I know people say it all the time, but it really is like, "Oh, with each step. Each step I have a success." Celebrate each and every single step towards your goal. 'Cause otherwise it's gonna be a painful journey. It really is. That has really been the thing that has helped me a lot. It is a big walk of faith.   Poornima: There are obviously times where you felt like you were banging your head against the wall. It wasn't working. You needed to change the timeline. You've kind of kept at it because you've been doing this now for two and a half years. Somewhere in that period of time, there must have come a moment where you felt like, "OK, what I'm doing, it's making an impact. It's actually bringing me joy." Right?   Joy Dixon: Yes.   Poornima: How did that feel for you? When was that?   Joy Dixon: That felt great. That felt really great. Really it was just encountering...It was actually when I started reaching out to former students for testimonials and to see that, "Oh, they're a director of this part. They're a senior software engineer over here." The words that they sent back about the impact that I had on their lives was like, "Oh my goodness." That was an amazing thing. That reminded me that this is why I do what I do. There is no better feeling in the world than being able to support somebody and assist them on their journey in moving forward.   Poornima: How do you continue to keep growing your presence?   Joy Dixon: Yeah. Ba-dump-bump. Actually even meeting young people. Young people are really great and they're super inspiring. People who are like me, who are like, let me transition and acquire some new skills and really kind of show them that, "Hey, I do this. You can do this." And when they see that and they get that light in their eye, then that makes all the difference in the world to me.   Poornima: Any final recommendations you have for our audience when it comes to growing their side project?   Joy Dixon: Yeah. Keep at it. I really do mean that. Keep at it. Every single step counts. Do what you need to do to take care of yourself. That is of the utmost importance. Your self care is number one. Always do something on your project every single day, even if it's some small thing. But just something every single day, that way you'll feel like, "Oh, you're nurturing yourself. You're being and you're nurturing yourself like your project and your baby.” That would be my recommendation.   Poornima: Those are wonderful words to end on. Thank you so much.   Joy Dixon: Awesome. Hey, thank you, this has been so great.   Poornima: For people that want more, how should they get in touch with you?   Joy Dixon: They can reach me at mosaicpresence.com and feel free to send me an email at joy@mosaicpresence.com. I'd love to hear from you.                                This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.

In last week’s episode of Build, we began exploring the theme of pursuing a side project while keeping your day job. Jox Dixon and I did some myth busting around the need to go all-in. If you missed the episode you can check it out here.   This week we’ve got a pretty meaty episode for you. We’re going to dive deeper into this theme, and talk about what to do when the inevitable happens: you can’t physically work on your side project.   We thought it was particularly important to tackle this topic because it’s happened to both Joy and myself more than once, and it’s probably already happened to you or you’re thinking about how to handle it when it does.   The common culprits that hold you back from physically working on your side project are burnout and stress. Each is often prompted by teammates at your day job needing you more, you feeling the need to do everything yourself, and not having enough help on your side project or feeling like you can’t ask for help!   People often think it’s the quality of the idea that determines the success or failure of a side project. But really it depends on how you respond each of these issues as they arise. Of course, it can be tempting to just give up and move on, because hey it’s a side project! But if you’re really passionate about your side project, it can be hard to let go, and you’ll want to continue to make progress.   So in today’s episode, you’ll learn the following:   Why it’s OK to take periodic breaks from your side project Why it’s important to say NO to things to avoid burning out How to set boundaries with your teammates at your day job, when they want more of your time How to ask others for help How to find people who are interested and motivated to work on your side project Why it’s OK if you don’t have knowledge or experience in some areas and can delegate that work to those who do Why you don’t have to respond to every improvement request immediately       Transcript   Poornima: In today's segment, we're going to talk about how to manage your time and energy around a side project. I know there's been a lot of talk around time management and energy management, so I'm going to dive right into some of the tougher topics.                                                   Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each episode of *Build* consists of conversations I have with innovators in tech. Together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and advancing your career in tech.   Why It’s OK To Take Periodic Breaks From Your Side Project                                                   We're continuing our conversation with Joy Dixon, who is a visionary and entrepreneur with 20 years’ of industry experience. In addition to having a day job as a software engineer, she runs a technical training school called Mosaic Presence. I know for myself, Joy, I have recently gone through a tough month, where I had a lot of health issues, and I just couldn't physically be there to nurture all of my side projects. Let's start by talking about how do you keep these projects humming along when you maybe physically can't?   Joy Dixon: Yes, that is a great question. That is a really great question, because that actually happened to me a couple of times last year, major health issues. It was really an opportunity to take a break.   Poornima: Good.   Joy Dixon: I took it as an opportunity to take a break, so I slowed down a little bit. It gave me enough space to refocus and to prioritize. That was something. Instead of trying to do everything, let's actually set up that list where this is number one, this is number two, and if we get those two things done, that's good. We don't need the full 30 done today.   Poornima: Nice.   Joy Dixon: That was really it.   Why It’s Important To Say NO To Things To Avoid Burning Out   Poornima: I remember in last segment, you mentioned that lovely word, which we started this year talking about, that N word. Let's hear it. Saying “no” to things. Right?   Joy Dixon: Yes, yes.   Poornima: What's your magic way of saying “no” to things?   Joy Dixon: I do it graciously. Really. I have said “no” to more things in the past two years, and not just like, "Hey, let's go hang out," but no to weddings. No to graduations. No to major birthday milestone parties. Really just having to make a decision and having to...most people have been receptive, because it's you're like, "Oh, I'm doing X, Y, Z. I'm working on Mosaic Presence. It's really important to me. Can we get together at a different date?"   Poornima: Right.   Joy Dixon: Most people have been more than receptive for that and really super supportive. I think just the practice. It's about practicing and getting comfortable with putting yourself and your dreams and your desires first.   How To Ask Others For Help   Poornima: In addition to saying “no,” I also have to get comfortable asking for stuff. How have you gone about getting help from other people?   Joy Dixon: My network has been really super great. I have really just reached out to them, because I'm very clear about what I know, which means I'm super clear about what I don't know.   Poornima: Yeah, yeah.   Joy Dixon: With that, I just reach out to people. Most people I have found...people have been so super helpful and want to help. Maybe not on the timeline that I have, but they are—   Poornima: That's important.   Joy Dixon: That is very important.   Poornima: I think you should say it one more time. Yeah.   Joy Dixon: Yes, people are very receptive. Maybe not on working on my timeline, but they do come around, and they do help. So just really learning to accept the help when it's available has been really, really good for me.   Poornima: I'm sorry. I had you repeat that, because I think a lot of times, when we get so passionate about our idea, and we want to put in the effort, we think everyone else is like, "Yeah. I can do this, too. I can quit whatever I was doing," but they need a little bit more lead time, because they also have commitments that they want to keep up. We just have to be respectful about that.   Joy Dixon: Really, having my own passion and my own project, really, I have more understanding for people when they have theirs. I'm like, "Oh, OK. We'll do it in two weeks, then."   Poornima: There you go. Now, here's the thing. I think a lot of people...because you mentioned before being type A. We get really averse to asking for help, though...   Joy Dixon: Yes.   Poornima: ...because it's our baby. We just have to figure out a way to get over the hump. How have you gotten over the hump of asking for help?   Joy Dixon: Yeah. That one's a really great question. I love that question, because I still do that. I'm still in process and learning how to do that. Back to knowing what I know and knowing what I don't know and really everything is an opportunity for me to learn. The teaching, writing code, I know all of that. The accounting? Oh, no. I don't know that. It's really just allowing myself to learn. Another thing along with that is being super clear about what I'm doing. When I'm super clear, then it's easier for me to find people and for people to find me who also want to support my project.   Poornima: Yeah.   Joy Dixon: Yes.   Why It’s OK If You Don’t Have Knowledge Or Experience In Some Areas And Can Delegate That Work To Those Who Do   Poornima: You said a couple of things here that were interesting. The first is knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know. That's good. That's the first level. Then the second level you said is getting the help for the things that you don't know. One question I get asked a lot is, "Oh, should I just dive in and learn that accounting?" Especially people in our audience. They might think, "Well, I don't know coding. Should I do that as an entrepreneur instead of hiring somebody?" What's been your response, or how do you handle that? "This is a way for me to learn. Maybe I just want to hire somebody and get it over with?"   Joy Dixon: Yeah. That's really good. Disclaimer. Type A. I actually spend time in each of the areas that I don't know, at least so I can have a conversation, a more intelligent conversation with the people. I can also vet people.   Poornima: Bingo.   Joy Dixon: I don't have to know it all. I'm not looking for a master’s degree in accounting.   Poornima: Sure.   Joy Dixon: At the same time, what I am looking for is a certain sense of, "Oh." When I have a conversation with somebody, I know the questions to pose, and then when they give me a response, I'm like, ‘Oh, that sounds good.’”   Poornima: Yeah.   Joy Dixon: Yes.   Poornima: I like to call that the BS detector.   Joy Dixon: There we go.   Poornima: Yes.   Joy Dixon: There we go.   Poornima: You know just enough to be a little dangerous, but at the end of the day, you don't want to do the work.   Joy Dixon: No.   Poornima: Yeah. You want to get somebody else who has deeper subject matter expertise in it.   Joy Dixon: Exactly.   Poornima: Wonderful.   Joy Dixon: That's great. I like that.   How Find People Who Are Interested And Motivated To Work On Your Side Project   Poornima: Yeah. Of course, there are times where we hire people, and they, for whatever reason, let us down, either because they didn't meet our standards or just things happen. That can cause us to become dispassionate, because you think, "Oh, maybe my idea isn't that great. That's why other people don't want to work on it." How do you stay motivated through those moments where some people just let you down or drop the ball or don't execute quite to the same level?   Joy Dixon: You're the great questioner. OK? Really, that one is back to self. Everything comes back to self for me and self-awareness. Am I super excited and I'm super jazzed? It's really my thing. I really can't hold anybody or put them on a hook to have the same passion about my thing as I do.   Poornima: OK. That's important. Yeah. I think that's a good takeaway.   Joy Dixon: That's really important first and foremost. It's really about just getting super clear about what I'm doing. I call it the lighthouse effect, like shine my message even brighter. For those people who are really attracted to it, it will make them easier to find me. Those people who are kind of like on the fence, then they'll stay away. Then we really won't have too many of these interactions.   How To Set Boundaries With Your Teammates At Your Day Job When They Want More Of Your Time   Poornima: No, that's good. Yeah. I think another issue I've seen that arises a lot is people want more of your time. Let's say at your day job or your side project, and you've got to figure out how to set those boundaries. How have you done that?   Joy Dixon: Yeah, that one is a really challenging one. Really. Like I said before, if you have social events, you have family events, those are really challenging.   Poornima: But even within your existing day job or your existing side where they want more of your time.   Joy Dixon: Yeah. Really, for what I've done with the boundaries is, “this is the boundary,” because I know any overflow will affect everything else. It will have a ripple effect. You might think, "Oh, I'm just going to spend these extra few hours doing this," but it will really have a ripple effect and take away from the other part. It's super important to get very clear and to just maintain those boundaries.   Poornima: What does that look like for you? Let's say somebody at your day job is like, "Hey, Joy. Really could use your help. Could you stay another hour or two to help me out with this thing?"   Joy Dixon: Balance of an hour or two?   Poornima: Yeah.   Joy Dixon: Sometimes it would be “yes,” and then sometimes it would be “no.” Honestly, it's truly contextual. If I have to teach a class, then the answer is “no.” If I'm available, then I can do it. It really is situation.   Poornima: In that moment.   Joy Dixon: In that moment, exactly.   Poornima: OK, got it. Then same thing for your side project. If someone says, "Hey, Joy. I really need you to help us do X, Y, and Z."   Joy Dixon: Yes.   Poornima: The same thing.   Joy Dixon: Yes, because I'm beholden to both, so I have to keep both at the forefront of my mind.   Why You Don’t Have To Respond To Every Improvement Request Immediately   Poornima: Now, there's also times where we want to do more. Maybe that project at work, we want to go that extra mile, or in the side project, it's like, "Ooh, wouldn't it be really cool if I could add this and that? That's going to take another couple of days. It's going to take maybe another hour of staying awake or setting up another meeting. Do I have the room? Does it make sense to do that or not?" How do you manage those...I like to call them requests?   Joy Dixon: Those requests. Are they from...   Poornima: From yourself.   Joy Dixon: Did I initiate them?   Poornima: Yes, yes.   Joy Dixon: OK.   Poornima: Yeah, you just feel so compelled. Maybe it's external, like a customer saying or a student saying, "Hey, it would be really great if you guys also provided Y."   Joy Dixon: Yes. That would definitely have to go on the lovely big corkboard that I keep in my bedroom full of great ideas. It would be in the parking lot, and then I will revisit it in time. There are so many things I want to do. There's so many things. Every time I teach a class, I'm like, "Oh. Take notes on the curriculum. I want to teach it this way next time. I'll say it this way next time." Then I just have to wait for next time. There are just certain times you can't make those changes each and every time. Having that break. Once again, I know I speak about space a lot, because space has really allowed me to decide. Is it something I really need to do, or it's just something in the moment that just felt like a good idea?   Poornima: Ah, that's good. What's your barometer for that?   Joy Dixon: Time.   Poornima: OK. Letting it sit.   Joy Dixon: Time and emotion. Really. There is a part that's like jazzed and this is great, and making it that part, I would move forward with that. If it's like fear or like, "Oh, I need to hurry up and get this to market," then anything that comes from that place is something that I really just sit with for an extended period of time, because if it's supposed to be done, then it will be done.   Poornima: Thanks so much, Joy. This has been really helpful.   Joy Dixon: My pleasure.   Poornima: Yeah. For all of you out there, if you've had a side project that you've been working on for a while, I'm sure you have your go-to for managing your time and energy. Joy and I would love to hear what it is. Please share it with us in the comments below this video.                                                    This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.

It’s a brand new month, and we’ve got a new theme we’ll be tackling on our show Build! We’re going to be talking about building, managing, and growing a side project you are passionate about while keeping your day job. I’m sure you’re aware of all the benefits that come with a side project: you get the chance to explore and learn new skills. And if it’s 100% yours, you get full creative freedom. However, you’ve probably heard that once your side project starts to grow you need to make a decision… You need to decide to go ALL-IN! You need to quit your day job and pursue that side project. Otherwise, you’re not really passionate about your idea, you’re not committed, and chances are you’ll appear less than focused! But going all-in on a side project can be a real challenge for many of us that don’t have the means, really like our day jobs, and truly want to have something on the side. Well, it turns out you don’t actually have to go all-in, and in today’s episode we’re going to tackle this myth. In future episodes we’ll talk about how to manage your time + energy when you physically can’t and what to do when your side project is facing a number of challenges. To help us out I’ve invited Joy Dixon, who is a visionary and an entrepreneur with 20 years’ of industry experience. In addition to having a day job as a software engineer, Joy also runs a technical training school in Oakland, California called Mosaic Presence. So Joy is definitely someone who walks the talk! In today’s episode you’ll learn: How to pursue a side project while holding down a full-time job, when you don’t have the means to go “all-in” How and why it’s important to share your side project with your current or future employer How to respond to people who think you aren’t “focused”       Transcript Poornima: I'm sure you've heard that it's a wonderful idea to have a side project. After all, a side project will help you learn a new skill or explore something. But once that side project starts to grow, then you've got to quit your day job and go all in. If you don't, you're just not that passionate about your idea, you're not committed, and you could appear less than focused.                                                   Today we're going to tackle this myth, and in future segments we'll dive into how to manage your time and energy and grow your side project.                                                   Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker, I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each episode of *Build* consists of conversations I have with innovators. Together we debunk myths and misconceptions that are relating to building products, companies, and your career in tact.                                                   I've invited Joy Dixon, who is a visionary and an entrepreneur with 20 years’ of industry experience. In addition to having a day job as a software engineer, Joy also runs a technical training school called Mosaic Presence.                                                   Thanks so much for joining us today, Joy.   Joy Dixon: Thank you for having me here, this is great.   Poornima: You and I met at a conference recently and I'd love to just get to know you a little bit more. Tell us how did you get introduced into tech?   Joy Dixon: Actually in the sixth grade. I actually had a teacher, who said, "Hey, let's do tech." She was doing computers, it was back in the day with dummy terminals. Learned Basic, line number 100, duh, duh, duh, line number 200 duh, duh, duh. That's actually how I started in tech.   Poornima: Wow, that's great that you got exposed to it so early and now it's brought you full circle where you're doing, you're teaching. Let's take it a step back, you have a day job right now. What's your day job?   Joy Dixon: I have a day job right now. My day job is writing code. I'm a senior software engineer and I write code by day and then I teach people to write code by night.   Poornima: That's awesome. Your side project is Mosaic Presence. Tell us a little bit about it.   Joy Dixon: Mosaic Presence is my thing. That is the one thing that I do. So there is, it is truly my bliss, it is a software development training school, we have a mobile focus and really it's about expanding opportunities and creating community. That is the main purpose of it all. We take brand new people, if you're a complete beginner, we'd love you there. Then we move on and we do mobile stuff, we teach people how to make SMS apps. As well as your standard apps, either iOS or Android, whatever one's your preferred flavor.   Poornima: Nice. What inspired you to start Mosaic Presence?   Joy Dixon: Actually I've been teaching for 10 years and I've taught at various companies professionally, as well as various universities, and I just really wanted to do my thing. I wanted to teach things in my way. And then also with, just when I went back to school to get my Master’s, I had to do that at night and on the weekends because I too had to keep my day job. I wanted to create a program that would allow people to also keep their day job as well acquire new skills.   Poornima: Nice. You've been doing this for how long now? Mosaic Presence.   Joy Dixon: Mosaic Presence? Two and half years. The first half year was a pilot program that I ran and that was really great, there were so many companies who allowed me to use their space. Then actually putting pen to paper and creating a business was in 2015.   When To Start A Side Project   Poornima: OK, great. How did you know you were ready to start this? I know a lot of people are like, "Oh I want to teach." Or, "I want to do this thing." Or, "I want, want, want." But it's hard to get over that hurdle and then start doing it. You mentioned you'd been teaching before, but when did you decide, “Now I want to make this into my side project and then a business?”   Joy Dixon: Into a business. This is actually really great. This is actually my second time at bat. 'Cause before I was just doing software consulting and I was building websites and doing consulting for people, and then that business went down because it did. I was working too much and not working on my business.                                                   Actually that was really good because it gave me a foothold this time to make sure, if you're doing Mosaic Presence, you're going to make sure you spend the time doing Mosaic Presence as well as maintaining your day job.   Poornima: So you had a little bit of a, let's call it failure.   Joy Dixon: Totally.   Poornima: It taught you how to do things the second time around.   Joy Dixon: I call them learning opportunities.   What It’s Like To Hold Down A Full Time Job And Pursue A Side Project   Poornima: I like that. Then let's talk about managing the business while you're doing your day job. What's that like?   Joy Dixon: A lot. It is really a lot. It is about time slicing, honestly. I pretty much sleep between 12 and 5, those are my hours. Before I go to work, I work on Mosaic Presence and then I teach at night. It's really time management, time management is key, there are a lot of nos to invitations to go places and to socialize because the weekends are really meant for me to spend on my business.   Poornima: I want you to hold that thought 'cause we're going to talk about that in the next segment. I want to skip ahead, why even do this on the side and keep your day job? Why not just save up a bunch of money and then say, "Peace." And go and just focus on your side?   Joy Dixon: That is a definitely a way to go if that works for some people. For me, this couldn't wait. Mosaic Presence couldn't wait and I wanted to fund it and then just make it happen. I was like, let's just do this. And the way I can do this and keep it in my control is to keep my day job.   Why You Should Tell Your Employer About Your Side Project   Poornima: The other issue that I know that a lot of our audience is probably thinking about is, what about your employer? How do they feel about it?   Joy Dixon: I told them. That was really, really, really important and key. Because when you start to kind of do stuff in the dark then you really don't do it. I was very open and honest with them that this is the thing that I'm doing. I just felt better about that, just being transparent. This is my love. I'm working here and I'm going to do my best and I'm gonna work in excellence as always do but this right here is my love.   Poornima: What was their reaction to it? Was there any, "Well, we need you here?"   Joy Dixon: They basically were like, "Hey, if you can do your job."   Poornima: OK, good.   Joy Dixon: So that worked out really well. I really appreciated that.   Poornima: So finding that fit.   Joy Dixon: Yeah.   Poornima: Yeah, I talk to a lot of people who when they know that they need to financially or intellectually have that day job, they negotiate up front with that future employer or the current employer. But they don't leave them in the dark because it gets them into deep water.   Joy Dixon: It really does.   Poornima: Later on.   Joy Dixon: It really does. I would definitely agree with that and recommend that to anybody's who's doing both. It could be a little scary especially if you're already in your current job. And they're like, "Oh, why are you doing this all of a sudden? Are you planning to leave?" At the same time I think it's just better just to have it out there. And it just makes you feel better in general and you put forth your effort.   How To Share Your Side Project With Your Employer   Poornima: Do you have some techniques you can share with the audience for even how to start that conversation with a current employer?   Joy Dixon: I would really find somebody who you feel safe with. If it's not your manger. Even if it's not, just like, "Hey." Have the dialogue and then at that point in time you do need to move it up the chain. But I would check all the lovely documents that they have for you to check. To see if this is even OK.   Poornima: That's true.   Joy Dixon: Before you even have a conversation. 'Cause that's really the challenge is the conflict piece.   Poornima: I do know some places there are very, very strict where you're not even allowed to do things like, "Oh, I took $100 for tutoring this kid on a one-off basis."   Joy Dixon: No really?   Poornima: Yeah. You're just not allowed to take money. To your point, check the documents first.   Joy Dixon: Check the documents first because there's a lot of times when people will think it's something but what's actually written on paper, 'cause that's really going to be what happens.   How To Respond To People Who Think You Aren’t “Focused”   Poornima: Aside from your employer, you probably told other people that you're working on this and on the side in addition to your day job. They were probably less than supportive. How do you manage those reactions where they're like, "Oh Joy, that's not very focused." Or, "How are you going to manage all of this? Seems like a lot."   Joy Dixon: It's really interesting 'cause part of me and the people in my life know I'm type A so they're just like, of course you are. But there are those people definitely who aren't as familiar with me or don't know me as well who do have that response. Really I just take it in and I'm like, “OK.” When you find that thing and Mosaic Presence is my thing, it actually energizes me. It energizes me and sets my energy in a space that makes me more creative, more full of life, more joyful, no pun intended. That's what I respond with that. And when people see that passion and they feel that energy then they're usually are like, "OK, keep going."   Poornima: They get it. That's good, wonderful.                                                   Well, thank you so much Joy for sharing.   Joy Dixon: It's my pleasure. Thank you.   Poornima: Now Joy and I want to know, are you worried about going all-in on an idea and would prefer to start something on the side? You've got some concerns? Share those concerns with us in the comments below this video and we'll be sure to take a look at them and respond shortly.                                                   That's it for this segment, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next segment where we'll talk about how to manage your time and your energy as it relates to your side project. Ciao for now.                                                   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.  

What Is Tech Debt And How Do You Manage It It’s crunch time! You’ve got eager customers who are waiting for you to ship product, your teammates are eager to complete the release and move on, and you don’t want to be the bottleneck. So what to do you? You rush through writing your code and put in a quick fix. It’s good enough to pass tests and a quick code review. Unfortunately, crunch time doesn’t come around once in a blue moon. It happens more often than we’d like. And sadly it gets heralded by sayings like: “Move fast!” “Break things!” And, “Ship code!” As designers, product managers, and developers we are eager to share what we’ve built with customers. However, constantly operating by the seat of our pants comes at a price and that price is tech debt. Whether you have or haven’t heard of tech debt, I’m pretty sure you’ve experienced its effects. If you’ve been on product teams that seems to constantly be putting out fires, you’ve probably noticed that over time all those quick fixes add up. And when it comes time to build something brand new, what would normally take a few hours or days, suddenly takes weeks or months. The reason it takes so long is because there’s a lot of cruft built up in the code base. Continuing to layer on quick fixes will only destabilize the code and impact its quality. If you’ve struggled to deal with tech debt on your product team, or want to educate new teammates on how to manage it, then today’s Build Tip is for you! I’m joined by Jay Hum who is a Product Manager and Pivotal, and together we’re going to be sharing: What tech debt it is and how to recognize it When it make senses to accrue tech debt – yes there are time where it makes sense to let it build up When to pay it down or just continue to ignore – unlike other types of debt, you don’t always need to pay down tech debt When it’s too late to pay down debt tech and what to do Be sure to share the episode with your teammates to help them understand the importance of tech debt! Want more resources on tech debt? Here's a link to the post Jay mentioned in the episode: Introduction to the Technical Debt Concept https://www.agilealliance.org/introduction-to-the-technical-debt-concept/   Transcript Poornima: When your product has a nasty bug that's impacting a lot of users, your first priority is to put a fix in that's going to help resolve it. You might hear your developers say something like... Developer: Yeah, I'll just put in a quick fix. Poornima: A week may go by, maybe possibly a month, and you've got another nasty bug on your hand. Your developer might tell you... Developer: No problem, I'll have that bug resolved by the end of the day. Poornima: Later on, you might ask them to put in a new feature, and they may respond with... Developer: Yeah, it's going to take a while. Poornima: How long? Developer: Weeks, possibly months. Poornima: “Weeks, possibly months!?” Why so long? Developer: Tech debt. What is tech debt Poornima: Wondering what's tech debt, how to avoid it, and prevent it before it gets too unwieldy? I'm going to answer these questions and many more, in today's quick *Build* tip.                                                  Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Today, I've got a *Build* tip for you. I'm joined by Jay Hum, who is a product manager at Pivotal. Jay, tell me what's tech debt? Jay Hum: Tech debt is the effort that builds up when a team makes a conscience decision to implement code that's easy, instead of building out a best solution. Poornima: OK, so what does that actually... Jay Hum: The easy-to-implement, quick, messy code, is the debt. Like any type of debt, it accrues interest over time, and so the additional effort that is built up that could either be time, money, or resources, is the technical debt that builds up that makes it much more difficult in the long run to implement a better solution. How to avoid tech debt Jay Hum: Here is the interesting thing. Tech debt is usually thought of as a bad thing, something that needs to be paid down very quickly, or avoided as much as possible, or all together. However, tech debt is actually unavoidable. Much like financial debt, there is not necessarily good technical debt, but there is technical debt that you can deal with.                                                  An example is, in the mortgage or student loan, where the principle plus the interest that you accrue could be lower than what you actually yield in terms of the investment. Any experienced or seasoned developer are always wanting to create the best possible solution that there is out there. However, sometimes you need to incur technical debt in order to get a product out to market quicker. Generally, the time to market, or the time pressure, is what makes technical debt unavoidable. How to manage tech debt Poornima: OK, it's unavoidable. How can we manage it, while continuing to meet customer needs and pushing features out? Jay Hum: Here's the thing about technical debt that makes this sort of the analogy to financial debt a little dissimilar. You don't actually have to pay down technical debt. For instance, when you're building out a product or service, there could be parts of the code that aren't used very often, or are not touched, that don't need to be changed. The RY on actually paying down that debt, or refactoring doesn't get you much, or doesn't get you anything there.                                                  One of the other ways to really look at it and approach it is build in technical debt into the product role map, or how you plan out your releases. When you think about it, you should be thinking about it in terms of what's the upside potential versus the downside risk of either paying down technical debt, or not paying down technical debt, and relate that, to again, getting a product or service out to the market quicker, or spending more time and writing more cleaner quality code. Poornima: All right, that's great that we don't have to always have to pay down tech debt, and that it's OK to accumulate it, but how do we know when to make the trade off of paying it down, versus just letting it exist? Jay Hum: Right, so one of the things that you want to look at, is what is the probability of the occurrence of something bad happening, or the probability of the occurrence of you having to do a major refactor because the technical debt has just gotten so big. Coupled with that, you also want to look at what is the impact.                                                 Again, there is smaller technical debt, where the impact of paying it down is not very big. Again, there's other parts where the technical debt can be very big, could lead to a big regression, and what is the impact on the delay to the market, or the impact to the customers that are actually using your product that's in the market right now. When you don’t need to pay down tech debt Poornima: Do you have a example of a situation where you don't need to pay down the tech debt, versus one where you do? Jay Hum: Sure, yeah. I think a really good example would be if you take a look at an app through your analytics, and you're looking at one of the features that you've implemented is not being used very often. This is a good example of, you probably don't want to pay down technical debt on that feature, because again, it's not a lot of people that are using it.                                                  Versus the flip side, so if you see that there is a feature that's being used very heavily by your users, and that they're clamoring for a feature that is sort of an add on to that feature, this is an instance where you would want to pay down technical debt quickly, so that you can build out that new feature that is an add on to the existing feature. Is it ever too late to pay down tech debt? Poornima: What happens if you leave tech debt around for too long? Is there ever a point where it's too late to pay it down? Jay Hum: There are instances where it is too late. Usually what that manifests itself is that you have to do a big rewrite, which not a lot of people enjoy doing, both from a customer perspective, as well as the development team. If you go back to what I said earlier, if you realize that tech debt is unavoidable, and you build it into your product strategy, and your product roadmap, then there's ways of being able to manage that tech debt at a good pace, so that you never have to end up with having to do a big rewrite. Poornima: Thanks, Jay. This has been really helpful. Do you have any other resources for our audiences to check out? Jay Hum: Yes, they should check out this article written by the Agile Alliance. It is called “Introduction to Technical Debt Concept,” and it goes much more deeper into some of the concepts that I discussed here around technical debt. Poornima: Now, Jay and I want to know, how do you guys handle tech debt at your company. Let us know in the comments below this video. OK, that's it for today ‘s *Build* tip. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive more great episodes of *Build*, and *Build* tips like today's. Special thanks to our sponsor Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing today's episode. Ciao for now. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).  

All this month, Karen Catlin and I have been digging into the theme of mentoring. We started out by sharing the debut Build episode on why some people are reluctant to seek mentoring, and last week we talked about how to approach mentors, set expectations, and thank them. In today’s final episode, on mentoring for this month, we’re going to talk about what you can do to become an effective mentor yourself. We understand that you might be reluctant to be a mentor for a number of reasons: you don’t have the time, you don’t feel qualified, or you feel like your experiences may not relate. Don’t worry Karen and me have you covered! You’ll learn: How mentoring is a two-way street benefiting both the mentor and mentee Why you don’t need to have same experience or perspective as your mentee Who should be holding the mentee accountable What to do when you just don’t have time, but still want to help someone who approaches you What to do when someone brings you a deeply personal problem Transcript Poornima: In the previous two segments, I've been talking to Karen Catlin, who is an advocate for Women in Tech, a leadership coach, and my co-author of our book, *Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking*. Karen and I have been digging into the importance of mentorship. We started out by talking about why you might be reluctant to seeking a mentor. Then, we talked about how you can effectively establish the relationship. If you've missed either of those segments, I highly recommend you check out the links below this video. In this final segment, we're gonna talk about how you can become an effective mentor yourself.                                                   Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of a series of conversations I have with innovators. Together, we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career. Now, I know at the beginning, Karen, you mentioned how you loved mentoring, because you get to learn a lot. I feel the same way. I think I actually learn more than maybe my mentees do and that's why I love doing it. Let's talk about some of the benefits that you're gonna experience should you choose to mentor.   Mentoring is a two-way street that benefits both the mentor and mentee   Karen Catlin: Sure, yes. It's definitely a two-way street. You may not know what you're gonna be learning from a mentee, but getting together, hearing about what's going on, the questions they ask, you are going to get insight into how you can benefit your career. You might just get a good, broad perspective of what's going on around your company or your industry. As I mentioned, maybe some great ideas for podcasts that I could listen to, or books I could read, or productivity apps I could use. I don't even know what's it gonna be, but I always pick up something when I talk to a mentee.   Poornima: Yeah. I feel like it's a great way to stay relevant. Especially if some of us are a little bit older and maybe we're not as in the know.   Karen Catlin: OK. OK. So one time I was talking to someone and they said, "TLDR." This was a few years ago to my credit, but I'm like, "TLDR, what's that mean?" So, I asked and they said, "Oh, just too long, didn't read." I'm like, "Oh, OK." Just now, I am able to just like, weave that into conversations and all of a sudden I seem really relevant.   Poornima: Totally. So you can speak the lingo.   Karen Catlin: Exactly.   Why a mentor doesn’t need to have the exact same experience or perspective as their mentee   Poornima: Now, when you were at Adobe, did you just mentor women or do you also mentor men as well?   Karen Catlin: Sure. As a senior woman at the company, I definitely was approached by a lot of woman for mentoring. Men approached me, too. I did definitely mentor both genders. I think it's important for a mentee to get advice from people who don't look like them, whether that is because of your gender, or your life experience, your...of other things that you're bringing to the company, bringing to the table. It's important for a mentee to get advice from people who aren't like them, because it's gonna broaden the set of advice that they're going to get, right?   Poornima: Sure.   Karen Catlin: Likewise, because mentoring is a two-way street, it's good for mentors to mentor people who don't look like them too, because, that is going to allow them to learn, get different perspectives, and all of that. I think everything is ups for grabs.   Poornima: Yeah.   Karen Catlin: Yeah.   Poornima: What about people who may worry that they don't have the same experience, or perspective, and so, they might not feel credible sharing their life experience with a mentee?   Karen Catlin: Oh my gosh. Don't overthink it. That's my advice for mentors here. The mentee has approached you because they respect you and they want to learn from you. You don't have to worry about, am I going to be able to provide just the right piece of experience or advice. Don't worry about it, just have a conversation, share stories, share your experience, it's gonna make a difference to the mentee.   What to do when you don’t have time to mentor someone   Poornima: I wanna talk about a couple of other issues that I see come up a lot when I recommend people mentor and they're resistant to. The first is time. “I'm just so busy, I have kids, I have a family, I have other obligations, I just don't have the time to be somebody's mentor.”   Karen Catlin: Yeah. Yeah. I get that. Because, we are all very busy. That said, if someone approaches you because they wanna get your advice, and they haven't time-boxed it following my advice from an earlier segment here. Ask them, what are you really asking for here? Can we get together and maybe, you know, if you're busy, you might say, "Can we get together for a 30-minute phone call?" for example. Ask yourself, "Do I have time maybe for a 30-minute phone call?"                                                   Chances are, you have some small segment of time that you could offer to a mentee and so, you can be responsible for saying, "Well, this is what I can give you and this is all I've got right now." If you're really too busy, you might just say, "The next two months I am just super busy on this project, can you ping me in three months’ time, and I'll bet I'll have some time for you then."   Poornima: Yeah. I think that's good. I think it's good to give people that kinda realistic picture. One thing I like to do—actually, two things I like to do—if somebody comes to me and I know they have that good directive question, like, I got this one recently, "How do you self-publish?" Well, I've already written two posts, like, pretty meaty ones. I tell them, "Read these posts and then, if you have any other questions, shoot me an email, I'm traveling a lot, I'll be sure to respond to you via email."                                                   Trying to find a 30-minute time spot across time zones, is just not gonna work for both of us. I think that's great. The other thing I say is, and you do this because you speak at a lot of events, I say, "I'm gonna be at this event, why don't we just meet there and when I'm in between sessions, would be great to come out and have a chat with you." I think finding those opportunities, you can get more flexible.   Karen Catlin: Yeah and,doing what you can to just help the person, whether that is with your actual mentoring or making a recommendation for another mentor.   Poornima: Yeah. That's a good one.   Karen Catlin: I had times, yeah, over my career, where really my mentoring dance card was just full. I really, really couldn't take on anymore mentees. When those things happen and someone approached me for mentoring, I would explain, my mentoring dance card is full. What are you really looking for from a mentor? And then I might recommend that they reach out to someone else at my company. Right?   Poornima: Yep.   Karen Catlin: Help them, move them forward in some way.   Poornima: Definitely. I know another hurdle is relevancy. Again, kind of, oh, you know, the mentee might say, "I'm looking for somebody in data science." I might say, "I don't know anything about data science, I'm just a front-end engineer or I'm a designer, why are you approaching me?" Right? It doesn't seem like my work is exactly relevant. I don't know if this is a good thing.   Karen Catlin: Yeah. It's so funny. Just a couple days ago, a mentor, excuse me, a mentee was reaching out to me and asking, "Hey Karen, I am thinking about putting on a women's only hackathon and I'd like to get your advice about how to do this." I had to tell her, "Well actually, I have very little experience with hackathons, even though I'm an advocate for Women in Tech. I think this is a great idea, but I don't have direct relevant experience to share with you. However, I do know about this one tech company who has run a women's only hackathon." I mention the name of the company, she said, "Oh, I know people who work there, I'll reach out to my network there to find out little bit more.” Again, this notion that I pushed her forward, I helped her out without really being able to answer her direct question, whether that was on data science or a hackathon.   Poornima: Yeah.   Karen Catlin: This notion, I’ve done with so many mentees, this notion of encouraging them to think about their network. Who else could they tap to get that specific experience or advice they're looking for?   Poornima: Yeah. Part of your mentorship is also helping them see what they already got, see the resources that they have at their disposal.   Karen Catlin: Exactly.   Poornima: It's not all about you having to do the work.   Karen Catlin: Exactly.   Who need to hold a mentee accountable   Poornima: Yeah. That's great. What about accountability? A lot of times people say, "How can I hold my mentee accountable? Make sure they're hitting milestones. Make sure that they are successful?"   Karen Catlin: Yeah. Gosh. Maybe I should be doing a better job at this. I really feel that as a mentor, my job is not to take any action items from the meeting, you know, it's to provide my experience, my advice, my thoughts. But, really, I'm expecting the mentee to be taking notes, to be figuring out what they're gonna do next, and to be making progress. I don't take any of that on me, but maybe I should be, I don't know how to help them. We all benefit from having accountability partners. It's just that, as a mentor, I'm already giving a lot of my time, I don't feel I need to be doing that as well.   Poornima: OK. Maybe that's something more a sponsor would do or even a coach, if you hire them?   Karen Catlin: Yeah. A coach would definitely do that for you. Otherwise, maybe it is a buddy, or a friend, or a colleague that you might reach out to, in addition to having the mentor, you have an accountability partner, who helps make sure you're making the progress you want to make.   What to do as a mentor when someone brings you a deeply personal problem   Poornima: I've had this happen a number of times, where somebody that I mentored, I see very quickly that it is not just about getting that promotion, or improving a particular thing about their career, there's some other stuff going on. It might be a personal issue, and so, how would you recommend answering that as the mentor?   Karen Catlin: Yeah. Mentors and coaches, frankly, we're not therapists. We're not trained in helping people through some deep personal issues. I remember a situation where someone had some things going on with, I think it was a teenage child, and, even though I'm a mom of teenagers, I still felt that this was something that I did not feel qualified or really feel right about providing guidance. Happy to share what I've done as a parent in different situations, but that's not getting to the point of providing therapy, so I've really had to sort of redirect the conversation and stay away from it, frankly.   Poornima: Yeah. Set some clear boundaries and make sure that they understand that.   Karen Catlin: I'm not a therapist.   What are male allies and how to become one   Poornima: Yeah. That's fair. I wanna go back to one of the earlier things that we had talked about around coaching people that may not look like you and I know as an advocate for Women Tech, one of things that you do is coach men to become better allies for women. Start by telling me, what exactly is a male ally?   Karen Catlin: Yeah. So, an ally is anyone who is in the majority and really has a point of privilege as a result. Maybe a little bit of power that other people don't have, because they're not in the majority. In tech, it's typically white men who have the position of power, they're the majority. So, it's an important thing for them to realize that they have this role to fill as an ally for women or anyone who's underrepresented in tech.                                                   They have a role to play to help those people be successful, to feel that they can be...that they're welcome somewhere, that they can be included, that they can grow their career and have an impact there. A male ally, that's what I look to them to do, is to make their environments, their teams, their company culture, more welcoming and inclusive to people who don't look like them.   Poornima: How do you help men to become male allies?   Karen Catlin: Yes. I believe there are everyday, simple actions that men can take to make their environments more welcoming and inclusive. For example, and this is something that I think that pretty much every woman who's professional, or maybe working—every woman working in tech, I'll go as far as to say that, has had this experience, where they have been talking in a meeting and some man with deeper vocal chords and a louder voice, just interrupts them and sort of steers the conversation in a different direction.                                                   There's a phrase for it, “manterrupting.” We've heard that before. What can a male ally do when they witness that behavior when they're sitting across the table and seeing it going on? They can say something with their deep, strong vocal chords, "Hey, I was actually interested to hear what Anna had to say, let's bring the conversation back to her." That's an example of an everyday action a man can take to be an ally for women in that meeting.   Poornima: Yes.   Karen Catlin: Another example, might be this whole idea-hijacking, I like to call it. Again, I think so many of us have had the experience where we have said something brilliant, awesome, in a meeting, and it kinda fell on deaf ears at the time, and then maybe a couple minutes later in the meeting, someone else says the same brilliant thing—often it's a man, only because there's gonna be so many men in these meetings.                                                   What's a male ally to do in that situation when they notice an idea has been hijacked by someone else? They can say something simple, like, "Yeah, I really like that idea, and when Jen said it a few minutes ago, she phrased it this way. I like the way you've built on it," or something like that. Another every day action a man can take to help the women and underrepresented minorities be successful.   Poornima: It's great that you are coaching men to have these everyday actions that are important and impactful. You have any others that you would like to share?   Karen Catlin: Oh, sure. Here's another space, I'll call it—forget about meetings, let's move on from meetings. We all need to have networks to be successful, to hear about opportunities, to hire from, right? When we're trying to fill roles at our company or to find jobs if we're looking for jobs. If we let our networks grow naturally and organically, chances are, we're gonna have networks of people who are just like us. “Just like me” networks. We enjoy the same hobbies, we went to the same school, we enjoy doing and talking about the same things, right? That's just human nature to reach out to people we enjoy spending time with, that's our network.                                                   I think we have a role to play, especially if we're a male ally, but we should really be looking to diversify our network, so that our networks aren't just like us and that they're filled with people who are of different backgrounds, different experiences, just went to different schools, worked at different companies and so forth. For men, specifically, I challenge them, if they go to some networking event, or a Friday afternoon beer bash or something, go introduce yourself to someone who doesn't look like you. You can define that however you want, but someone who doesn't look like you.   Poornima: Maybe shorter than you.   Karen Catlin: Maybe shorter, yes. Darker skin, gender, whatever it is. Say hello, get to know them a little bit and see if there isn't something that you can either learn from them or that you can do for them as a result. Just getting to know them a little bit. That challenge, I think, is important and I try to embrace it, too. When I go to a networking event, I tend to like to look for the women that I wanna meet and reach out to them. It's easier for me to have those conversations. It's a little bit more intimidating for me to go up to a young man in a hoodie and introduce myself and start a conversation. I try to do that myself, because I think it's important for me to diversify my network. It's good advice for not just male allies, but probably for all of us.   Poornima: Yep. Well, thank you so much Karen. This has been a lot of fun and I'm sure the audience is gonna get a lot out of this. Why don't you let us know how we can get in touch with you.   Karen Catlin: Sure. You can get in touch with me on my website, there's a contact page and that is karencatlin.com. If you want more everyday actions you can take to support diversity, inclusion, create a welcoming environment at your company, check out the Twitter handle @betterallies.   Poornima: Wonderful. Thank you. We'll be sure to share the links below the video. That's it for our episode on mentorship. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode. If you've enjoyed this segment, then please be sure to share it with your friends and your colleagues. And finally, a special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. Ciao for now.   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).

Have you already tried mentoring and found that it’s not working for you? Is it because you’re just not getting what you want out of it, or other people have convinced you it’s just not worth your time? We get that something may go wrong, which is why in today’s episode we’re going to cover ALL the things that can go wrong with mentoring. But we won’t leave you hanging… Karen Catlin (https://karencatlin.com/) and I will provide concrete tips (including some exact script to use) for: - Why you might consider finding a mentor inside versus outside your current company - How you can go about setting clear expectations with your mentor - How mentoring and coaching are different - How to decide if it makes sense to pay for coaching - Why it’s important to thank your mentor and how to do it effectively In the next video, we’ll conclude our theme of mentoring by sharing how you can get started as a mentor! Transcript Poornima: In the last segment, we talked about the importance of mentorship and why some people may be reluctant to seeking out a mentor. If you've missed the segment, I've included a link to it below this video, so don't miss it and be sure to check it out. In today's segment, we're going to focus the conversation around how you can get the most out of mentoring. Welcome back to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. Each *Build* episode consists of a series of conversations I have with innovators in tech, and together we debunk a number of myths around building products, companies, and your career in technology, because I know there's a lot of people out there who may not be aware that they are doing things that are actively acting against them from having a good mentoring relationship. Karen Catlin: Sure. What not to talk about during mentoring Poornima: Let's start by talking about what you should not expect to get out of that relationship. Karen Catlin: In a word, gossip. I used to have a mentee who would come to my office for our monthly meetings, and would sit down and just say, "So, tell me what you're hearing about. What's going around the company?" Oh my gosh, like I wasn't just going to share all of the, you know, news I had heard to this person, you know? Poornima: Right. Karen Catlin: He was just looking for gossip and it basically turned into this mentoring relationship that I hated. I really did not look forward to those meetings because like he was probing me for intelligence. It wasn't cool. Poornima: Yeah, yeah. It wasn't the purpose of the meeting. When mentoring goes wrong Karen Catlin: No. Can I tell you something else I've hated about mentoring? I had another mentee who we were working together, I think, for over a six-month period, once a month we had a meeting, and when we got together each time I would say to her, "So last time, you know, we talked about this. Did my advice help you?" Her response was various forms of, "Oh, you know, I've been too busy" or, "I didn't really think it was going to work so I didn't even try it out," but she was there to get more advice from me. Like, what was that all about, right? I was not fulfilled. I did not think my advice was helping her, and again, I hated those relationships. Poornima: Yeah, so it didn't sound like it was something that would keep you engaged as the person who was doing the mentoring. Karen Catlin: No, exactly. Poornima: Anything else that people want to be doing? Karen Catlin: I'm so glad you asked. Poornima: Yeah. Karen Catlin: The other pet peeve I have around this—and I bet most people in our audience here would be incredibly respectful of anyone's time that they were asking for mentorship—but I definitely have had people that have overstepped the bounds of that. You know, a meeting has been scheduled maybe for an hour and I can't get them to leave the office. It's like the hour is up and they keep talking, and they want me to keep providing advice. I'm just trying to get them out the door because I've got other things to do, so we really need to be respectful of the time and our time commitments there. How to set expectations for your mentoring relationship Poornima: OK, so now that we've talked about a number of things not to do, let's switch gears and talk about how to set expectations. Karen Catlin: Sure. A mentee should really be looking to the mentor for advice, but really in the context of, "Have you ever experienced this situation before?" Or, "Tell me about a time you might have had to do something like this." For example, let's say that you wanted to approach a mentor because you had to learn about a certain market vertical, right? The worst question is to go to that mentor and say, "Tell me everything I need to know about this market vertical." It puts so much burden on the mentor to be like this educator in everything. Poornima: We don't know where to start. Karen Catlin: Any way, and we don't even know where to start. It's too big a question. Much better would be to approach the mentor and say, "Hey, I need to come up to speed on this market vertical. Can you tell me how you came up to speed and learned everything you know?" Poornima: Nice. Karen Catlin: Something like that. They then can share their experiences and start talking about how they have come up to speed on the market. Poornima: Yeah. It's a lot more relatable and they have those experiences. They're not kind of fishing for things that may or may not be applicable. It's kind of your job as the mentee to figure out which piece of their experience relates back to you. Any other examples that you have? Karen Catlin: Sure. I remember mentoring someone who came to me because she wanted to explore a lateral job move and she actually asked a really good question. She didn't come saying, "Hey, I have this opportunity to do this lateral job move. Do you think I should do it?" No. She didn't say that. Instead she said, "Hey, I'm thinking about this lateral job move. Have you ever taken a lateral job move and how did you make the decision to do it?" Then we were able to have a great conversation about it. When does it make sense to pay for coaching? Poornima: It's natural to start and have maybe a coffee conversation. There are a lot of mentors, though, who are also coaches that expect to be paid, so how do you know when it's time to hire somebody? Karen Catlin: Mentors and coaches are similar and yet different as well. A mentor's job is to provide their experience, share their advice, those types of things. A coach probably has more of a discipline around helping a client in a certain way, whether that is a job transition that they're exploring and trying to put frameworks around that, or strengthening leadership skills, which is what I focus on, and every coach is different. I think a very simple way to think about this is, a coach will be—it's a business, and so there is a charge for that, and a mentor is a free thing.                                                   One thing I'll say though is every coach has a different style depending on their experiences and their approaches to things, and I am a blend. Chances are I've walked a mile in my client's shoes because I've had such a long history in tech already and all my clients are in tech, so I do provide some mentoring in terms of my coachees might ask me something, my clients will ask me something, and if I have relevant experience, I'll share that story because I think it might help them, but then I'll also be putting more of a framework around helping them achieve their goals overtime and that's why it will end up...you know, there's a payment involved, there's a cost involved. Poornima: Yeah. You're trying to get somebody to a milestone. Karen Catlin: Exactly. Poornima: You're trying to help them improve, and because there's a lot of structure around it, you then want to get paid for that versus like just general kind of coffee conversations. Karen Catlin: Right. Exactly, exactly. Poornima: For people who are evaluating when it makes sense to hire somebody, how would you recommend that they think about it? Karen Catlin: Yes. I would recommend it in terms of, first of all, if you don't have a good mentoring situation or mentoring program at your company or in a community of some sort, then that's a time to explore coaching. I would also say that if you have a situation where you're trying to grow some skills and you're very much, "Here are my goals and here's what I want to get to," and you feel that it would be something you want to do not out in public, like you don't want anyone at your company to know you're working on these skills, again, you want to do it on your own and sort of on the side, you might want to hire a coach. It also might be that you want some professional help in terms of, yeah, you respect a lot of people that you work with, but are they the right people to help you get to this point that you're trying to get to in your career? It might be time to get an external perspective and some professional help. Poornima: Yeah. I've also found that just having the accountability of meeting with somebody weekly, thinking of it as an investment, is really helpful. Karen Catlin: Yes. Poornima: Versus like, "Oh, can we grab coffee 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there?" A lot of times it's valuable, but you miss some of the context, and like you said, some of the framework that people you're paying for have done this over and over again. How mentoring differs from coaching Karen Catlin: Yeah. Here's an analogy. Let's say you think about your workouts, just to keep yourself healthy and so forth. You may have a workout buddy or a friend. You're going to go work out, go climbing, go for a walk, whatever. That's great, but if you really are serious about changing things up, you might hire a trainer at your gym to really get things moving in the right direction and get some professional help. That's similar to how you might approach coaching and mentoring. A mentor would be someone like, "Let's go for that walk together. Let's go climbing together." We're going to talk as we go, but it's going to be a little more casual. Then if you really want to get serious, you're going to hire the equivalent of the trainer at the gym. You're going to hire a coach for your career. How to thank your mentor Poornima: Last question for you in this segment. How about thanking your mentors, expressing your gratitude so that they know that their time was well spent, and they keep kind of looking out for you and want to work with you? Karen Catlin: Yeah. Mentors, even if it looks like we are professional and successful, we still enjoy being treated to a cup of coffee or a lunch. You know, it's a nice touch, and of course flowers, wine, gadgets, Teslas. I don't know. Just have some fun there. Poornima: Yeah. It'd be a toy Tesla. Karen Catlin: A toy Tesla. There you go, but seriously, gifts are always nice, but I'll tell you the most meaningful thank yous I've gotten from my mentees have been when they have come and thanked me and told me, "This is how your advice has helped me." I remember I mentored someone when I was back at Adobe just over lunch one day. It was just a one-time, casual mentoring kind of thing. A year later, she reached out to me and said, "Hey, Karen. I want to thank you for that lunch we had a year ago. You told me these things and this is what I did, and I just got the promotion I was trying to go for." I remember I went to lunch, but I didn't remember everything I told her. I shared some advice, shared some stories, whatever.                                                   For her to come back and say, "This helped me" was so important to me because that meant that I spent my time well, she really was paying attention and in sort of a circle kind of thing, it also helps me become a better mentor because now I know, "Oh, that story or that advice really resonated for her. I'll remember to use that again if someone is in a similar situation." So thank somebody by really telling them, "This is what you've shared with me. This is what you told me. This is what I did. Here's how it helped." That's the best thank you any mentor could ask for. Poornima: No, that sounds great. Well, thank you for sharing that with all of us. Karen Catlin: Sure. My pleasure. Poornima: Karen and I want to know, are there expectations that you're looking to set with your potential mentor and you're wondering how to frame them? Let us know what they are in the comments below and we'll be sure to respond to them shortly. That's it for this segment. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next and final segment on mentoring where Karen and I will be talking about how you can become an effective mentor. Ciao for now.   This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).

Welcome to Build brought to you by Pivotal Tracker! I’m your host, Poornima Vijayashanker.  Each Build episode consists of a series of conversations I have with innovators. Together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. One misconception I fell prey to early on in my career was staying heads down and waiting for someone to acknowledge my accomplishments. The thought of tooting my own horn seemed too self-promotional. I was worried about what my teammates and boss would think. It wasn’t until I came across people who helped me find my voice and style that I realized the disservice I had been doing to my career. Through their guidance and support, I realized how beneficial mentors can be to your career. While there’s been a lot of talk already about the need for mentors, in today’s segment we’re going to take a slightly different angle and explore: Why many resist seeking mentorship What is a mentor versus a sponsor When is mentoring appropriate What to expect from a mentor Why is it good to have a mentor  In future segments, we’ll tackle how to effectively get a mentor, and how you can get started as a mentor! To help us out I’ve invited Karen Catlin who is an Advocate for Women in Tech, a leadership coach, and my co-author on our book: Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking. Transcript Poornima: One misconception I fell prey to early on in my career was staying heads down and not talking about my accomplishments. I felt like it was too self-promotional to toot my own horn, and I worried about what my colleagues and my boss will think. It wasn't until I came across people who helped me find my voice, and told me that it was OK to share the work that I was doing, that I became more comfortable. And it was through their guidance that I realized how valuable that mentorship can be to catapulting your career.                                               While there's been a lot of talk already around mentorship, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper. In this segment, we'll dive into why you might be resistant to getting a mentor, and in future segments we'll talk about how to effectively approach a mentor, and if you wanna be a mentor, how to go about getting started.                                               Welcome to *Build*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker. In each episode of *Build*, I'm going to be talking to innovators in tech, and together we're gonna be debunking myths and misconceptions related to building products, companies, and your career in tech. And to help us out, I've invited Karen Catlin, who is an advocate for women in tech, a leadership coach, and my co-author on our book, *Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking*. Thanks so much for joining me, Karen. Karen Catlin: Oh my gosh, it's my pleasure, Poornima, thanks for having me.  Poornima: Yeah. This is such an exciting episode for me, 'cause you and I have been working closely for a number of years. Now, for our audience out there, I wanna go back a little bit to your days as a VP at Adobe, and walk us through what you were working on there.  Karen Catlin: Sure, sure. So I joined Adobe through the acquisition of Macromedia, so I actually worked at those two companies for 17 years, so a big bulk of my career. And while I was the Vice President there, I ran the shared engineering services, which included things like product security, product globalization, our open source, our engineering productivity tools, accessibility work. All sorts of things that we hire deep experts in those areas, and then worked across the product teams to help them with their product releases.  Poornima: In addition to your role as VP at Adobe, you were also mentoring a lot of people. Walk us through why you decided to do this.  Karen Catlin: Sure. And I actually started mentoring people much earlier in my career. I remember at one point, at Macromedia, I was a program manager, and in fact I was the only program manager for the company at the time, and I worked on a very early version of Dreamweaver, which you may remember. And as other product teams started hiring program managers, I offered to help hire them and train them, and bring them up to speed. And because of that interaction, a lot of those program managers, by default, kind of started looking to me for ongoing mentorship about how to be successful in their role. So it started out really there. And then, certainly I just kept continuing to do that as I moved up with my career and into the VP level.  Poornima: That's great that you were doing a lot of corporate mentorship, but as I know it, you also had been mentoring outside of Adobe and other companies that you worked at. Talk to us about the kind of mentorship you did outside of the company.  Karen Catlin: Sure. So there are quite a few ways to get involved in, formal mentoring programs, I'll call it, and I do that through...for example, my alma mater, where I mentor a senior, an undergraduate, who's about to start her career, and I provide mentoring during her senior year, which is great. And I get matched with someone, and it's a nice way for me to give back to the university, as well as to learn about what a senior is going through right now in her life, and trying to figure out and navigate the career options and so forth.                                                 I also do more informal mentoring, which I like to call micro mentoring, and I do that through The Women's Club of Silicon Valley, where I've been a member of that for a number of years. I've been on their board, and I certainly love helping our members with anything that they might need some advice on, some help on. And I call it more informal because we're not matched, people just reach out to me if they have advice that they want to seek, they wanna get my experience that I've had on something. And they'll just reach out and say, "Can we get a cup of coffee, get together for lunch," something like that. So it's much more informal and kind of organic that way.  Why is it good to have a mentor  Poornima: So let's dive into kind of the bigger theme here, right? 'Cause I know a lot of people say that mentoring is important, but why is it even important? Like, why do we need to do this, why can't we just read books, or ask our boss, or ask our colleagues for help when we need it?  Karen Catlin: Yeah. So first of all, I think that I enjoy mentoring because I wanna pay it forward. I want to share my experience, and help other people who might be going through similar challenges, or similar choices that they need to make, to learn from my experience. And I hate reinventing the wheel, so if I can help other people not have to reinvent the wheel themselves, if they're going through the same type of situation that I'm going through, I'd love to—or, have gone through, excuse me—I would love to share my experience with them.                                                 And this whole notion of paying it forward is one reason I mentor, but it's really a two-way street. Every time I mentor someone, I learn something from them, too—it's just not me providing my advice, I learn from them. I might learn about, you know, good new books or podcasts I should be listening to. I might learn about new productivity tools that are just, you know, a new app to do something that I had never heard off. When I was a VP I also might hear about certain challenges that people are facing, that actually helped me be a better leader, because I got intel and insight into what was going on around the organization that I might not otherwise hear about.  When is mentoring appropriate  Poornima: Yup. And for the mentee side, what are the benefits for them?  Karen Catlin: Oh, sure. So the mentees, they get to have a sounding board. For example, if they are trying to decide something, get some advice, they get to hear someone else's perspective on that. They get to hear stories about a time that that mentor maybe went through something similar, and then they can learn from that. And they just might be able to take a step back from that day to day, I'm working, I'm getting stuff done, let me step back and think about what I should be doing with my career, these choices ahead of me, how I should think about a problem differently, or a situation differently. So, so many benefits to a mentee.  What is a mentor versus a sponsor  Poornima: I've also heard of this word, sponsor, and I'm sure some of our audience has as well, so walk us through what's the difference between a mentor versus a sponsor.  Karen Catlin: Sure. So they're very different, although they may sometimes be the same person. But let me break it down. A mentor is someone that you might meet with to get their advice, and they should share their stories, their life experiences, their perspective on things, so that you get that insight into what they, you know, how they think about things. By contrast, a sponsor is someone who is influential at your company, or in your industry segment, and they are going to be in situations, meetings, different situations where they will find out about opportunities that they might think of you as a good person to fill. So they will open doors for you that you might not even know exist, right? So that's what a sponsor does, they know you well enough to recommend you for opportunities, and to support you that way.  Poornima: Yeah, a little bit more directed, then.  Karen Catlin: Yes, exactly. But you might not even know you have a sponsor. They might just be doing this behind the scenes, and opportunities are coming your way and you're not even sure why they happen. So sometimes you don't even know you have a sponsor.  Why people are resistant to mentoring  Poornima: Nice. Now, not everyone wants a mentor, why do you think people are resistant to seeking one?  Karen Catlin: Yeah, so in my current role as an advocate for women who are working the tech industry, I have talked to hundreds of women about mentoring and the importance of mentors, and the two things I hear from many women—there's a theme. The first is, "Ooh, it's so awkward to go up to someone, or send a note, and say 'Hey, would you be my mentor?'" You know, that's awkward and a little intimidating, so they don't wanna do it for that reason. And then the second reason is that they think they're imposing on someone. Everyone's so busy in tech, right? Super busy, and so why would some important person wanna take any time out to help me, right? It's an imposition, and I don't wanna go there.  Poornima: Yeah. And what would you recommend to kind of getting over those hurdles, if that's what's holding you back?  Mentoring what to expect  Karen Catlin: Right, right. So I like to break it down with my coaching clients, as I encourage them to find mentors in their companies, I like to break it down in terms of, be very specific about your ask. For example, let's say your goal is to file your first patent. That's a really clear goal, and there are...then you can look at, who do I respect around the organization who's filed a patent, and send a simple note saying, "Hey, I'd love to file a patent and I would like to have lunch with you to find out about your experience with patent filing." You know, just really simple, concise, direct, this is what I would like to do.                                                  Sometimes it might be a longer term mentorship, so another example of an ask might be, "I'm very interested in growing my career to the director level. Would you mind meeting with me for three months, once a month, for half an hour or something. I'll bring the questions, you bring the advice." Right? Just be very specific about what you need. You don't even have to say mentoring, like, that feels awkward. Just say, this is my ask, can you help me?                                                  And you'll notice with both of those, whether it's a one-off or a longer term thing, I time boxed it, right? And I think this notion of time boxing is really critical when you reach out to a mentor. If I were to say to you, "Hey Poornima, would you mentor me?" You'd be like, "What's that mean?" Like, what does that even entail? What are they asking me to do? But if I can say, "Would you meet with me for half an hour, once a month for three months," you know exactly what you're getting into, and it's a whole lot easier for you to say "Yes," or maybe, "Not right now, I'm too busy," if that's the case, right?  How mentoring relationships evolve Poornima: Yeah. Or, let's do a couple meetings first, and then if it works out, there's chemistry, you like what I'm saying, then maybe we'll do a full three months, but let's not get—  Karen Catlin: Exactly. And by the way, at the end of that time box period, let's say that is a three-month, or a six-month engagement, if things are gelling and you still wanna be learning from that mentor, and the mentor wants to continue meeting with the mentee, you can continue it. You can renew it for another period of time, another six months, three months, whatever that is. Yeah.  Poornima: Thank you so much Karen, I think that's a great place to get started with mentoring. And for all of you out there, if there was a hurdle that Karen and I didn't cover in today's segment, let us know what that is in the comments below, and we'll be sure to answer it shortly.                                                  That's it for this segment. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the next segment, where we'll continue the conversation, and talk about how to get the most out of your mentorship. Ciao for now.                                                  This episode of *Build* is brought to you by our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker. -- Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).   

There’s been a lot of debate and controversy around the lack of women and minorities being represented in tech companies from entry-level to the C-suite and board room. However, what isn’t showcased is how there is sisterhood within tech, where women are helping each other out, and enacting change at every level from schools to the board room. To talk about how women are investing and encouraging each other, I’ve invited Samantha Walravens who is the co-author of the new book Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech. If you’re a woman, minority, or male ally you’ll learn from Samantha how: Women like Maria Klawe at Harvey Mudd have tripled the number of women graduating with Computer Science degrees Women are connecting female founders to female angel investors and influencers to grow their startups Corporations are changing and disrupting the dynamics of the boardroom   This is the last episode of FemgineerTV but don’t worry it’s not the end... After hosting FemgineerTV and listening to audience members like you for the past 2 ½ years, myself and my sponsor Pivotal Tracker decided it was time for a fun format! Starting next month, I’m going to be launching a new show called Build. I think you’ll enjoy the new format for Build. Each week you’ll receive a short video on a topic to help you build a product, company, and career in tech. So stay tuned for the launch of Build :) Want to help us get the word out about Build? Please take a moment to leave a review on iTunes here. If you’ve never left a review, here is a quick tutorial on how to do. -- Poornima: Welcome to another episode of *Femgineer TV*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker, I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer.                                 In this show, I invite innovators in tech, and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building tech products and companies.                                 One of the most heated topics today is the lack of women and minorities represented in tech; from entry level, to the C suite, to the board room. While we all know this is already a problem, in today's episode, we're going to be talking about some of the solutions, and showing how there are companies and organizations enacting these solutions.                                 And to help us out, I've invited Samantha Walravens, who is the coauthor of the latest book, *Geek Girl Rising: Inside The Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech*. Thanks so much for joining us today, Samantha.   Samantha: Thanks for having me!   Poornima: Yeah, it's wonderful.                                 Let's start by talking about why you and your coauthor, Heather Cabot, decided to write this book.   Sharing The Unspoken Narrative of Women In Technology   Samantha: The inspiration for this book was a conversation I had about three years ago with a friend of mine, who's been in Silicon Valley for 20 years. She's a woman, she's the VP of sales in business development, and she's worked in a number of tech startups, and we were having coffee, and she said, "Sam, I cannot tell you what just happened in my performance group review, it was last week, and my manager commented on what I was wearing, the color of my dresses, the jewelry I wore, and he told me that I was too aggressive, and too bossy, and I needed to tone it down a bit." Meanwhile, she is the head of sales, and she was rocking her number out of the park. So she said, "Sam, you've got to write something." She knew I was a journalist. She said, "You've got to write something and you have to talk about this kind of discrimination and this kind of sexism in Silicon Valley."                                 Mind you this is before the *Newsweek* article came out, "What does Silicon Valley really think of women," people were discussing women in technology, but it really was not a top of mind—and so I started to do a little digging, and researching and interviewing women. And what I found was, yes, there's sexism, there is harassment, there's discrimination, there's unconscious bias, it's there, it's a problem we need to talk about it and deal with it.                                 But there was another narrative, another discussion that wasn't being told, which was: these women want to talk about the companies they were building, the technologies they were creating, the women who are supporting them and helping them along the way in their careers. There was this whole other narrative that was missing from the conversation that was happening in the national news media about sexism in Silicon Valley.                                 And I thought, "we have to discuss this." So, Heather Cabot, who's my coauthor, was in New York, I'm in San Francisco, we talked, and she said, "Sam, I've been researching this topic," it was kind of a coincidence, it was like one of those weird moments of weird fate. And she said, "I've been researching this topic, let's work together." So we put our heads together and we just started digging into the topic, and it's been three years now, and finally the book is coming out!   The Sisterhood That Is Supporting Women In Tech in Silicon Valley And Beyond   Poornima: So one thing I experienced early on in my career, and it keeps me motivated, is the women who inspired me. So, early on, when I was a college student in engineering school, I had a professor, and she had twins, and she was doing her research, and she was teaching, and she was leading the department, and I thought, "If she could do it, I could do it." And as I was reading the book, I noticed the theme of the sisterhood kind of coming up again and again.                                 Tell us how you discovered this theme as you started writing or as you were doing your research.   Samantha: Of course. Well, I too had a mentor back in my Silicon Valley days when I worked for a software startup during the dotcom boom in 1998 to about 2003, so I saw the dotcom boom and the bust happen, I was living through it, our company went public, stock went to 130, then went down to two, so I lived and breathed the dotcom boom and bust.                                 My manager/boss at that point was Carol Carpenter, who has since gone on to become—she was the CEO, actually CMO of ClearSlide and then CEO of ElasticBox, so she's a prominent woman in Silicon Valley, and she really pulled me up. She really, when I was lacking confidence, and I thought, "I can't do this," I'd just had my baby, my first baby, we were going public, and I thought, "I can't do this, this is crazy." We're working 24/7 and I have a newborn at home. She was the one who said, "Sam, you can do it, you can do it." And having that kind of mentorship and that kind of woman who was going through it herself pulling me up, really encouraged me.                                 So as we were researching the book, we started noticing these pockets around the startup universe, women who were supporting each other, investing in each other, encouraging each other in their careers and inspiring the next generation of girls and young women to pursue technology and continue their careers in technology.   Encouraging The Next Generation of Women To Consider Careers In Tech   Poornima: Yeah, that's great. I think you're absolutely right, that is a narrative that's missing from the media and more women need to know that that's out there as well, so that they don't feel like all there is is just what the media portrays.                                 Now, the first place that you write about change happening is at the primary school up to the high school level, so walk us through what that looks like.   Samantha: Well, fortunately, before Obama left office, he did create an initiative, a $4 billion initiative called "Computer Science for All" that is encouraging and putting funds towards creating computer science curriculum in schools throughout the country. I was so excited to read about Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, in the Chicago public schools now, computer science is a requirement for all high schools in Chicago. So I think we're going to see more of that.                                 When you look at the numbers, though, we still have a long way to go, cause 25% of high schools in the U.S. offer computer science, I think it's like 22% of girls, of students taking the computer science AP exam are girls, so we still have a long way to go.                                 What we noticed, though, it's sort of this grassroots movement of women who are encouraging the younger generations to start building, to start creating, to start coding. For example, we start our book talking about Debbie Sterling, who's the founder and the CEO of Goldie Blocks, and she's got this great—I have two little girls, we have it at home, it's a great toy that encourages girls to build, and there's a really fun, positive role model, Goldie, who builds a spinning machine and she has all these sorts of engineering—you wouldn't even know it's engineering, it's really just building Ferris wheels and building merry-go-rounds and all these fun things, along with the story, talking about Goldie and her friends, and how she's building these different fun games and amusement park rides. We have that in our household.                                 These are the kinds of things that women are doing to try to inspire the next generation. There is a woman in our book who started a company called Bitcode, she's actually working with the public schools to get them to use video to teach girls how to code. So if you have kids you know that they're on video, they're on YouTube, and they're really tech savvy. I have four kids, they can get around YouTube, and iMovie, and they're all over it. So, this tool is used in the public schools, to teach coding, using videos, to make it fun.   How Colleges Are Changing The Ratio Of Women Graduating With Computer Science Degrees Poornima: It's great, yeah, it's good to see these grassroots efforts, so that even if there is kind of a gap in terms of change for public schools or the school system in general, there's ways in which parents and teachers can supplement that.                                 So, the next place in which a lot of women and minorities drop off is at the college level, tell us who's working on changing that.   Samantha: Well, we had the most amazing experience at Grace Hopper in 2015. I believe you were there, and Heather and I, my coauthor and I went, and just to see, I think it was 12,000 women there in computing, and it is a true celebration. And to see the enthusiasm and the excitement and the bonding between these young women, it was so encouraging.                                 When you look at specific colleges, there's a lot being done to encourage more women in to pursue technology and computer science. I met with Maria Klawe, who's the president of Harvey Mudd, and wow! What a firecracker she is, she skateboards around campus, she's just a really fun, wonderful woman, and she implemented a program along with her colleagues a few years ago, where there are two tracks for computer science, so as a freshman you can take the gold track or the black track.                                 The gold track is for students who have not had any computer science experience in high school; the black track is for students who've had some experience. So, by doing this, the students who have not had experience don't feel so impostered, they don't have the confidence cause no one's had this experience, so they get through this year and I spoke to a couple of students who have taken these classes, and they say that by the end of the year, everyone's pretty much at the same level.                                 So, she, Maria Klawe, and her team has tripled the number of women graduating with computer science degrees at Harvey Mudd in the past ten years, and the number is, I hate to throw in all these numbers, cause they get little mind boggling at times, but 55% of the computer science graduates at Harvey Mudd are now women.   Poornima: That's great, it's a nice change to—the numbers go up.   Samantha: There's also Stanford. Another example of what's going on to encourage women to pursue computer science is Stanford University, of course a top institution, but they have a Women in Tech group called She++, which was started by Ayna Agarwal, and who was not even a computer science major by the way, but she started this group to encourage women and they had a Gala, every year, which gathers all the women in technology, not just Stanford. What they do is they go out into the communities and they take on high school students in different communities around the country and they support these young high school girls to start programs in their communities. For example, I live out in Marin County, and there is a girl who started a robotics happy schooler box program in Marin City, which is an underserved community in Marin County, and she runs this afterschool program in Marin City.                                 So all of these girls around the country who are starting these programs through She++ gather together for this gala, and I am telling you, if you could be there to see these college women, these high school girls who came, they were dressed to the nines, they were glamorous, I mean, talk about debunking the myths and breaking stereotypes about what a woman in tech looks like, I mean, we could have been in an LA nightclub, not to sound like—but they were so beautiful and wonderful and smart and excited to talk about their programs, and they were so excited to be in technology. And again, this is why Heather and I said, "This is a story that no one sees," you don't see this kind of enthusiasm around technology, you see, "Oh, it's so hard, numbers are dropping, it's all doom and gloom." And so we really wanted to tell that other story.   The Angel Investors And Others Who Are Supporting Female Founders   Poornima: OK. That brings us back to industry, and I know there's a lot going on at the corporate level, as well as startups. I'm of course partial to startups, so let's start there and talk about how the ecosystem is changing for women and minorities.   Samantha: There's a lot of momentum behind supporting female founders. For example, there are accelerator programs like the Women Startup Lab, which is down here at Menlo Park; there's MergeLane, which is in Colorado; there's The Refinery in Connecticut. These programs focus on female founders, and really giving them the tools, the skills they need to grow their company into a venture, fundable company. And they give the tools to learn how to pitch venture capitalists, and we all know the venture capital world is very male dominated.   Poornima: Yeah, it is a challenge. I know I've had my fair share of doing the fundraising.                                 So, there's a very common problem around women and minorities getting up and pitching their business to VCs, either male VCs not getting their idea, or they don't think it's a big enough market, or there's a lot of unconscious bias around it, so how are women getting their training to get over all of that?   Samantha: Well, you've started a company, so you know what it's like. The founders that we've met, that I've met in my journey with this book, are so passionate about their idea. But you can have an idea, and it's not going to go anywhere—you have to have the product market fit, you have to test the idea, you have to build your team out—and so these programs are really teaching women what they need to do to get to that level, to actually pitch to investors. But when you look at the numbers, I think it's 10% of the venture funding, globally, goes to female founders—it's still a really small percentage.                                 We've also noticed that there's women who are angels. So angel investors who fund companies at the early stages—for example, Joanne Wilson, aka Gotham Gal, who has a tremendous momentum in New York City, who has invested in a number of really great companies; Caren Maio, Nestio, Shanna Tellerman, Modsy—she finds these women, who have ideas that are big, that are scalable, and she nurtures them, and she's like the fairy godmother to these women. And there are other women that we talk about, we'd had to read the book to learn about all of them, but there are women who really take these female founders under their wing and support them on their journey.   Poornima: I think it's great that there are women like Joanne Wilson out there. Do you have a sense of how many companies she's invested in?   Samantha: Joanne Wilson has invested in around a hundred companies, and they're doing fantastic. One of them, Shanna Tellerman, started the company Modsy, which is an immersive, 3D environment for home décor, home design, and she told us that she created this project called “The Pinnacle Project,” at Park City, Utah, and it was Wednesday through Sunday, I think. And she invited Joanne, and Susan Lyne, and a bunch of angel investors, as well as a number of female founders, to come gather, network, ski, and have fun, and she said it was funny, because all the women were thinking, "We should be home, we should be working, we should be with the kids, we have so much to do," and she said she had to tell and remind people that, "This is what the guys do. They have a boys call and they pick off and it's all about business, whereas women don't have that sense of, “Let's go out to ski, or golf,” and that kind of networking, so it was an example of this pinnacle project, which is going to happen recurring every year, of, "OK, women, we can get together, have fun together, network, introduce each other to investors and influencers, and have fun while we're doing it. It's OK."   Poornima: Yeah. That's fantastic. And I think another thing you had mentioned pipeline ventures, or pipeline angels?   Samantha: Pipeline angels, yes, yes. Natalia Oberti Noguera is a force of nature and she started this angel investing group for women and I went through it and Heather went through it. I did it in San Francisco, Heather did it in New York, and basically it's a training, it's a bootcamp or a training program for women who are credited investors, to learn how to invest in female and minority-led companies. So it walked us through the process of how do you set evaluation on a company, what do you look for in a startup that you're investing in, what kind of traits you want to look for in the team, what's going to make this a good investment. So it trains women to invest as angels, and then you actually make an investment at the end.                                 We made an investment in a great startup—which I believe is still hush hush, underground at this point—but I believe we made a great investment and we're following the course of these early stage female founders, and it's really her goal to change the face of angel investing, to increase the amount of money going towards these early stage female founders.   Poornima: As we were doing research for your book and when I was reading it, I noticed that there was some astonishing findings, like only 11 companies that were founded by African-American women have received funding over a million dollars. So walk us through who is working to change this.   Samantha: Well, that number has actually increased, it's now 13 companies that have received more than a million dollars, but the numbers are still really low. One woman who is really on top of this problem is Kathryn Finney, who is the founder of DigitalUndivided, which is an organization whose main purpose is to increase the number of women, minorities in the tech world, latino women, and black women founders, and she just recently launched an accelerator, in Atlanta, Georgia, called the Big Innovation Center, and I think their first cohort is gathering this year to help skill up and prepare these minority founders to raise money.   How Tech Companies Are Growing Up And Changing How The Nature of Work   Poornima: So let's switch gears, and talk about corporations. We previously had Lisen Stromberg on the show, talking about the changes that were happening for parents—what have you seen?   Samantha: Well, what we've noticed is that Silicon Valley is growing up. They are trading in their ping-pong tables and foosball tables for nursing rooms, which is inspiring to see. When I started out, I had my Medela Pump in Style in a cold bathroom out of the courtyard of our startup, so it wasn't pretty, but we spent a day at Eventbrite not too long ago, and Julia Hartz, who's now the CEO of Eventbrite, it's very focused on woman, developing women in leadership positions and allowing for work-life balance. And I say that word, “work-life balance,” a term that is loaded, what she's trying to do with that company is focus on the whole person, not just the employee self.                                 For example, they have a program called “Take the time you need.” So if you need time to care for a child or to care for an adult, you can work from home, you can take time off, so she's really interested in her employees, and telling her employees, "You can do what you need to do, so you can live a life and you can be an employee."                                 And she also tells the women who are having babies at her company, she says, "You know what? You can get through the first six to nine months," it gets a lot easier, because a lot of women when they have their babies early on, they think, “I can't leave this poor creature alone with a daycare with a babysitter,” and she says, “If you can just get through that”—she's got two little girls herself—”If you can just get through that time, stick with it, come back, and we will support you while you're doing it,” which is fantastic.   Poornima: You also showcase companies like Power to Fly. Walk us through what Power to Fly is.   Samantha: Yeah, Power to Fly was started by Milena Berry and Katharine Zaleski. Katharine actually wrote an article apologizing to all the mothers out there. Before she had children, she was a little bit judgemental of mothers taking time off and having to leave work early, and then she had her first baby and she thought, "Oh, my gosh, this is really hard," so she and Milena got together and started this company, Power to Fly, which connects women with remote and flexible job positions, so they can actually care for their family and pursue careers in technology. The great thing about technology is that it can be done remotely. Especially if you're in coding, you don't have to be in an office 24/7, so Power to Fly works on that.                                 Another great program is Tina Lee started a program called MotherCoders, and she's based in San Francisco, a fabulous woman, her program retrains mothers in tech skills, so they can go off and they can—either they've taken time off or they have background in some other field, they can skill up in technology, and go out and get the tremendous amount of jobs that are available in technology as they get back to work.   Disrupting The Boardroom   Poornima: Well, that brings us to the boardroom, so walk us through what changes are happening there.   Samantha: The number of women holding board seats in our country is still very, very low, I think the number is 18% of board seats at Fortune 500 companies are held by women. So we still have a long way to go.                                 One real pioneer in this area is a woman, her name is Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, she's fabulous, she is the CEO and founder of a company called Joyus, a tech company, and she, a few years ago penned an article called "Tech Women Choose Possibility." And she really wanted to profile the women in Silicon Valley, in the startup world, who are doing great things, just founding great companies. There was a lot of positive response to that article, and so she created an organization called #choosepossibility.                                 Part of that organization is a group called, or an initiative called "The Boardlist." And basically it's a matchmaking tool that matches qualified, board-ready women with startup, tech companies, looking to fill board seats with women, so she made that happen, and they placed three women on the board, which it seems like it's very low, but what they're doing is they're connecting the VCs and the startup companies with these women, and a lot more placements have been made not directly through the platform, but just through the connections that have been made on this platform.   Poornima: OK, great, so it's good to know that there is some change happening at the board level as well.                                 Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Samantha, I know our viewers out there are going to enjoy reading your book, *Geek Girl Rising*. And for our viewers who are women, minority, and allies, is there anything else you would like to share with them in terms of resources?   Samantha: Yeah. I would love to see everybody come to our website. We have a gazillion resources on how you can join the digital revolution, just take a peek.   Poornima: Thanks for tuning in today and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode of *Femgineer TV*. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please be sure to share it with your friends, your teammates, your boss, and everyone so that they get to benefit from all the great resources, and subscribe to our channel to receive the next episode.                                Ciao for now! -- FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.

It's an interview double header! We talk to Poornima Vijayashanker and Lawrence Wintermeyer. First up Aden interviews Poornima Vijayashanker about her work on Femgineer, her previous life at Mint and what it meant to be at the forefront of Fintech before Fintech had broken through After the break Chris Skinner interviews Lawrence Wintermeyer about Innovate Finance's new Industry Sandbox Consultation. We discuss why a sandbox is important, who should be getting involved, where we currently are with the regulators. This is a great insight into where the industry is going next and how companies both big and small can make a difference. Enjoying FinTech Insider? Tell a friend about us and please leave us a review on iTunes. The post Ep249 – Poornima Vijayashanker & Lawrence Wintermeyer appeared first on 11:FS.

It’s an interview double header! We talk to Poornima Vijayashanker and Lawrence Wintermeyer. First up Aden interviews Poornima Vijayashanker about her work on Femgineer, her previous life at Mint and what it meant to be at the forefront of Fintech before Fintech had broken through After the break Chris Skinner interviews Lawrence Wintermeyer about Innovate Finance’s new Industry Sandbox Consultation. We discuss why a sandbox is important, who should be getting involved, where we currently are with the regulators. This is a great insight into where the industry is going next and how companies both big and small can make a difference. Enjoying FinTech Insider? Tell a friend about us and please leave us a review on iTunes. The post Ep249 – Poornima Vijayashanker & Lawrence Wintermeyer appeared first on 11:FS.

There are a lot of people who want to change their career later in life. They want to do more challenging work, earn more money, and have a better lifestyle. Given the growing need of technical talent in the US, it would see like a technical career would be a great choice, right? Unfortunately despite the dearth of technical talent, many people are wary because of the misconception that transitioning into a technical career later in life is just too hard. Another is, as you start to fall behind on your technical skills, it’s hard to play catch up! Hence, a lot of people struggle to stay relevant. Piling on career pauses like parenthood make it even harder! However, the growing number of retraining programs, bootcamps, and online education options are looking to cater to busy people who are eager to transition into a technical position. In today’s episode we’ll talk to Tina Lee, who is actively is working to change these misconceptions with her nonprofit MotherCoders, which helps moms on-ramp to technical careers in the new economy. You’ll learn from Tina: Why people get put on the mommy track and how it does a disservice to women who want to continue to pursue their careers Why technical skills are crucial for employment and why Tina is focused on helping mothers acquire them Why companies shouldn’t withhold investing in a retraining program and how it can benefit employees and employers attract and retain top technical talent Show Notes Check out MotherCoders at http://www.mothercoders.org/  FemgineerTV is produced as a partnership between Femgineer ((http://femgineer.com/) and Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/). San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA (http://www.startmotionmedia.com/design/).   Full Transcript Poornima:         Welcome to another episode of *Femgineer TV*, brought to you by Pivotal Tracker. I'm your host, Poornima Vijayashanker, the founder of Femgineer. In this show, I host innovators in tech and together we debunk myths and misconceptions related to building tech products and companies. One common misconception I come across a lot is how challenging it can be to pursue a technical career midway through your career.             Another is that it's really hard once you've lost track of your technical skills, or they've gotten rusty, to get back on track. One woman, Tina Lee, is working to change this misconception. She is the founder of MotherCoders, a nonprofit, that helps moms on ramp to technical careers in the new economy. Thanks for joining us, Tina. Tina Lee:            Thanks for having me. Poornima:         Yeah. So, I know you and I met about a year ago at a conference, but I'm not too familiar with your background. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about how you got started. Tina Lee:            So, I started this journey towards having a technical career when I became a management consultant coming out of college. I helped implement large, enterprise-level IT systems and from there I kind of had this epiphany that tech was going to play a major role in business, and it was just a matter of time before the rest of the world was going to be transformed by it as well, and then after that I did technical recruiting. I spent some time in grad school studying education technology, and then ended up working on behalf of nonprofits and government and helping them use technology better to meet their goals. Poornima:         So that's great that you've had all this exposure to technology in your career. What ultimately inspired you to start MotherCoders? Tina Lee:            Well, like a lot of people who are inspired to make change, it came from a deep place of pain. Poornima:         Yeah, what was your pain? Tina Lee:            So, I had been trained to do simple things, build simple things: HTML, CSS, a little bit of JavaScript. I even tried learning Ruby for a while. And it was fine until I had my second child, right? The programs that are available to beginners usually happen on the evenings or on the weekend or online. And I felt like because I had just had a baby, my second one, I felt very isolated. So, doing it online felt very lonely and I couldn't make these in-person classes anymore, so out of that I had this vision of like, you know what? I cannot be the only mother, a new mother, who’s experiencing this. I should just organize kind of an informal meet up because my grandmother had met me.                             I had envisioned maybe some grandmas here on the corner and then we'd be doing our thing here. And ultimately what happened was I had so many women that filled out this informal Google Poll that I had about their interest level that I said, "OK. There's enough there to do something more organized." So I ran a pilot out of a co-working space that was empty on Saturdays and just happened to be next to an onsite child care facility center. Poornima:         Wow. Tina Lee:            Yeah. So that we were able to run the classes in the conference rooms and then have the kids be cared for by professional caregivers in a setting that was set up for them. Poornima:         That's awesome. So you really saw the opportunity. One as like a personal pain point that you experienced but then after you do this experiment there were a number of women who were interested. And then from that point, how did you transition into making it the nonprofit that it is today? Tina Lee:            So, I'm all about failing fast and rocket prototyping. So that was kind of my way of experimenting with this model. And because so many women had reached out, ones who could not participate in the pilot for one reason or another, I knew that there were moms out there that were hungry. And once you dig deeper into the numbers it collaborates that, right? I know you had Lisen Stromberg on the show recently and you look at the numbers about how many millennia women are about to become mothers, right? A million a year for the next 10 years or so. And then you look at how millennia women are going to be the largest and the most educated demographic ever, right? And then you look at who’s already a mom now.                                There's just tremendous opportunity to help moms who are either stuck on the sidelines and they want to get into tech but can't. Or they're in a job where they're not touching it and they want to move up. This is a great way to activate them and give them a skill set that will help them stay competitive. And we even have entrepreneurs who feel like they need a bigger tool set. They want like a wider understanding of how the ecosystem’s working so they can really launch their ventures. They come to us for that understanding and then also the community, too. That's a big part of what we do is the community because like I said being a mom is very isolating. Poornima:         Yeah that's fantastic. I'm sure some of our viewers out there who are entrepreneurs will be interested to learn a little bit more. So it’s great that there are going to be all these millennial women who are becoming mothers but I know there's still a problem when it comes to leadership, and as you and I have noticed, within tech itself only 26% of women hold computing jobs. So, how do you think MotherCoders is helping with that? Tina Lee:            Well, couple of things. One, we've kind of discussed this a lot which is a pipeline issue. Yes. We could be graduating more women with degrees in computer science or engineering but we also do a terrible job as a society of helping women thrive once they become mothers, right? No one ever says the term “working dad.” We just assume that— Poornima:         That's true. Tina Lee:            —you're going to be working. Poornima:         Yeah. Tina Lee:            But for mothers, I think as a society, culturally, we're still very ambivalent about how we feel about women working outside the home once they become mothers, but if you think about it, mothers are the people that you work with, right? They're the people sitting around you and they're your cohort next to you that's going to be taking over this role. It’s just the workplace is not set up to help women succeed, right? The IT worker is all in, all the time. Poornima:         Right. Tina Lee:            And if you have caregiving responsibilities, that's impossible, right? And women are kind of pressured to make a choice because there are not...there just aren't the social support systems, right? School lets out at 3. Poornima:         Yeah. Tina Lee:            There's no paid parental leave, right? And a lot of companies are just starting to experiment with flexible work hours, right? So all these things make it very difficult for women who feel like they want to prioritize their families and of course at the same time they're made to choose. Poornima:         Yep. I do remember in Lisen Stromberg's interview we talked about this caregiving bias. So it’s great that you touched upon it. I think you also mentioned in a talk earlier the mommy tax versus the fatherhood bonus. Walk us through why this disparity exists.   Tina Lee:            Oh man, we're going to get sad. OK. So, because of this ideal worker model, right? You're expected to go in all the time. Once you become a mother, everyone knows what that means and what that looks like, right? Based on our certain circumstances. Our current set of circumstances. So, automatically men and women will think, "OK. So this person is either going to be downshifting their careers or they're going to drop out altogether." Right? "And if they do stay they're probably not going to go all in. So let’s put them on the mommy track." So, women aren't left with that many choices right? So the way I frame the mommy tax is that automatically you're considered less valuable.                                 Right? And that will represent...that will manifest itself in salary negotiations, in having projects that will help you reach the next level, in helping you maybe make connections or professional development that will bring you to the next level. So there's a tax not only in real terms in salary but also a tax in terms of the opportunity cost.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            Of what you could have done if you didn't become a mother in the eyes of the employer. Now it’s such a powerful bias that women who aren't even mothers get hit by it right? I mean how many stories have we heard of women walking in to pitch their companies or trying to get a job and they say, “Are you going to be pregnant?” Or, “You're married, do you plan to have kids anytime soon?” Not only is that illegal.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            That automatically kind of primes everyone in the room to think like, "Oh, right. You're a woman. There's a high chance that you'll become a mother and you're just going to peace out at some point and why should we invest in you." Right? So that's the motherhood penalty. On the flip side, the opposite is happening to men. "Oh! You're going to become a dad? This means you're going to be...you're going to be going in even harder because now you're responsible for caring for a family, right? You should be given the best projects because you really need to get to the next level. And you really should get a salary bump because now you're responsible for all these people."   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So it’s just a very unfair situation where women are getting hit by this mommy tax and dads are not. And women are already a lot of times behind because of the gender pay gap that they came into before all this even happened.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            Oh and for every child that you have, additional child, you get hit a little bit more.   Poornima:         What can we do to sort of alleviate this? Or what...what can people do to sort of empower themselves?   Tina Lee:            Well, I think we need to talk about it in several levels, right? One is the individual level. One may be at the company level. And then one at a society level. So I'm going to start personal. Personally, I think one of the strategies that I've employed is you really have to take stock of your own capacity.   Poornima:         Mm-hmm.   Tina Lee:            What are my goals? What are my passions? What do I want to do? What capacity do I have in terms of caregiving? Do I have family to help me out? Do I have friends? Do I live in a community where there's support systems? So all of these things have to be taken into consideration. And I specifically stayed in a neighborhood in San Francisco that has a high density of in-home child care providers, and preschools, and great elementary schools to kind of situate myself where I would have these resources available to me. Other people move in, their parents.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Other people move closer to their parents. Everyone has a different situation, right? And I'm lucky in that I have a great partner. So all of these things help me succeed. But on a company level, what would make it even better, as I mentioned earlier, some flexible schedules. If I have a role where I pretty much can do work without being physically in the office, I should be allowed to do that, right?   Poornima:         Yep.   Tina Lee:            And if I happen to work with other people who are caregiving, not just kids but for their parents, or they happen to do other things in the community, they should be given that right, too. So having this flexibility actually benefits everyone in the company.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Paid parental leave is huge, right? And also really thinking about how to combat that implicit bias against women and mothers, right? And that kind of speaks to the larger problem of the societal expectation that women are expected to provide caregiving and men are not, that women should stay home after they have kids, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            And the reality is that our society's changing, women are more educated, they're working. Forty-five percent of families with kids under 18 now have two working parents working full time to stay afloat, right? And so the reality is that we need to change some policies around how we support parents in general, caregivers in general. And I'm really glad that people like Sheryl Sandberg through *Lean In*, Emily Slaughter through her books, and then Lisa, too, are really tackling this societal piece because we can't change. We're not going to see change until we have culture change and I think that's a long-term thing that needs to happen.   Poornima:         So let’s bring it back to the struggle to stay relevant, right? You take a pause for parenthood, or you downshift, or maybe you don't even downshift, but there's this perception that you are downshifting. So I think it’s great that there are retraining programs like yours. How do you see these programs evolving overtime?   Tina Lee:            I don't know.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            That's the honest answer.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            I don't know, because—   Poornima:         But you see people embracing them?   Tina Lee:            Yes, people are embracing them, but I think we're at the beginning stages of just having this consciousness that tech is moving really fast.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            We live in this world where you have to continuously learn in order to stay relevant whether you're a caregiver or not, right?   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            That's why companies invest in professional development budgets and provide access to online training courses or learning plans. So I think we as a society know that people need to stay fresh on top of the skills and understand how fast things are changing in the industries, right? And that's why they invest in the professional development piece, but they also will have to come up with new ways of providing those to people who may not have the capacity to go to the one-week conference.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Or the “take three months off to learn how to become a full-stack web developer” type of programs, right? Those all-in programs are going to be very challenging for people with caregiving responsibilities and that's why you don't see an influx of caregivers in those types of boot camps or in online learning, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Because as I spent time in ED School, I know that learning is very social and I'm a big believer that context is important. It’s great if you learn how to speak French by yourself, at home, in front of a computer but if—   Poornima:         No, I tried that. I have a terrible accent.   Tina Lee:            But yeah it would be better if you had actually visited France.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            If you understood French culture and maybe even had some French friends and had a French meal. So it brings it all together and that's kind of the experience that we aim for because it’s not just the skills. It has to happen in context.   Poornima:         Yeah. So why teach these technical skills? Why not just get people to get better at management skills or some of the other softer skills? Why do you want to focus on tech skills?   Tina Lee:            I think tech is transforming our economy. It’s just going to be one of those things that we take for granted, right? And having that literacy is going to empower you to think about your own industry differently. And it’s going to impact the way you approach a problem differently. And I think once moms gain that level of tech literacy, it just gives them a level of confidence to approach this new phase in their life differently because a world of opportunity will open up, right? I think before in the beginning, when things were still very technical to the point where you had to have a bachelor’s or a master’s degree to understand it, then it was less accessible.                                 But now we're at the point where we've automated a lot of these things and made it a little bit more friendly. And I think if you're really going to innovate, it's just as important to understand the problems in the industry and then figure out the technical piece that goes along with that. And I think there's enough room for everyone to participate in that exercise.   Poornima:         So why don't we talk a little bit about the type of people you see coming to your program, other coders—are these people that are outside of tech? Or are they people within tech who maybe were on the business side and then wanted to transition into the technical side?   Tina Lee:            So, after running five cohorts now, some patterns are emerging, right? We mainly see women who are working moms and they want to get technical but can't find a solution that works with them because of scheduling or child care issues. They know that their path to career advancement requires them to gain this new skill set, right? So they want access to it and we provide that for them. Another group of moms who come to us, like you mentioned earlier, they may have stepped out for a little bit. A year, six months, some even 10 years, right? And they're just looking for a refresh. To figure out a way to connect their passions to a path forward.   And then the last group, these are entrepreneurs who have an idea for an app or they are already on their way to building a company and they just realize, like, "Hey, I'm kind of stuck now and I can't proceed without a grander understanding of what it is I'm trying to do and how to go about it." And so they come to us. So those are kind of the three groups that we see. In terms of industry background, they just run across the gamut. We have moms who worked in a startup only on the operations side. So they wanted to get closer to moms who were scientists, who are working in a lab. And they're like you know what? I actually want to do something else because it enables me to be more creative. So just really all over the map in terms of industry background.   Poornima:         And how do you go about doing the teaching?   Tina Lee:            So, we have a three-pronged approach. As I mentioned before, it’s not just the technical skills.   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            So, we teach a little bit of code. All the moms are taught HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build a basic website and how to launch it, but the goal of that really is to give them a taste of it, to see how it feels to build something and put it out into the world, and to really check themselves. “Do I like this enough to keep going?”   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Right? Or, “Is this enough? Or do I pivot?” The second piece that goes along with that is the community piece. So we bring in women from the field, like yourself, and we create this community not only of people who could mentor them, but people who provide access to job opportunities. And then of course they have each other.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Right? They can go to conferences together. They can just go to a café and help each other. And having that nerd mom comradery is really essential to success because, sometimes in the middle of the night and there's no one else there, you can feel like you can ping someone.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            And then the last piece that we do, right, technical, community, and the last piece is the childcare piece, right? And that childcare piece really helps moms figure out in a safe space if this is something they want to go further. Right? And I would also argue that another piece of it is context. Although it’s hard to explain to people what I mean by that. What I mean by that is all of this is happening within context of what we see in everyday life and that piece of context is provided by the community, right? You come in and explain we use agile and that's what it means in our shop.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Or we believe in rapid prototyping and design thinking and that's how it works in our shop. Right? So all of these things are relevant. Not just the building part or not just the hanging-out-with-your-people part.   Poornima:         So that's great. So how do you pick a cohort?   Tina Lee:            We pick a cohort the way I would build a team.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            So because...before I used to be a technical rep, I spent some time being a recruiter, and having that safe space for learning is really important. And I realize how hard it is to do this when you are a mother as well. So I work with my board and we have several steps to our application process, the last one of which is an in-person interview.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Where we really talk to the moms. “Are we right for you? Are you ready for this?” Because a lot of learning will have to happen outside of the classroom too, right? So they have to have capacity and they have to be really clear about why they're doing it because otherwise you're not going to stick to it and it's not going to feel like you achieved something at the end, right? So we walk them through that. And it’s worked out pretty well. All the moms come together and I think because being a mother is such a democratizing experience they all show up as people who are there to support each other, and want to learn together, and move forward together.   Poornima:         So walk us through what a day in the life of MotherCoders looks like.   Tina Lee:            Sure.   Poornima:         For your students.   Tina Lee:            So, Saturday only classes right? You would go...you would drop off your baby. So we have a half an hour transition time. It takes a while to explain have they eaten, have they slept, all that stuff.   Poornima:         Right.   Tina Lee:            So you hand off to the caregiver and you're in your seat by 10:00 right?   And then you learn until noon. And then we have lunch together. We always have lunch catered because it's such a special time and they have to bond. And a lot of times we'll have speakers there too, right, who will stay and hang out with them. So it’s a great time to just kind of network and talk. And then after lunch they learn some more. And then around 3, we leave half an hour for reflection. So I'm big on you learn, but at the end of the day, you have to pause and really connect what happened to how you're feeling about it and how it connects to your own understanding of the work, OK? And then after that they pick up their kid and then they go.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            In terms of content, it will vary by day. We have specific build days where people just get together and they build and we help you work through your wireframes and your issues. There are days when we have lectures. We don't really have a lot of lectures. We have “discussions,” I should call them. And then there are other days when we have guest speakers who come in and they talk about a topic that they want to talk about, or they do a workshop, or something I've been doing is I've been pairing a cyber security info sec expert with data scientists.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So on one side you have data scientists who want like all the data, and then the other side you have people who are in charge of the data or making sure they're following the rules about data and saying, "Whoa." So that's been a very illuminating conversation, too. So we've been doing stuff like that.   Poornima:         That sounds great. So how many people have you graduated? You mentioned you have five cohorts coming who have gone through the program?   Tina Lee:            Thirty-four so far.   Poornima:         Great. OK.   Tina Lee:            Yeah we're really delighted because 34 moms represents families, right?   Tina Lee:            And there is over 50 kids. And another way to think about this is we've placed 34 stem role models.   Poornima:         Oh, great.   Tina Lee:            Right? Into homes. They are inspiring our next generation of kids. Right? So not only are these women changing the trajectory of their own family like right now, their kids are going to be impacted, too. So we're really looking at this from a multi-generational perspective.   Poornima:         Yeah. That's fantastic. So what are some immediate outcomes that you see from them graduating in the program?   Tina Lee:            Jobs!   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            They're getting jobs.   Poornima:         Good. OK.   Tina Lee:            They're getting jobs in tech, right?   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So we have moms who have become front end engineers. We have moms who have become mobile app developers. We have moms who have become user experience designers. Some have been promoted, of course, because now they have this new tool kit. And then we have other moms who are proceeding with their startup dreams. So potentially, right, we have entrepreneurs out there. So, this has been really exciting to see them grow.   Poornima:         That's great. So it’s a lot of variety of outcomes but all pretty positive.   Tina Lee:            Mm-hmm.   Poornima:         So how do you measure success for MotherCoders?   Tina Lee:            Right now the way we're measuring success is completion.   We're also looking at how diverse we are in terms of the people that we have in our classes. Right? I'm an intersectional feminist.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            Eighty-one percent of women become moms and if companies are really worried about diversity? I'm like, “Come to me, because we have queer moms, we have moms that emigrated from other countries, like just everybody.” We just think about it racially, religiously, geographically, right? So the way we measure success—there's a piece of the diversity piece, and then there's a completion piece, and then we're starting to track not only who got jobs or who got promoted, but how much did they increase their income?   Poornima:         Oh, great.   Tina Lee:            Or earning potential? Right?   And that's been tricky because we've been running cohorts and it takes time. And different moms have different capacities, as I mentioned. And some of them have kids, again.   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            Because moms do. So, we're trying to figure out a way to tell that story better but just anecdotally because there are only 34 moms, I keep pretty close tabs on them.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            I know that they are making more money because some are buying new homes.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Some are buying new other things.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            And they're updating their LinkedIn profiles and LinkedIn tells me that, right?   Poornima:         Sure.   Tina Lee:            So we know that they're getting skills, getting new jobs, buying homes, and on top of that, starting businesses.   Poornima:         So I love that you care about this diversity piece, and I do, too. So I'm going to ask you this question: What about Father Coders? You know there's a lot of stay-at-home dads that's becoming less and less of a stigma, but would you ever be open to allowing men to come in and participate in your program?   Tina Lee:            Not in the foreseeable future.   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            And here’s why, right? The reason why we don't do Father Coders is exactly the same reasons why we do MotherCoders, right?   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            Think about it from a kind of a cultural perspective.   I have actually gone to meetups and programs. They're very friendly. Not that they're not friendly to women, but in terms of belonging, I think women have a harder time feeling a sense of belonging in those spaces, right? And you walk into a room and you don't see anyone who looks like you...it's very intimidating and there's a lot of trepidation around going back again.   So we create this safe space where we know that women will find inviting, right? And I think mothers specifically have a very unique set of challenges, right? That go beyond just being a woman, right? The scheduling, the feeling of pressure to be the perfect mom, and the perfect spouse, and the perfect worker, all the perfect things, right? And then on top of that picking up skills and working in an industry that's predominantly men is very intimidating, right?   Poornima:         OK.   Tina Lee:            So all of that comes together in MotherCoders. And I understand that fathers have the same challenges with scheduling, but I bet you they would feel less trepidation walking into a space that was designed more for someone without the challenges that moms have.   And we actually have had conversations with women who come up to me and say, "I'm not a mother but I care for a family member. Can I come?"   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So I can see at some point that we rethink our structure.   Poornima:         Oh I see. Right.   Tina Lee:            But we exist for the same reason that Hackbright exists and Women's Colleges exist.   I graduated out of a Women's College. So all of those things still stand and until we kind of break apart some of those barriers to women I think I need to keep doing what I'm doing now.   Poornima:         Thank you so much for coming on the show. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we end?   Tina Lee:            Yes, I would love to share with you kind of my pie-in-the-sky kind of vision that I'm working towards, right? Women from all all over the U.S. and the world reach out to me and ask when we're coming to their communities.   Poornima:         OK. Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So I know there's a desire for this type of training program all over and we're trying to figure out a way to get there. And we envision ourselves being in any community that wants to have a MotherCoders but, because, you'd know, technology varies by geography, and industry, and all these different things. We want to design a program that's thoughtful enough and flexible enough where they can design it to fit their local conditions, right? To fit the needs of their local employers so that moms will have a place to move to. So we are moving towards that. We are actively fundraising towards that.   And the reason that we're a nonprofit is because we're committed to helping women who cannot afford to pay $10,000 for Bootcamp or they're not sure if they want to invest in that even before having tried out something more preliminary. So we are working towards a vision where we're all across America, if not the world, so that we could help women everywhere as they transition into being moms and thrive in the workplace.   Poornima:         Great. So how can we help you with that?   Tina Lee:            Well, help us get our word out. This is great, right?   Help us send moms who are interested in taking our program to us. I would also love it if employers who are worried about retaining moms that they have to provide professional development for them through us. And then also figure out a way to maybe work with us to develop programs or return ships where women who may have stepped off want to get a refresh and then go back.   Poornima:         Yeah.   Tina Lee:            So those are great ways. And then of course, we're always looking for donations, always looking for sponsorships. So many ways to partner with us and everything can be found on our website.   Poornima:         Wonderful. Well we'll be sure to include the link to it.   Tina Lee:            Thank you.   Poornima:         Thank you again for joining us, Tina. Thank you for tuning in today and special thanks to our sponsor, Pivotal Tracker, for their help in producing this episode of *Femgineer TV*. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please be sure to share it with your friends, your team, your employer, and of course, all the mothers that you know to get the word out. And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive the next episode of *Femgineer TV*. Ciao for now.    

"The best teams are composed of individuals with complementary skill sets..." -Poornima Vijayashanker Poornima Vijayashanker - Entrepreneur Engineer, Author, and Speaker Poornima Vijayashanker is an entrepreneur, engineer, author, and speaker who has made her mark on the tech world. A graduate of Duke University, Poornima was the founding engineer at Mint where she helped build, launch, and scale the product until it was acquired by Intuit. Following the acquisition, Poornima went on to launch Femgineer, an education company for tech professionals and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to build software products and companies. Poornima speaks at industry events around the world and has authored the book, How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products, and Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking with Karen Catlin. Having served as the EIR at 500 Startups, Poornima has also lectured at her alma mater’s Pratt School of Engineering. Connect With Poornima: Website | @Femgineer | Facebook | Youtube  Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking How to Transform Your Ideas Into Software Products Subscribe to the Outlier Newsletter: Click Here If you enjoy Outlier On Air, please Subscribe & Review on iTunes or Stitcher Brought to you by: OUTLIER ENTREPRENEURS CLOSED FACEBOOK GROUP Request Invite

Poornima Vijayashanker was a founding engineer at Mint.com and now is building an education company called Femgineer. Her new book "Present! The Techie's Guide to Engaging an Audience" speaks to the importance of speaking up. Poornima talks to Scott about why speaking up and improving your communication skills can revitalize your career in tech.

This is the sixty-seventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Poornima Vijayashanker (on Twitter @ Poornima), the founder of Femgineer, an education platform for professionals. Poornima was previously the founding engineer of Mint.com and then transitioned to a founding role with her first startup BizeeBee. She was then an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at 500 Startups. Poornima joins us to share her story as a founder, what it was like transitioning from an engineering role to a founder, how to raise money, and much more!

Poornima Vijayashanker is the founder of Femgineer.com, an education tech startup focused on helping professionals in tech level up in their careers, and tech entrepreneurs build products and companies. From a young age, Poornima was interested in many fields, not only on computers, software, and programming. She took apart her first computer at age of 14, and was writing histories and speaking since she tried her mother's typewriter at age of 10. She has found a fantastic way to combine all of her skills and interests to create unique products and messages. She graduated with dual degrees in electrical engineer and computer science, but she is also a writer and and active YouTuber,  to communicate her experiences and motivate others to pursue tech, learning and entrepreneurship.

While a lot of people talk about the financial benefits of a remote team, that’s actually NOT the reason why Ben Congleton and his team decided to build a remote team. You’ve probably also heard over and over again the importance of company culture, but Ben actually breaks down what him and his team at Olark do to build a strong company culture! During the show we covered the following 3 misconceptions people have about remote working: 1. Employees won’t be as productive and progress will stagnate 2. Communication between employees and teams will break down 3. A remote team will be devoid of culture In the pilot episode of FemgineerTV Ben and I tackled each of these misconceptions. And Ben shares how he and his co-founders have built an amazing remote team of 30-people, which spans San Francisco to Europe.

Building a web product was a lot harder in 2006 than it is now. Poornima Vijayashanker tells us what it was like to code back in those days as founding engineer at Mint, an app that later sold to Intuit for $170 million. Since then, she's been helping people better understand the product development process through her blog and company Femgineer. We talk about what code newbies should think about when building a new app, whether for fun or for profit, and how it takes more than code to make a great product. Show Links Digital Ocean (sponsor) MongoDB (sponsor) Heroku (sponsor) TwilioQuest (sponsor) Femgineer Mint Codeland Conf Codeland 2019

This week, Poornima Vijayashanker (Founder of Femgineer/BizeeBee & EIR at 500 Startups) and Julia Grace (Head of Engineering at Tindie) join Product Hunt’s Erik Torenberg and Ryan Hoover at 500 Startups HQ. We chat about tools communicate with remote teams, our love of email, and products to help fight digital distractions. Listen in. - Yo (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/yo) - A simple app to say "yo" to friends - Tindie (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/tindie) - Shop directly from indie innovators - Slack (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/slack) - Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving & search. - Screenhero (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/screenhero) - Collaborative Screen Sharing + Voice Chat - Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/) - Build better software faster - Trello (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/trello-66) - Organize anything, together - Asana (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/asana) - Teamwork without email - Product Hunt for iOS (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/product-hunt-for-ios) - The best new products, every day, in your pocket - Edgar (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/edgar) - Stop letting your social media updates go to waste - Self Control (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/self-control-mac) - Avoid distracting websites - Boomerang (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/boomerang-for-gmail) - The ultimate toolbox to control sending/receiving emails - Mobile Flow (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/mobile-flow) - Eliminate digital distractions - “Hooked” Book (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/hooked-book) - How to Build Habit-Forming Products - Tiny Habits (http://tinyhabits.com/) - BJ Fogg’s program to help build healthful habits - Streak (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/streak) - CRM in your inbox - for Gmail - imoji (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/imoji) - Turn selfies or any photo into stickers you can text - emoji.sexy (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/emoji-sexy) - The emoji URL shortener - Transform Your Ideas (http://www.producthunt.com/posts/transform-your-ideas) - 20 week e-mail course on building & launching software In case you missed it, check out batch 9 of 500 Startups (http://www.producthunt.com/e/500-startups-batch-9) and this lovely collection of Emoji Apps (http://www.producthunt.com/e/emoji-apps) on Product Hunt.

@Poornima Vijayashanker, Founder Of BizeeBee And Femgineer, Discusses Lean Product Development Methodologies For Building And Shipping Products That People Love on the Global Product Management Talk with @CindyFSolomon, Host Poornima says, "To guarantee that people will love the products you build, you need a process! I'd like to share the process I've been using and refining at all my startups: Mint.com, BizeeBee, and Femgineer. I know that sharing my process will help others in the Startup Product and Global Product Talks communities, who are just as passionate about building products as I am!" Resources: http://bit.ly/X6FNV9