My experience with Crossover
After almost 2 years of pandemic, the world is going back to normal including the way of working. A lot of people was able to experience the remote work, and now they would like to stay that way. My own remote work experience started 5 years before the pandemic, back in 2015 and I have to thank Crossover for that. I have been working in Crossover for almost 7 years now, and I have been in 4 different positions.
I am aware of all the negative feedback that Crossover has around the web, and I honestly can say that I understand it, however that doesn’t mean that I agree with it.
I usually get questions from people inside Crossover or people that want to apply, on what’s my opinion about all the feedback. After several years of answering the same questions, I can now say that Crossover is not a company for everyone, you actually have to like what you are doing, to be able to succeed here. Let me explain that a little bit.
Crossover is a company that is always changing, and the changes can be confusing if you don’t adapt to them quickly. Also, Crossover is always challenging you to be better, and when you think that you have actually reached the best level, you will always receive a new challenge. I’ve seen really good people leaving the company because they don’t like it, so they prefer to resign. I have also seen really good people leaving, because they failed, but the failure is not on them, neither on Crossover; it’s just because they didn’t match, they didn’t belong. As mentioned before, to be able to succeed in Crossover you need to like what you are doing, and the way that the company is working.
So, today I wanted to share a little bit of my story, how I actually started in Crossover, and why after almost 7 years I still like it.
Eight years ago, I used to work in a local company, a telco, which was one of the best places to work here in my country. However, my work there was affecting my personal life, as mom, I wanted to be able to spend more time at home. So I decided to resign.
I took some months off from work, and I really enjoyed the fact of being able to be with my kids after school. Even if I wasn’t with them at 100%, just being there was making a difference. This made me analyze, and I decided to look for a remote job. Back in 2015 that sounded almost impossible for someone in latin america, but I wanted to give it a shot.
That’s how I found Crossover, by doing so many searches on LinkedIn. The job offering was for an L2 Engineer, it was fully remote, I was able to work from my country and the payment was the same one that I was getting in my previous job. My first impression was that it was too good to be true! There weren’t a lot of reviews back then, and I actually thought it was a scam. However, I decided to try, there was nothing to lose, but a lot to gain.
The hiring process back then had some general tests, then the technical tests and after that, the interviews. I was able to complete the tests, the technical ones were more difficult to what I was used to, but they were achievable. Finally, I got to the interview stage, and I moved to the next step. There was a test week, divided in two: the first part to learn the processes and the second part to demonstrate my technical knowledge. This test week was the one that helped me to see that it wasn’t a scam.
I had my first part of the test week, and it went well. There was a lot of reading to do, and I had to demonstrate that I had understood all that. After that, I was able to start the second part of the test week, I needed to work in 5 fake custmer tickets, and resolve them. I was really busy those days, but I was able to work on them and show the results.
The payment came, directly to the account that I had created, and I was able to use the money the same day that I got paid. One week later, I got a new interview and the job offer came. I was thrilled, this was the opportunity that I wanted.
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My first month was all about learning my products, initially I got assigned 3 different products and I needed to learn by myself. I tested all the things I could in the test environments, read all the tickets that I could, replicated the cases and learned a lot. Finally, I got my first tickets assigned, and that’s when the fun started. I won’t deny that it was scary, with my first ticket I noticed that I didn’t know the products, the customers were the experts. But, I never gave up. I decided to work and review the tickets as needed, eventually, ticket after ticket, I was gaining more knowledge and experience.
I was an L2 Engineer for almost 2.5 years, I was able to learn and support 13 different products, each different product was a different experience for me. Even if I knew the technology behind, it was really different to see that technology interacting with other technologies, and in actual customer use cases. All this helped to increase my technical knowledge.
After that, I got a new challenge. There was the opportunity for me to apply to the management position, and I really wanted to go back to it. I decided to take the risk, and I took the tests. I had to apply in the same way as any external candidate, as that’s Crossover policy. I passed the tests, and I got a lot of help from the VPs that were in the team back then. They created a program to get new managers, and I was getting extra tasks to improve my management skills. All these tasks needed to be completed outside of my normal working hours, I was still an L2, so I needed to continue working on tickets.
Finally, 3 months later, I got the official promotion and I started working as a manager. At the beginning it was weird, as I was managing the people that used to be my teammates, but I was able to work with them, and always help them to improve. Being a manager in a remote company is a completely different experience as being a manager in a normal job. I was able to learn how to be able to help people that I had never seen in person, how to earn their trust, and how to check with them the different improvement opportunities. Besides that, Crossover is not a traditional company, Crossover usually focus on giving negative feedback, and that’s how we should learn. Receiving negative feedback as a manager can be confusing, but eventually you understand that you need to learn from it and apply all the changes needed.
As a manager in Crossover, I also had to see all the different opportunities to improve the team, which included automations to reduce the time for any task, process improvements and also the rank and review. I had to keep an eye in each member of my team, and if any of them was failing or delivering less than expected, then I had to coach and help them to improve. There were hard decisions that I had to take as a manager, because if someone wasn’t at the level that the company needed, and wasn’t improving after the coaching, then we needed to terminate that person.
I had 1.5 years of being a manager, when I was offered the option to be a VP. I got the challenge to fix the L2 team, and demonstrate that I was able to lead as a VicePresident in Support. I accepted the challenge, and this new position helped me to learn even more. But, not everything was so easy, Crossover is known for being a company that changes a lot. Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoy the changes and I learned to adapt really quickly, however, we had a big leadership team change when I was in my VP time probation, and all the things that I was doing were not needed anymore, so it was like starting from 0. Once again, I decided to see the things with a positive view; and I started learning what was needed.
It took me 1 year of probation time to be able to get my official promotion, but once I got it, I felt really happy and satisfied; because it meant that I was able to learn from all the negative feedback received, and I was actually helping a big team to improve. As an official VP, I had more responsibilities, and I got more tasks. I had to lead the full support team, and not only 35–40 people as I used to lead as manager. This challenge showed me that, even if I was at VP level, I was able to learn from everyone in the team, and that I needed to get all that learning and transform it in actions to help the team to improve. The team improvement meant that I was also improving and growing.
One of the things that have impacted me the most as a Support VP, is that agents working in the team have contacted me to let me know that my impact in their work is really interesting, they are always thinking what I would do or think about something, and that helps them to keep the high standards in their work. This makes me think that I have done something good when I work with each of them. I always made sure to dedicate time to them, because they were the ones helping me to be better too.
During my work as Support VP, I got assigned to one of the biggest Business Units in Crossover, to help them to improve their products. It was a big challenge, with a lot of problems that needed to be resolved, and required me to work hard to get the solutions. I was able to work together with them in such a positive way, that one year later they offered me a position in their team. This position was also a VP position, but instead of being Support only, it was to be VP of Operations. This offer came to me as a surprise, first of all because I didn’t have any experience in the operations field, and they wanted me to learn with them. Second, because I wasn’t looking for a change. At that moment, I knew that a hard decision was coming, because I loved being a Support VP, and working with the whole team, but I also wanted to gain more experience and knowledge. In the end, I accepted the new role.
I have been a VP of Operations for 4 months now, I am learning to see the business with different eyes. But, my previous experience also helps me to be able to focus the work and see everything with different eyes.
Crossover has taught me how to see the remote work, how to see the work as an L2, as a manager, as a Support VP and as an Operations VP. But besides that, it has also taught me how to always see the things with a positive view and how to adapt to changes so quick.
So yeah, working in Crossover can be really challenging, but it’s a challenge that I like and that I really enjoy a lot!
