How to go from getting started to world class

Planning For Growth

Lots of people write stories about management. Most of those people never actually do management and there is a dearth of actionable content for people getting started in management or struggling with rapid growth.

Building a team from 0 to 50 or 100 as a department head or executive at a startup is hard, arguably much harder than inheriting a team as a new hire or as part of a reorg at a larger company. There are a few key topics keep coming up as challenges when I discuss this with my peers. Those challenges are consistent across companies, teams and cultures and what I hope to address here.

My most recent team accomplished our initial growth as a startup (Heptio — Series B, 40+ people at the time I was hired, ~100 at time of acquisition) and the remaining bit while being acquired and then operating as part of one of the largest software companies in the world (VMware). The team is customer facing, travels and is highly technical. Broadly speaking the team covers everything from pre-sales to education, evangelism to consulting. We’ve created content that has reached hundreds of thousands of people, delivered hundreds of paid projects and contributed to some of the most complex Open Source software in existence.

This context is critical as the most important part of building any team starts with planning, and you need to understand the shape of what the team must accomplish to properly plan. Early on we made a few key assumptions that ended up being true which allowed us to fully realize the early investments we made. The key elements of our initial plan looked very similar to any early stage startup, with a few role specific elements:

• The market for what this team did was growing insanely fast (Kubernetes)
• The competition for talent in this particular role would force us to be deliberate about team structure and growth
• We’d need to go beyond standard compensation level discussions to attract key talent — reduce travel, allow cross-function work, increase collaboration over similar roles/teams in the industry
• Financial targets (margin, revenue, CAC)

The most important element of the initial plan we developed was the deliberate choice to treat the financial targets as an aspiration for the first year. This allowed us to avoid the typical problems of a quarterly focused cycle and being driven purely on short term metrics. This is absolutely key and often gets lost in department level planning. If you want to accomplish great things your horizon needs to be years, not months. You need to plan to fail.

As we discovered along the way the thing that ended up having the largest impact on the people and the teams culture was work style and collaboration more than anything else including compensation. Allowing typically high-travel work to be done remotely, with more team level interactions allowed us to hire people into roles they typically would never consider. This helped avoid the worst of the talent crunch, and for about 18 months we dramatically over-performed on bookings.

The thing we deliberately de-prioritized thrived as a result of the larger plan.

Great problem to have. Directly related to the capabilities we’d brought onto the team by being a bit creative in the role definition and planning phase.

Collaboration

The biggest challenge in building a new team is ensuring that the people on the team actually collaborate. That sounds trite, but it’s true. Most management blogs will ride the hype train of whatever fad is popular right now, but weirdly enough a team that respects and trusts one another doesn’t always collaborate. You also can’t just arrange a dinner and expect collaboration either. It’s never that simple.

Slack, Zoom and Email are not the same as collaboration.

So how do you solve this problem when you are hiring a bunch of people you don’t know? You look for connectors. One of your early hires (ideally first 3–5) needs to be someone who is the teams social butterfly, a person who thrives on collaborating with other people and isn’t abrasive, confrontational or controlling. It is a super hard skillset to find in the technology industry. Enable this person to connect their peers in the organization, and go hunt for a couple more as the organization grows. Minimally a 1:10 ratio works, but I’ve found the ideal is 1:5.

This sounds superfluous, hard to measure and ‘soft’. It also just plain works. These people still do the job everyone else does, they just bring others along for the ride. They are the 10x engineers.

While hiring at CoreOS and then at Heptio I got very lucky to land a couple of folks with this skillset early, and it was one of the most important parts of our success. Not just the tech skills. This role becomes more critical if the team is distributed across offices or is remote.

The second and potentially equally critical hire you need to make is the ground-breaker. A huge mistake most folks make here is attempting to hire a name. I can’t emphasize this enough do not seek out someone famous purely because they will make your VC’s take notice (that is a short term help), rather look for someone who when everyone else is saying “east”, they are comfortable saying “west” and are capable of getting people to rally in that direction despite any existing data, patterns or processes saying they are wrong. They have an instinct or understanding of the domain that is hard to quantify, but yields amazing results when they are right.

This sounds like a wildcard? Threat to your managerial decisions? That is intentional. You want the team to see you take input and adjust accordingly. That is how you build trust, and how you scale. More importantly it is how you learn and avoid monoculture. If you are working at a startup or in a new team that is likely the core mission for a long while — learn, experiment, improve and repeat.

The people you hire for these roles are the central nervous system and heart of every team. It is hard to spot them, but once you get the pattern of interviewing and mentoring them it levels the entire organization up — including you.

After you get these folks on board you need to enable them to start doing their thing. Kickoff some peer to peer sessions to demonstrate new features or project wins, let them build internal tools — anything really to get folks engaged with one another. If you are in a senior or executive managerial role at first you should be present but meter out your involvement and look to fade to the background and let the Individual’s and front line managers take the reins. The team should be comfortable talking to you obviously, but should not rely on you for everything they do.

At this point the team itself has a bedrock foundation of collaborating, experimenting and learning. You can start to plan on scaling. Business demands will usually dictate the size and shape of the team — total headcount, responsibilities etc. However a few key decisions you’ll need to make once you have digested the goals include what seniority level and location each hire should be made at.

Sometimes this is obvious, other times it is really not. In general once you’ve established a strong senior core I believe you should focus on hiring the most junior level (career experience, not age) engineers you can given the objectives at hand. This is again based on long term horizons. Hiring junior or mid-career engineers will generally give the team a much longer runway for growth and cohesion.

Time Management

A huge part of how you approach this depends on what type of role you are in, and what type of company you work for. Hopefully the managerial overhead (eg “approval hell”) you have is fairly low, this means you’ll have more time to run the business and more importantly mentor your people.

Do not let your calendar control you. Every successful business person in existence will tell you flat out — you need to block off time for you. This has to happen regardless of what role you are in. Your thoughts, critical issues, unplanned communication. So many of us fail at this and we end up spending cycles we don’t have to address the immediate fires, but miss the time needed to create and refine long term strategy and vision.

“There is an insidious tendency to neglect important tasks that do not have to be done today — or even this week.”
― Charles E. Hummel, Tyranny of the Urgent

Delegation is another critical thing here and one of the basic methods I employ in this arena focuses on a simple question you can ask of yourself — is this project or task something that requires my focus and has a specific need of my skills or situational awareness, or is this something that can be or should be run by someone on the team?

I call this ‘roll for initiative’. Discuss the task openly and let someone volunteer for the responsibility. Give only as much guidance as you feel they need. This works perfectly for tasks and projects that don’t have firm output or timelines. Good examples are internal house keeping tasks, automation, low criticality system changes, business reporting and open ended research. This is a great place to let self-starters and folks who recoil at structure stretch their wings. About half of these projects will fail in my experience. Plan accordingly.

As a general rule of thumb you want to get people thinking about how to resolve issues for the organization with as little direction as possible. That doesn’t mean no direction, and it doesn’t mean you as a leader get to ignore problems or not provide feedback.

Hiring

When you are trying to build something great the first and most critical muscle you must develop is hiring. I’ve talked about this in the past, but over the past few years I’ve come to realize this is a very challenging area for many people to master as most corporate training on the subject tends to focus on credentialing (listings) and job fit (interviews).

Both of those approaches are mediocre at best. How to hire great people is rooted in a simple lesson — success without adversity is a horrible teacher.

Generally you won’t come away with a stellar team if you are only hiring people who look like your mental model for “success”. I’d rather hire someone who life has punched in the mouth a few times and help them grow, but thats hard to capture in an interview setting.

So what should you be interviewing for? Math.

Not the numbers kind, the performance kind. Do you think this person will make the team better? Additive or multiplicative? There is a big difference between someone showing up and doing the job, and another person helping others over perform.

The other thing to hire for is growth. Do you think this person will (or can) grow with the company and team? This is the reason I advocate against focusing on metrics such as years of experience during the hiring search. It is a nonsense metric, and ignores the thing you are actually looking for (the future).

Feedback

Feedback is best provided in small doses over a long period of time, not all at once after a major event such as project completion or feature release. That makes it almost impossible to process for most people. Some quick tips on this front:

• Take feedback more often than you give it — this is often extremely difficult. Most people are bad at giving feedback and worse at taking it. Often times folks struggle to detach emotion and ‘events’ from these discussions. This means you will need to be a lightning rod sometimes.
• Try not to do “give and take” feedback sessions, either give some or get some but never both at once. It feels defensive to most people upon reflection
• Never give bad feedback on friday’s or before PTO
• Have a weekly or bi-weekly 1:1 with everyone who directly reports to you, and leverage that time to provide small doses of feedback ahead of a ‘full review’ cycle

Lastly on this front one of the hardest things to get right is alignment. Ensure the tasks you assign, OKRs and goals are used to inform and structure feedback. Telling Alisson that her conduct in a meeting was bad is obviously one thing, but if her goal is to move into a Management role then critiquing coding skills is less valuable to her than critiquing her people skills, and your job as a leader is to help her grow where she wants. That does not mean you should avoid feedback on areas key to a persons job based on their desires, rather you should use their desire to inform where you should focus the feedback. Think 80:20 split.

Mission

This is where you really need to focus those cycles you gained by controlling your calendar, hiring some great people and delegating things. Start thinking about the current health and directional alignment of the organization with the broader initiatives.

Taking a page out of Extreme Ownership you want to be very clear in setting the mission for the teams you manage, and explicitly call out who’s the authority on what subject or who has decision making authority for what parts of the plan.

The mission becomes the team’s identity and rallying point

Our mission was simple: Delight our customers. I hammered this point home repeatedly in slides and during all hands calls. The result was the team always focused on the customer and executed to the best of their abilities, because it was clear what was being asked for.

We established this mission by making the exercise interactive and involving a small number of people for the first wave of planning, then moved on to a broader audience after some feedback and iterations had been collected.

The biggest challenge with planning is getting folks to understand that the plan will always be a living document. Aim for a directionally correct mission, not a complete blueprint.

In my experience the more detailed plans I’ve laid out, the more prone the team has been to stalling over minutiae. This is counter intuitive for many of us, but over-planning is effectively passive micromanagement and people get wound around the axle on the details. Instead let the people who are doing the work fill in the details. Provide guidance and feedback on their plans and ensure you are available to make any key decisions in a timely manner.

I’ve been asked a lot over the past couple of years to discuss what its like working at a Startup given my work history is mostly larger companies.

To put some context behind my thoughts its worth noting that both of my recent employers (CoreOS and Heptio) have been fantastic experiences, but were not in fact my first stints in the Startup arena, however given that my Startup origin story is quite a bit dated I’m going to stick to the more modern material.

I couldn’t come up with a good structure for this without giving away details that are still a bit too fresh for me to disclose. Instead the below is just snippets based on both facts and my own experiences that you hopefully find useful.

One thing is for certain — while HBO’s Silicon Valley has some truth in it, building a Startup is definitely not like that for most.

Why Work at a Startup?

The idea of being part of a team of people scrambling to build a business from nothing sounds appealing.

You like the sound of doing a lot of hard goddamn work and enjoy learning on your feet more than learning from others.

The idea of change and flexibility appeals to you. New roles, new locations, new co-workers, new products. Its all going to change a lot.

You are okay with going it alone / being lonely. This is mostly true for executives / department heads and founders in particular.

You can handle, and maybe even enjoy an emotional rollercoaster. The joy of winning / creating is amazing (highs) but the constant struggle and frequent failures (lows) often lead to many burning out or feeling stressed out all the time.

You want to do something incredibly rewarding (assuming things work out), in almost all circumstances working at a startup is sort of like a time dilation bubble for your career. You get more experience, faster and in a broader array of scenarios.

Why Not Work At a Startup?

It is not easy.

It is not a utopian panacea of feel good stories and people playing foosball.

Compensation is generally lower. The tradeoff here is the career growth and flexibility. The younger the company the crappier the (immediate) compensation but the more growth and flexibility you’ll have.

Despite what pop culture would have you believe there is very little time for you and your friends to hang out at work. Sure you know them, and you like them, but you’ll have no time.

You are impatient. The average startup takes 7 years to exit. Most never do, and unless you are one of the first dozen employees or a high ranking executive the average payout is nice but not life changing. Basically it is a long slog.

You will not have as much influence or input as you think. Sure if you are employee #7 (as I once was) you will have a lot of input … for a while, but the goal is to grow the business.

As that happens your influence dwindles. By the time a company reaches 100 people the executive team has exceeded their Dunbar number and the company is becoming something else.

Why Work at an Enterprise?

You value stability at work, the same day to day job is A-OK with you. Planning for the long term is your norm.

Immediate compensation and benefits are a significant concern for you.

You want to bolster your resume with a household name. Everyone knows who American Express and Google are. Not many recruiters or hiring managers know Startup #231.

Mentorship and learning from experienced industry veterans is something you value and would serve you better than being thrown into the deep end.

Why Not Work at an Enterprise?

You want to feel highly valued as an individual / person. Most large companies fall flat here. Sure you may land with a good Manager or Director but by and large you are just a line item.

You prefer high energy co-workers and modern work environments. Most enterprises operate in office parks built decades ago, with long commutes for most employees the general vibe is lower energy and more work-focused.

Rapid changes in work focus, work environment and individual assignments is something you need to thrive.

There are a lot of considerations to take into account and this is just the start. I think for most people over the course of their career that bouncing back and forth between both types of companies provides the biggest personal and professional benefits for you.

This allows you to both learn about different phases of business and about yourself and how you handle different circumstances while also choosing when to accelerate your career or compensation as needed.

Its also worth noting that while Startups are often perceived to be a young persons game, thats not really true. Sure the age trends a bit younger for specific roles and company types.

A big reason for that is the number of people who can afford to take a financial risk within each age bracket deviates based on a number of factors such as medical concerns, having kids, dealing with aging parents, saving for retirement and similar.

These concerns should certainly be at the forefront of any decision making about what company you should land at if you are deciding between offers as many Startups do not have as robust a set of benefits or compensation as their larger counterparts (instead relying on equity and the time dilation effect I noted above).

Startup or Enterprise, A Tale of Two Careers was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Future is now, but are we ready for it? It doesn’t feel like we are. Not a day goes by without someone complaining about how fast things are moving.

Your neighbor might say too many projects, companies, people — GAH! Who can handle all of this?! Too much change. I miss the good old days!

Our society is so ill equipped to deal with the rapidly changing circumstances that we are seeing things like Trump and Brexit happen, when 10 years ago it would have been unheard of.

The changes taking place in our world are not going to slow down, they are going to speed up. Largely because of technology and human connectivity. We are standing at the foot of a mountain and the peak is hidden behind a vale of clouds.Yea,

This is a great thing. To live at this time, right now and be able to participate in the creation of the future. As a technologist or entrepreneur the impact of the emerging technologies like machine learning and the ‘race to the bottom’ on pricing of commodity services and components like web hosting are not just creating immense value for companies like Google and Amazon, but also lowing or outright removing the barrier to entry for everyone else.

About 15 years ago I bootstrapped a company with a few friends. We failed. The failure itself was in part because the barriers we had to overcome were too high and opaque for us given our experience at the time. Fast forward to the past few years — I’ve funded, assisted and worked with founders who have been able to skip over or address many of those same challenges for a fraction of the cost both in time and money. Even something like a basic brand website or ecommerce deployment is now trivial cost and you are online in a day or two. Only 10 years ago this used to take weeks or months and cost thousands of dollars (time+money).

This same ‘race to the bottom’ applies in the enterprise space. Several years ago it was unheard of if you wanted to launch a micro-site in a few hours. Doing something like that to help promote a new product used to be a multi-month project with dozens of people and teams involved and was often not worth the cost. Now its as close to ‘on demand’ as you can imagine with Squarespace, AWS, Shopify and the like.

These changes aren’t just about geeks being able to quickly deploy and access software though. The resources that are now cheaply and easily available are driving huge economic and social shifts which will have long reaching and cascading effects.

During this time we’ve seen the rise of communication and social networks as an economic enabler across both basic coordination and transactions. While many people have and use SMS to coordinate economic activity, especially in the developing world the premier platform of the past decade was Facebook.

Facebook was really ‘social 1.0’ and it was really created in a pre-mobile, and very western-centric era. It is showing its age. What comes next? With smart phones everywhere, and half the world moving beyond SMS what does the world look like with 5, 6 or 10 billion connected users who all have a Smart Phone or even Siri or Alexa in their pocket or on their wrist? What new platforms and paradigms will rise?

We’ve never even approached having any platform which can address half the world let alone one that has a contextually diverse engagement model. Text? Voice? Touch? Imagine if all of these were seamlessly connected and available as they’ve been portrayed in pop culture like Eureka, Star Trek, Minority Report and similar?

That is going to happen. In our lifetime.

The impact of these changes is already being seen first hand worldwide. Children are being raised with a vast array of technology and on-demand services from a very young age. Numerous studies have shown access to mobile devices and the internet has helped increase GDP and literacy in the populations of African and South East Asian countries — two of the most under-served and impoverished regions in the world.

Improved logistics and food creation coming from autonomous systems, drones, CRISPR and other technologies will continue to reduce or eliminate extreme poverty in the areas which have been hardest to reach and serve for generations. Over the past 10–20 years we’ve seen immense growth in these area’s already, and as much as the BRIC countries helped drive worldwide growth in the 00’s there are dozens of still-untapped countries which will rise to the fore and drive the next wave of economic growth.

Why does this matter? The level of connectivity and global awareness has never been higher, and the impact that this shift has on traditional economic models and companies has been immense. Yet we still have below 50% of the world population connected. As more and more people are brought into the connected age there will be more and more globalization and as a result more Brexit and Trump.

Because of these shifting sands it is no longer viable to rest on a static plan (life or business) and poorly structured regulation. Standing still is a death sentence for any ambition you might have. Regardless of who you are — change is coming.

Everyone needs to understand that the total global economy is going to explode and be reshaped over and over again in the next 30–50 years as more and more people gain access to basic goods and services. This is a good thing, Globalization has been a powerful (mostly positive) change agent, but as with any change there will be challenges.

The golden age for technology is here and now and the potential market for engagement, products and other new ideas is still growing by leaps and bounds. The chance to build something great was not yesterday. It is not tomorrow. It is RIGHT NOW.

For years I’ve worn numerous hats, lived on airplanes and worked out of everything from coffee shops in Indiana and airports all over the world to corner offices in Manhattan.

I was always busy. On the go.

Now I’m not.

How is that possible? I work at a hot startup. I’m building and running several departments and countless side projects. I’m the personification of a busy person. Except I’m not. At least not in the way that matters most — my own perception.

People who always feel busy are usually stressed out and unhappy. They typically don’t value the time of others. They either end up doing countless hours of repetitive tasks they don’t like or working with people who drive them up a wall. They often cause this same nonsense to occur for others in their organization. There are never enough hours in the day.

Richard Branson is busier than you …

… but I bet you feel busier than he does.

Using myself as an example (cause you and I have more in common than either of us do with Richard Branson) — on paper I’m a busy guy. My calendar has more events than most, I have a bigger backlog of ‘to do’ items and more miles flown. Yet I dont feel as busy as most people do because I love my life and my job and I’m thankful for both.

This isn’t just because I have a ‘good’ job. Every job I’ve had since I worked at Burger King (when I was 16 — decades ago) was good in some way. Your job and your life are also quite good, or they can be, if you learn how to take advantage of it in a specific way. Namely being thankful for the opportunity you have. This isn’t easy for most people. It wasn’t always easy for me either.

This is a mindset shift.

My mindset and how I approach my work started shifting years ago. Working on a fairly challenging ‘devops’ project (before devops was a thing) for a client I realized that I truly enjoy talking to people and helping them win. It wasnt the code or the design. For me it was pushing through obstacles, collaborating with others and helping teams and companies succeed where they had failed or struggled that gave me a real sense of pride and made me enjoy the work.

This particular customer had struggled to get configuration management, testing, integration — anything modern honestly, to work for them. Most projects resulted in shelfware. Installed, but never used or maintained. I turned that around for them by training them up front and making the initial part of the project an interactive planning exercise (something I still do) where we figured out as a group what we needed to have in place for all of us as individuals to want to use the solution (aka ‘nice to have’ items). This was a seismic shift from how other projects had been executed.

It made them thankful for the opportunity and happy to work with each other.

This is what stops busy.

All of the project minutia and the long hours working on slides in a hotel located in an office park someplace in Texas gave me the right ingredients to figure out that being busy is just a matter of how you think about your time and whether you are thankful for what you are working on and who you are working with.

I was working long hours under tight deadlines with a customer that had numerous similar projects fail. I should have felt busy. I should have felt stressed and frustrated.

I didn’t.

I’m constantly seeing friends and colleagues struggle with feeling busy, being overwhelmed and overlooking the opportunities they have rather than being thankful. If you change your mindset you will stop feeling busy and start being a more positive, productive person.

I’ve been a people manager in the tech industry for almost 10 years now. I’ve managed small teams, large projects, direct reports and managers. Like most people my first few attempts at management were failures, thankfully they were mostly normal run-of-the-mill failures typical of first time managers. Nothing horrible, catastrophic or story worthy (sorry to disappoint!).

However through those failures and the successes I’ve had over the years I’ve developed an approach for building and leading teams in the technology industry that I’m going to share so that others can avoid some of my mistakes.

First I’d like to offer a word of caution I always share with potential managers — If you choose to be a manager or executive you must accept that a huge part of the career path you are embarking on is about serving others. It is not about ‘being in charge’ or ‘getting a raise’. Many horrible managers and executives I’ve worked with / for in the past misunderstand this. In order to build an excellent culture and team a leader has to assist and execute.

This means coaching, removing obstacles, helping people navigate politics and similar. Not just telling them what to do or blaming people when things go wrong.

Hiring & Building The Team

Assuming that you need to hire someone, or build a team from scratch this section is for you. If you just need help with how to manage a team jump ahead.

The biggest mistake most organizations make in technology is hiring for ‘current’ or ‘past’ expertise or pedigree. People are not dogs. In fact people are much closer to stocks than dogs, and as the saying goes — past performance does not guarantee future returns. Any manager or exec who has had to fire someone can attest to this.

Job Listings

As a hiring manager you should solicit input from any senior team members you have on job listings you are going to post. Make sure you pre-face this by letting them know that you’ll review but not accept all the feedback. This is important as most companies, states and countries have rules and laws around what can/cannot be in a job listing. However their input is valuable and worth the time to collect and reformat as it may give insight into their perception and hourly responsibilities that you might not have had.

This also gives them a sense of ownership and pride in the hiring process. Which makes them far more likely to assist with on-boarding and mentoring their new colleague and to provide referrals, which are usually the best source of new candidates.

Personally I try to stay away from ‘pedigree’ listings and rote requirements and write job listings which are more descriptive of the day to day expectations and skills needed.

Think of it like this “10 years of Python” is not a skill, its a duration. Further 10 years for you is very different from the 10 years someone else spent in a different company or market space. Instead write this as “Experience with Python 2 and 3 in an HPC environment including SciPy, NumPy, Twisted etc”. Include the stuff you really need, and highlight things you would like to bring in. Don’t expect 100% compliance on day 1. This is the single biggest reason many companies have hiring pipeline problems.

Bad job listings beget bad applicants.

Interviewing

Phone screens, Hacker Rank, resume selection and similar should thin the applicant pool quite a bit. After all those steps the in-person panel interviews are the best closing option. These are of very high value when the candidate and team has had time to prep.

Many in the industry (myself included) advocate you skip the whiteboard, powerpoint and big-O approaches and instead give the candidate a realistic amount of prep and ask them to answer a question or series of questions about how they would approach something that lines up with the job (again convey the ‘day to day’). For example “We had a problem with throughput using Node in the following scenario, how would you have worked / resolved this?”.

The goal of in- person interviews is interaction, not review of a persons resume or ‘on the spot’ skill checks.

Have the team ask questions and interact with the candidate on their approach. If they are just a little wrong it doesn’t usually matter. How can I say that? Because if the candidate did an okay job explaining their thought process and methods but lacks specific domain experience and the team wants to work with them then things will work out (this is why its a panel interview and you don’t just hire based on a resume).

If the candidate is abrasive or doesn’t mesh well you will likely have issues that impact further/deeper than a node.js scalability problem (for example). People are much harder and more expensive to fix and adjust than technology is, and this is why panel / team interviews are crucial.

References

I know what you are thinking and yes you absolutely should ask for references and follow up on them. I’ve had several people list fake supervisors and family members on their resume. Obviously this wont fly. For people who lack a robust resume ask for teachers, project leads or supervisors at places they volunteer to fill this role.

Also while I appreciate the usage of Github and similar as a review component do not make the mistake of thinking code on the internet is a substitute for a reference validating the candidates skills, professionalism etc.

Making a Hiring Decision

Get feedback from the team and review resumes, github, references and similar for all the candidates for an hour or so (depending on the size of the pool). See if there is a decisive winner. If there is this is easy. If there are a number of similar candidates things get a bit more difficult and you need to start considering other elements.

• Salary / compensation expectations. This is still a business. At the junior end there isn’t usually a large delta, but people 10–20 years into their career often have 20k+ salary differences from their peers. Our industry is remarkably non-standard here.
• Team chemistry and diversity. Do NOT hire someone just because they get along well with the team or have a specific pedigree, diversity (of any sort) is a huge benefit. While you want to ensure the candidate can do the job and make sure the team works well together (don’t hire someone everyone hates) you should consider taking the #1b candidate who has a different background. This will often help in ways you cant predict.
• Location. If the team is all remote then timezones matter. If the team is all local and likes to hang out near the office hiring someone with a 2hr commute has some risks affiliated with it. Not just for the existing team, but also for the person who now has 4 extra hours a day dedicated to getting to/from the office.

Leading A Team

So now that you have a team in place, or at least some parts of a team you need to figure out how to make them and the broader organization successful. This is much harder than it sounds, but below are some tips based on my experience in doing this. If you have any further idea’s or need advice please reach out, I’m more than happy to lend some guidance.

Drive Communication

It sounds simple, but this is where most managers fail. The most common crutches I hear managers mention is that “communication is a two way street” followed by “I’m too busy” — basically being lazy and expecting others to carry the load. While nobody bats 100% here you must do the best you can.

People look for any excuse to avoid hard or awkward conversations. Rise above this behavior as a leader.

Make yourself available to your team via their preferred method of communication. Email, Slack, IRC, SMS. It doesn’t matter, be online and approachable just like you should be in real life. This is especially critical if you or your team are fully or partially remote.

Force regularly occurring communication, including the dreaded 1 on 1's. Your busy. Your people are busy. It doesn’t matter. Put the meetings on the calendar and make sure you prioritize them over other things. Too often this type of cadence gets pushed to the back burner. I’ve been guilty of this just as much as anyone, so I know its hard, but you have to make it happen.

Enable Collaboration

Remember that communication doesn’t have to be limited to “up and down” the chain. One of the most powerful lessons I’ve picked up from working in Open Source over the years is that lateral / peer to peer collaboration is every bit as critical as boss-employee (or maintainer/lead to contributor) communication.

Peer collaboration yields the most rewarding and consistent results while helping to enforce a robust culture.

Setup team wide calls. Start internal team projects. Get people working together and growing together and let the team drive. The results of something this simple will impress you and have a larger impact than you expect. This is also a good way to let individuals test their leadership capacity and you can challenge people to put in the work to stand out in a less risky area than on a major client or release.

Build Loyalty and Improve Team Morale

Actions speak louder than words. This is especially true in management. Most people can see through a manager who doesn’t (or can’t) help / support them, and that ultimately results in employee churn and low productivity and morale. None of which is good. However that doesn’t mean that you should shy away from making bold, motivational and candid statements (more on this below).

Make sure your actions support the statements you make.

The reason sometimes loud and brash leaders have hordes of people supporting them is because they have built up the loyalty of those people over time by supporting them with actions. One of the biggest things you can do to build loyalty is support your people when they fail or make poor choices. Don’t let anyone make a mountain out of a molehill and ardently avoid anyone playing the blame game or acting like a seagull. Nothing kills morale and team chemistry faster.

Defend your people, especially when they fail.

Conversely in my experience the routine “job well done” emails / rewards are usually not as effective at building loyalty as defending someone when they make a mistake. This sounds counter-intuitive but most people know when they’ve done a good job and freak out when they mess up. Thus the simple positive gestures only provide marginal increases in happiness. Point being — you should still do the small ‘at a boy/girl’ stuff, but that should only be 1 tool in your arsenal, and the most important time for you to be available and making a difference is when things are going haywire.

Be Transparent & Honest

Hard times bring hard decisions and bad news. That is always true, but often we all make the mistake of skipping over the difficult decisions when things are going smoothly. After all who wants to rock the boat? I do, and so do you.

If you dump bad news on an already bad situation you are effectively turning a thunderstorm into a hurricane. If you dump bad news on a good situation you are an afternoon shower on a beautiful summer day. Now ask yourself — Which scenario sucks more?

You also need to ensure this is understood by your leadership team. People and teams can take only so many lumps in a short timeframe before things reach an irreparable state. Being transparent with people as decisions are happening can help pace the (potentially bad) news and give them more clarity. It also gives you as a leader a better way to present updates: “Remember a few weeks/months ago when we discussed funding for this project …” goes over a lot better than waiting for the employee to ask and replying back with “The project wasn’t funded”. Also as the old saying goes: bad news travels fast. Know that before you share.

Likewise if you forget something, apologize and be honest. You are human and your people will respect you more for your honesty than for glazing over something. Just don’t make forgetting things a habit, what seems small to you may be a world changing situation for someone else.

Go Social

Lots of managers fail to socialize how good their people are. This is a problem because when your rock star engineer number 2 asks to attend a conference that will cost the company $5k you have to explain to your boss who this guy is, and why this is important (and this pattern repeats up the chain). Promoting your people is a 24x7x365 activity as a leader and makes your life much easier when bonuses and budget requests come around. Remember that bad news generally travels faster and ‘sticks’ much more than good news does, so in essence you need to be a cheerleader for your people as much as possible to offset this.

This is especially true if you are 2 or 3 levels up the chain, as the actions you take have a much more significant impact than team leads and similar first level managers.

This also means that as you move up throughout your career (either as a manger or as an engineer) you absolutely have to keep coaching people to socialize their wins and champion their peers. If you have a peer rewards system in place that is great, but make sure you encourage the team to thank each other and give accolades publicly as well. This is truly one of the most difficult things for introverts in the tech industry to do, so make sure you help them as much as you can.

Take Advantage of Passion

The last tip I’ll give you is to understand what people really want to work on, and get them lined up to do it. This starts with hiring, but extends forever, and people’s desires often shift so make sure you stay on top of it.

Sometimes what an engineer or manager wants to work on seems like a poor fit (eg an introvert recruiting people) or will require you to juggle resources on a few teams to make it happen. You should put in the effort to help them anyway. Even starting them with small side projects, getting them a mentor, make it a part time assignment. Outlining the steps they have to take to get there. Anything helps. You must capture their passion and interest.

Not only will this build an immense amount of loyalty it will also help diversify the skills and people on your teams — resulting in a higher level of capability and output from those teams.

Remember — happy people are productive people.

How To Hire & Lead Great Teams was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Transparency has become a bit of a buzzword lately. However almost everyone misunderstands what transparency in todays always connected culture actually amounts to, and how they should leverage it from a business and engagement perspective. Wednesday I had a horrible experience with a company who I rely on, not because they failed, but because of a lack of transparency in dealing with their customer(s).

At about 1130am PST my internet went down. This isn’t a frequent occurrence, so I didn’t think much of it. I tested a few things, tried calling my ISP after I confirmed the problem wasn’t in my apartment and got a fast busy. No big deal, I made some lunch and tweeted to them that things were down and using my mobile phone (the future is nifty) I opened a ticket via their web form.

By about 1pm I was starting to get concerned as other people on twitter all over the greater San Diego area were reporting outages. Since I work from home most of the time I, like many others, need to be connected. After a few conference calls I finally got someone on the phone. The customer support representative gave me a non-committal statement about how the problem was being “worked on very diligently”. This stance continued on twitter with a number of their customers asking for ETA’s and details on what specifically was wrong. Essentially we were all being blown off.

You should assume some of your customers are well informed about the services your business provides — especially if they rely on them.

Now here is the thing — this sucks, and I’m sure some people somewhere were busting their hump to fix BGP or replace some broken gear. They had a real bad day. Worse than mine I’m sure. However that wasn’t being explained or communicated at all. There was no transparency. Worse than that for the first few hours of the outage no communication at all occurred on social media, in their tickets or otherwise. They merely confirmed there was a problem and moved on.

Thats a major failure, and like so many things it is a cultural failure. Someone in their leadership ranks, likely in the customer support organization, has set the tone that communicating details with customers is not a good idea and that further engagement with customers around problems is an even worse idea.

These days that ideology presents a problem because often your customers know more than you want to believe. You need to stop assuming everyone who buys from you is a moron. I worked in tech support back in the late 90’s and early 00’s, so I know this is a cultural issue — I’ve seen it and participated in it first hand.

However its not the year 2000, all people are well networked and connected. The game has changed and you must adapt to it. The cultural failure and lack of transparency continued when all the support tickets were closed with “fixed” but no details were provided, and they posted a blog stating that no details would be forthcoming — because it might confuse people.

The result of this stance is frustrated customers. Back in the day customers were isolated, now they are not, now those customers communicate with one another frequently at meetups, on twitter, in facebook groups and occasionally in person.

As a real life example several of us have exchanged messages speculating what the issue was, if it will re-occur and what our contingency plans should be if it does. None of which is doing our ISP’s brand or customer satisfaction rating any good, and all of which could have been avoided by a simple blog post and/or tweet giving some details.

There is no point in putting my ISP on blast by name, cause that won’t accomplish anything and this isn’t really about their issues, but rather about the world as a whole and how customer engagement and satisfaction has changed. If you are starting a company, working in a customer facing role or are part of the leadership at an organization I’d implore you to think about how your decisions around transparency and communication are impacting customers and the people in your organization. These problems are not just related to ‘always on’ services, as others have observed the lack of transparency and communication from customer service organizations even happens in places like Starbucks:

“Customer service isn’t just mechanical recourse. A free-drink coupon does not make up for the inconvenience or the loss of time or the plain flat-out irritation I’ve experienced.”

Most companies treat customer service as a buffer rather than an integral part of the business. Combining that horrific strategy with the lack of transparency leads to companies like Comcast being lambasted at every turn, and while they have a monopoly in many cases most businesses do not.

So while I’m sure there is a case study supporting the customer service as a shield ideology, I’m equally certain its costing most companies an immense amount of business because we are in a connected age where communication happens instantly across the globe with complete strangers. The last thing you want from a brand perspective is strangers bonding over how bad your support is, how horrible an outage was or anything similar.

As a contrast in a similar market space look at how Netflix communicates with its customers. Gory technical details are publicly available online: http://techblog.netflix.com/ and they use this as a recruitment tool, and it builds immense rapport with their customer base. No speculation or worry needed. You as a customer know whats going on. Transparency in all its splendor and horror.

For further reading on this topic take a look at the Delivering Happiness book by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, which does a good job providing a contrasting approach. Just remember — your customers are going to talk about you, it can either be an informed discussion brought about by the transparency of your culture or a speculative discussion brought about by the lack of transparency. In my experience a speculative discussion is usually a negative one.

The tricky thing with innovation is that its a very non-specific return on investment, which makes it really hard to justify to executives. You might hit a home run, or you might strike out. When you compound this with the ‘sacred cow’ problem most companies face, the road to innovation is steep.

So what is the sacred cow ? Its best qualified as the dominant product in a company. Sometimes this product may be 50% of the revenue, other times it may be 90% or more. The importance of this product (or team) distorts and influences the ability for other products and teams to succeed by blocking innovation, siphoning capital and having a ‘pull’ on talent and brain power.

There are a few ways to help mitigate the risks affiliated with these sorts of scenarios. Two good approaches to copy can be taken from modern software development teams (Agile) and how angels and silicon valley (SV) funds invest.

Angels and SV funds invest in a broad number of companies not because they want them to all succeed, but because they expect many of them to fail but they only need a handful to succeed to see a positive ROI. Likewise one of the biggest benefits of Agile is breaking down work into smaller chunks so you are distributing the workload effectively and working around risks and blocking issues.

Hedging your bets across lots of small projects is safer than pooling your time and capital into a small number of large investments / projects.

Many traditional businesses don’t understand this at an institutional level. They expect, plan, steer and budget for everything to succeed, and dump endless additional resources into course corrections and unplanned work. This is a mindset failure. We all know there is no such thing as “100%” successful, especially at a large scale.

So if you know its impossible to achieve 100% success and the big-bang approach is bad then where should you put your time and capital to get the best value (or ROI) ?

Its easier to start by discussing where you shouldn’t put it. Pet projects that are driven by risk management are a categorically poor strategy (at least for technology). Also you should aim to avoid having a risk averse attitude / strategy, not because its out of style, but because it makes your business or team ripe for disruption by external factors.

On a recent a16z podcast (replaying this StartupGrind interview), Clayton Christensen and Andreesen spoke about disruption. Some of the more interesting things that come from Christensen’s work is that it can be applied to highlight a lot of the challenges in the enterprise technology market, especially around the ‘sacred cow’ and innovation problems that the larger players are facing.

Well run organizations get disrupted.

The “all hands on deck” big-bang approach occurs all too often in large organizations and this is where most companies start to fail. Investment and focus is internal, usually focused on the ‘sacred cow’ and share holder value. Companies and agencies attempt to deliver on these objectives using a small number of large projects and predictably any correction based on external factors is usually too late and requires a huge investment and mad scramble.

The traditional ‘well run’ company invests this way because they are risk averse with capital and put everything they have into sustaining the ‘sacred cow’ (eg the “known quantity”). This was the problem Microsoft suffered under Ballmer — inward focus, ignoring external trends and not innovating.

At a macro level everything was about Windows. Windows was their sacred cow, and while it was highly valuable the rest of the world innovated past the era of tightly coupled dependencies. Those dependencies are what determined the value of Windows and helped define it as Microsofts sacred cow, the market moved and Microsoft failed to innovate.

When large projects fail, there is a huge impact.

Assuming that you are interested in driving innovation in a larger company or government agency. There are a couple of approaches that Chistensen has spoken about that can be implemented. Efficiency Innovation, Sustaining Innovation and Disruptive Innovation (sometimes called “Empowering”). The last is usually a large strategic investment in a new direction or product. Often this is a big-bang approach and is incredibly difficult to get approved and supported through completion in large companies, and it also has a fairly high chance of failure.

The other two (Efficiency and Sustaining) offer safer approaches for most large corporations and agencies. The implementation of either could be done by copying the process / strategy that the software development world has shifted to (smaller components) and what the VC’s and funds in Silicon Valley are doing (smaller investments) — Basically you push lots of smaller projects, producing smaller changes across the enterprise which would be deployed to the market faster. Know that some percentage of these small projects will fail and hedge your bets.

Instead of the 2–3 large projects typically underway in your average organization there would be 25 or 30 smaller projects. Smaller teams (3–5 people) would be used on these smaller projects which could adapt quicker, struggles with blocking events due to resource and timeline conflicts decrease in frequency, projects become easier to resource with outside help or to staff with new hires, and you achieve the all-important faster (incremental) time to market.

Reinvesting into innovation is the key to building the forward leaning culture required to adapt to external forces

You then take the savings and culture you built by leveraging Efficient or Sustaining Innovations and invest back into Disruptive Innovation projects. I can’t speak for Google’s exact model, but it is telling that they spend $3.5Bn USD annually on “moonshot” (Disruptive) projects. That can only happen if you are efficient and/or sustaining with a forward leaning (not risk averse) culture.

The mindset change that must occur for this to be viable for your team is two fold. First the expectation of 100% success must be abandoned. Second the act of trying to innovate by itself should be valued, including failure.

All projects produce value, either as a result of their success or from the knowledge gained while failing.

The real objective with innovation is to produce value. This could be efficiency with capital / time or service and product elements including improved quality, lower time to market, less friction or higher revenue generation but the higher level objectives are usually earned over time and often take many false starts and pivots to achieve.

You will need to use the small successes and lessons to build up to a larger strategic theme / objective and that larger objective will vary by market and company, and possibly team to team. There is no magic “one size fits all” approach here.

Understanding the ‘sacred cow’ problem and if it applies to your team and using the ‘go small’ strategy outlined here will help inform you of how to best make decisions about allocation of resources towards innovation initiatives. Also make sure to evaluate the market situation your company or team is in, because even if disruptive elements are not readily apparent they may be on the horizon, around the corner or lurking under your bed.

After my last post I had a few people ask why I had chosen the term “frictionless” to describe something that has always existed. To a certain degree I’m just following other people’s lead and using their terminology (must be the sales part of my DNA creeping into my writing), but it also indicates that although the problems have always existed, the solutions available are indeed new.

The idea behind the “frictionless” term, at least to me is to indicate that some specific element of enterprise technology or business in general is moving efficiently, with no interruptions or undue hindrance towards the end state objective. Its not utopia, but it is a much better way to approach business and technology strategy in 2016.

Using a consumer technology as an example — my Netflix subscription is a fixed fee on autopay, and 99.99% of the time when I turn on my TV Netflix just plain works. They did this as a much smaller company than their competition.

Netflix is a frictionless experience for most, and when you compare it to the experience of Blockbuster — you had to drive to the store, park, manually wade through rows upon rows of movies to find one that was both something I wanted and was in-stock (remember the out of stock new release days ?), the price depended on how old the movies you rented were, how long you kept them etc. But you werent done there, you had to drive home, come back to return the movies at some point — and hope there were no late fees. Blockbuster’s entire business model was full of friction.

Although technology plays a critical part in most disruption taking place in business and the enterprise world right now, its not the only thing. Netflix disrupted Blockbuster (and put them out of business) because they had a better business strategy that incorporated and frequently changed because of technology. From the outset Netflix was out to remove hurdles (friction) from the consumers experience, first by charging a smaller subscription fee, mailing DVD’s out (you never leave home), then streaming. It was a business strategy focused on a frictionless experience.

But this story isnt about Netflix. Its about you and your business. When you go into work tomorrow, no matter where you work or what your title is, I challenge you to start cataloging all of the little inefficiencies (eg friction) that make your job or your customers (internal or external) experience painful, slow or frustrating.

Once you start identifying the problems you can start thinking about ways to make things run smoother. Are your POS systems out of date with no/poor inventory integration ? Does your logistics division constantly struggle to manage deliveries and shipping deadlines ? Is your IT department incapable of keeping email & chat online ? Is the espresso machine in the office bad enough to make you walk to the nearest Starbucks every day ? (ok, that last one is a pet peeve)

These may not be your area’s of responsibility, but often in life and in business the person with a plan and a willingness to drive is the one who ends up making the biggest difference, not the person with the fancy title.

Continue reading about frictionless in another of my posts here

Not terribly long ago consumer technology caused many of us to scratch our heads in disbelief and utter several creative expletives. The days of cassette tapes, Windows ME and horrible printers are now (mostly) behind us on the consumer side of technology, we can buy random brand cheap electronics with the expectation that most of the time things will just work. This is not the case in the enterprise IT market. Yet.

Its really important to have a good perspective on where the enterprise IT space is in terms of its development and maturity. It is still a nascent area. Many businesses didnt really start making heavy use of IT systems until the 90’s and 00’s, and many still struggle to tie IT to the business it supports. From that perspective consumer technology had a long head start.

In the past decade we have seen a rapid rise and maturation of processes (Agile, SAFe, DevOps) and core technologies (AWS, Linux) that have set the stage for the enterprise space to finally start catching up with the consumer space and present internal business units with a frictionless experience. Why is that important ? Why is that important ? Because it allows your business to operate at immense speed, and at lower costs.

Consider how difficult it was just 10 years ago to start a technology business or project — you had to buy equipment, license software, hire a wizard etc. It was not uncommon for this to take weeks or even months. Now you can go to any number of Software as a Service vendors or Cloud providers and have an online business or project operational in a day or less. A solid example is your marketing team deploying a product mini-site on Squarespace vs undertaking that endeavor 8–10 years ago. It is now higher quality, faster and lower cost than ever before.

At the more extreme end of the spectrum is startups who have designed their business around these modern concepts and tools and can for example avoid a vehicle recall by a software update sent over the air. This same paradigm is now available to enterprise IT teams but the skills, corporate policies and hierarchy have not quite caught up.

While the implementation of a website may be trivial, in many businesses the process of approving and funding that website is not.

I talk to customers and peers across the industry quite frequently about these hurdles. Its getting better every day, and will eventually cease to be a bottleneck (For you, or for your competition). As HBR recently pointed out -Once businesses become more efficient at allowing IT to operate at consumer speeds we will see a massive gain in economic efficiency.

The roadblocks that slow down rapid experimentation and deployment of new technologies are often rooted in risk avoidance techniques that are essential to large and long term material investments (eg real estate and people) but do not (and should not) apply in the same manner to technology investments (eg deploying a VM on AWS). This must change.

Since the foundational technologies and related processes have improved, and the business side of things is starting to catch up it’s not difficult to imagine a time in the near future where enterprise IT (including application development and other technology groups) is a frictionless business function. Gone will be the days of endless meetings and procurement nightmares.

Under this scenario the adoption and usage of technology (eg a product marketing website) in a business becomes similar to that of consumer technology, and could be leveraged to gain real business efficiency. Something that has been talked about for decades, but has often gone unrecognized in the average business because of poorly designed software/systems, poor organizational alignment, inherited business dependencies and lack of skills.

The real challenge in the face of the economic slowdown is for businesses and government agencies to to take advantage of this massive shift. Based on my experience and seeing first hand what my peers in the industry are doing I’m advising any executive who asks to develop a mid-term strategy focused on this concept. Address the skills and organizational gaps by building the right team and optimize your business strategy to better leverage technology. Focus on creating a frictionless relationship between business and technology and the end customer your business sells to (be it B2B or B2C).

Start with reviews in the following key areas, and restructure the business to effectively prepare itself to benefit from the shift taking place in enterprise technology. A word of caution — if you dont adapt, your competitors (internal or external) will. Although this is a very large undertaking it is essential for most businesses to effectively compete in 2016 and beyond.

Organizational Structure

Don’t review just the org chart, but also your hiring process, technology decision tree and overall responsibility matrix of both the technology teams and the business units. This will help to identify key people, organizational weaknesses and bottlenecks/inefficiencies.

One common misstep that occurs here is the emphasizing of accountability, but not its counterpart authority. It is entirely too easy to drift into inefficiency by micromanaging and armchair quarterbacking because authority has not been delegated the right people. Accordingly a key thought in structuring the organization for long term success is ‘making ownership of decisions easy’. Look for the people who are most impacted by a process or decision and ask yourself if you can empower them to effectively own it.

Ensuring that decision making responsibility and authority reside at the lowest level in the organization (that can make an informed decision) will help your organization gain immense speed and drive employee engagement, just make sure to support and coach those individuals in their decisions, especially through early missteps. This becomes a much easier proposition to take on if you also look to maximize your top talent by placing them in corresponding decision making roles.

Technology Adoption Processes

The key question to ask here is — How long does it take to get a new technology implemented in your organization/business unit ? There is no concrete correct answer, but moving forward the time frame should be hours or days, not weeks or months. This is especially true if you are in a market that is being saturated by competitors or revolutionized by startups.

There are of course caveats. Replacing your entire on-site storage infrastructure will take longer than deploying a new product launch site onto OpenShift, but the overall goal here should be to remove obstacles and create a frictionless process that works to protect the business while allowing the teams and people doing the work to move fast.

One example of how this could align would be giving line-of-business managers some level of authority over technology acquisition, so their group (eg marketing) can move at a pace appropriate to their needs and adopt the tools they need/want (again, make ownership easy). The risk here is little to no standardization across business units, but that isnt always a bad thing, you just have to balance it with a process that provides a minimal amount of validation — It usually makes sense to adhere to a security policy for example, or use the same enterprise storage vendor, but maybe marketing should be able to use Wordpress on OpenShift instead of Squarespace. Make sure you factor this into the Organizational Structure as a whole so that things are consistent.

Employee Enablement & Engagement

As the linked Forbes article above points out, talent is your number 1 priority. Most studies and reports on employee efficiency in the modern workplace focus on engagement, which is often tightly coupled with recognition. As a leader it is critical that no matter what organizational structure you choose that people are recognized based on their effort and their success.

Another key ingredient in driving engagement in the modern workforce is openness / transparency. Any decision making process (not just the outcome) that impacts employees on a day to day basis should be subject to their (constructive) criticism, and with more people able to review those processes the people who self select / choose to get involved become more engaged. Rather than having involvement dictated by firm policy, it becomes a bit more of an open forum as described in the open organization.

“The currency of leadership is truth and transparency.” — Howard Schultz

Plenty of other ideas exist on this front. Everything from having employee’s work at a charity for a day or allowing them to have free time (Google’s infamous 20% rule) works to varying degrees. I can attest firsthand that having a peer-to-peer recognition system that people enjoy using is very effective.

Also when figuring out how to recognize and engage people remember that while money isn’t everything, it does matter.

Customer Experience

This is a challenging area for most leaders, especially those in a business which focuses on B2B sales rather than the end consumer. Evaluate what your customer sees in terms of engagement with your brand and business, and understand how you can leverage a more dynamic and technically savvy business to improve on those perceptions and remove friction from the process.

A broad review driven by probing questions will often reveal a lack of self awareness in the broader organization with regards to the customer experience and the role individuals play in it.

In the B2B world for example — does your sales and order process involve humans ? Should it ? What is the lead time to fulfill an order ? How seamless is the customer engagement if there is an issue during or post sale ?

A shining example of how to build a customer-centric company in the consumer space comes from Zappos. The examples often cited are also ones that can help drive employee engagement along with enhancing the customer experience.

Many of the most valuable businesses in the world have a frictionless customer experience. Look at everything from Amazon and the myriad of ways you can buy (mobile app, dash, buttons, echo, website, subscriptions) to Tesla’s lack of dealers. Reducing the time spent and number of ‘choke points’ / bottlenecks a customer has to endure to do business with you is the holy grail of frictionless customer experience.

Leveraging Technology to Help Create a Frictionless Business was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.