If you think you would like to use these ideas at your company, but you are unsure where to start, I can describe what we did at Avvo. I joined when the company was already nine years old. It had a mostly monolithic architecture running in a single data center with minimal redundancy.
There were some things that we did quickly to move to a more fail-safe world.
Moving from planning around objectives to planning around priorities
First, we worked to build a supportive culture that could handle the inevitable failures better. We moved from planning around specific deliverable commitments to organizing our work around priorities.
Suppose specific achievements, my output, measure my performance. This way of measuring performance often creates problems.
Suppose I need to coordinate with another person, and their commitments do not align to mine. That situation will create tension. If the company’s needs change, but my obligations do not, there is little incentive to reorient my work. To achieve my commitments, I can be thwarted by dependencies or hamper the priorities of the company.
People in leadership like quarterly goals or Managing By Objectives because they create strict accountability. If I commit to doing something and it is not complete when I say it will be, I have failed.
Suppose you think instead about aligning around priorities. In that case, those priorities may change from time to time. Still, if everyone is working against the same set of priorities, you can be sure that they are broadly doing the right things for the company. Aligning to priorities sets an expectation of outcome, not output.
Talk about failure with an eye to future improvement instead of blame
The senior leadership team must be aligned with these approaches. The rest of the organization may not be initially. When leaders talk about failure, they must do it with a learning message rather than blame or punishment. People should know that the expectation is that they may fail. If they are avoiding failure, then they probably aren’t thinking big enough. It is a message that “we want to see you fail, small, and we want to make sure we learn from that failure.”
I created our slack channel to share the lessons from our failures. I sent a message to my organization, making it clear that I don’t expect perfection. I shared my vision that we become a learning organization in town halls and one-on-ones.
Fail-safe architecture
Monoliths are natural when building a new company or when you have a small team. Monoliths are simple to make and more straightforward to deploy when you don’t have multiple teams building together. As the codebase and organization grow, microservices become a better model.
It is critical to recognize the point where a monolith is becoming a challenge instead of an enabler. Microservices require a lot more infrastructure to support them. The effort to transition from one architecture to another is significant, so it is best to prepare before the need becomes urgent.
Avvo had already started moving to a microservices architecture, but lack of investment stalled the transition. I increased investment in the infrastructure team. The team built tools that simplified the effort of creating, testing, monitoring, and deploying services. We then made rapid progress.
In every company, I use the lessons that I have shared in this article to build a culture where teams can innovate and learn from their users. It manifests differently with each group, but every team that has adopted these ideas has improved both business outcomes and employee satisfaction. Work with your peers to adopt some of these ideas. Start small and grow. The process of adopting these concepts mirrors the product development process you are working to build.
If you decide that it isn’t a good fit for your company, you will have failed smart by failing small.
I will leave you with a final thought from Henry Ford.
I was the Chief Technology Officer at Avvo from 2016 until 2018, when the company was acquired. One of the proudest achievements of my tenure there was building a more diverse and inclusive technology team.
While I have spoken a bit about our efforts before in talks, I haven’t written about it. Even though we had done well, I hadn’t achieved the ambitious goals I had set when I joined the company. I was always hoping to do better at my current company, and then use the wisdom from building more diverse organizations multiple times to provide higher-value insight.
Given current events, I hear from friends at tech companies that they are re-evaluating their lack of diversity. They want to improve. While companies have tried different tactics for years, we haven’t made much progress as an industry. If you are trying to address diversity for the first time, it is a daunting task. It is easy to try some things, make no progress, and then give up.
This article isn’t a prescription for improving diversity at any technology company. It is a case study for how we grew diversity at Avvo. The different strategies we employed may be useful for your efforts. They may just inspire you to try new things that are appropriate for your company and culture.
Starting Point
Avvo is an online legal marketplace connecting consumers and attorneys in the US. The company overall was fairly diverse from both a gender and a race perspective. When I joined in 2016, the technology team was a different story.
At the start of my tenure, the organization was not very diverse, as displayed in the charts below. Additionally, there was no one from any under-represented groups with a management title in the Technology team.
The team’s status quo was not the result of overt discrimination, but it did demonstrate a lack of prioritization of diversity, inclusion, and reducing unconscious bias.
My vision for the company was to make it an exemplar of diversity and inclusion within the region. I wanted to not only make Avvo’s technology team diverse to prove that it was possible. I also wanted to show that a diverse group is more than capable. I knew that we could use our diversity as part of our employer branding, helping us stand out in a very crowded market for talent.
Making Improving Diversity a Priority for Technology
I set the tone I intended to take as part of my interview process for the role. I didn’t want any potential for disputes between the rest of the senior leadership and me.
Once I had accepted the job, I had a multiple-month notice period with my former company. I used the time to talk to the Director of Engineering and head of recruiting to prioritize diversity in hiring, set expectations, and start building a better pipeline.
Building a Coalition and Setting Expectations
If you are working to build a more diverse team, you have to get recruiting as your partners on the effort. While it may seem natural, it is not. Recruiting (especially external recruiters) are incentivized or measured on their ability to close roles as quickly as possible. Most recruiters I have worked with are delighted to help find diverse candidates, but it is critical to let them know you understand that it means it will take the whole process longer. It is also essential than their managers understand this.
If you have hiring managers reporting to you, you need to get them on board and excited about this effort as well. One measure of a manager is their ability to hire well. Being serious about diversity will likely mean that they will take longer to fill roles for their team.
You may need to assure them that you will take this into account if they miss their KPIs. You cannot set-up or hold conflicting goals for your managers. If you cannot prioritize building diverse teams over hitting KPIs, you will likely fail at both.
One way to handle the increased time to hire is to start sourcing for a role much earlier than scheduled. Spend the time before the position was supposed to open only looking at under-represented candidates. Create an agreement with your manager that you will be able to hire them if you find a suitable candidate early. If you reach the planned opening date for the role and you haven’t located anyone, you can open the pool to your normal channels without losing time.
Your manager will also need to understand the potential impact of a diversity hiring focus on your KPIs.
With your manager’s support, create a reasonable KPI or OKR as your goal to track your efforts. The OKR should give you not only a target but also some cover if there are challenges to some of the tradeoffs you may need to make because you are hiring more slowly. Share your goal with your team. Update them on your progress regularly. Transparency is essential but also helps to enlist the rest of your team doing their part to help achieve the goal.
At Avvo, my diversity goals were part of my OKRs. I shared our progress with a monthly update to the organization. This repeated communication demonstrated the level of importance I placed on this goal and showed our improvement in real-time.
The good news is that as you make progress towards your goal, your time-to-hire will come down while maintaining or increasing your diversity. It does get easier. You will soon stop making tradeoffs as you continue to improve.
Fixing the Interview Process
When I joined Avvo, the hiring process involved multiple pre-interviews, a do-at-home coding challenge, a review meeting, an in-person interview loop, and a follow-up meeting. The process may have taken a single candidate over a month to get from the recruiter’s first e-mail to an offer. Even without taking diversity into account, it was not an efficient process for a company that wanted to grow.
The Avvo process kept inappropriate candidates out by design. It did not find appropriate candidates, however. In machine learning parlance, the false rejection rate was too high to avoid raising the false acceptance rate. If you are trying to screen out, you miss a lot of good people. Often, biases are part of the filters. Those biases reinforced the lack of diversity.
The state of the current process gave me a license to make some drastic changes. I had the support of the recruiting team and many of the managers. They all had stories of losing good candidates because of the length of the process.
There were some employees and managers who defended the status quo hiring process as required to maintain the quality of the development team. Luckily, they were in the minority. After hearing their position and discussing it with them, I decided to move forward, knowing that I had the support of the majority of the group.
Removing the Coding Challenge
Many companies believe in the at-home coding challenge as a critical way to establish a candidates bona-fides before investing too much time in them. Many sources discuss the problems with coding challenges from a diversity perspective. The arguments against the practice that resonated with me were the following:
Candidates will often take much longer to complete them than companies expect them to. The Avvo guidance was that the candidate should spend no more than two hours on the challenge. One candidate estimated that he spent 12 hours on it. He wanted to make sure that he did well.
A coding challenge is unpaid labor with no value for the results. The demand sends a message that the company places no worth on the candidates’ time. I do know that some companies pay candidates a nominal fee for completing the challenge. I encourage this, but eliminating the challenge also solves this problem.
Not all candidates have sufficient time to work on coding challenges. If a candidate is on a job search, they may get challenges from multiple companies, each with an expectation of hours of work. A candidate may already work at a stressful job or multiple jobs. They may be a caretaker to children or other relatives or have a long commute so that they can live in an affordable home. The candidate may have other issues that require their time. The challenge can be an unreasonable burden for those people.
A coding challenge requires that the candidate have the equipment and connectivity to complete the project. This requirement may not seem like an unreasonable expectation for a software developer, but not every developer may have the economic or personal safety to make this happen.
The combination of all of the above creates a bias towards people who do not have significant constraints on their time and finances. Those biases reinforce and perpetuate the lack of diversity in the industry.
As part of the hiring process, it is still critical to understand a candidate’s technical maturity. We replaced the coding challenge with multiple in-person challenges during the interview loop described later in this article. To not overwhelm our interviewers, we focused on making sure that the recruiter and hiring manager screens established a high culture and technical bar. This expectation on the screening required training the hiring managers on questions to ask for candidates at different levels. As we got comfortable with this process, the new screening process achieved an equivalent level of success identifying candidates while increasing diversity in the candidate pool and significantly decreasing the time-to-hire.
The Interview Loop
There are many articles on reducing bias in the interview loop. We combined the ideas that we felt resonated the best with our culture as well as some of the best ideas I had experienced from prior companies.
Interviewer Training
We required that anyone participating in the interview loop participate in two training sessions:
An overall interviewer training that myself and the head of recruiting for my team presented. This training included much of the standard content of a traditional interview training effort.
An implicit bias training led by someone from Ada Developers Academy (a Seattle developer training program focused on women and gender-diverse people). We had hired interns from Ada, and their mentors were required to take this course. It was so valuable that we made a deal with Ada to present that class at Avvo from time to time to help with our interviewer training.
We also required that anyone participating in interviews got qualified on the interview questions.
A group of developers for each of the different disciplines got together to create two or three technical problems to solve reflective of the type of work they did every day. Each question had a set of representative answers in a 3×3 grid. One axis represented the candidate’s experience level. The other axis was unacceptable, acceptable, and excellent solutions.
We asked the same questions to any candidate regardless of the level of the role or their experience level. Over time, we added to the set of representative answers as we heard new answers from candidates.
To train on the question, ideally, the interviewer would attempt to answer the problem themselves. Then they would observe a trained interviewer working with a candidate on the challenge twice. Then a trained interviewer would watch them working with a candidate on the question themselves.
Only once all those steps were completed could the person interview candidates. Any trained interview could interview for any team hiring for a role in that discipline. There was no level required for an interviewer.
The Interviewer Panel
We made sure that there was at least one person from an underrepresented group on any interviewing panel. This requirement was challenging at first. Some of the interviewers ended up having many interviews to do.
We felt it was important for two reasons. If we were interviewing someone from an underrepresented group, they would see someone like themselves and would be able to ask questions (if they wanted) about their experience. If we were interviewing someone, not from an underrepresented group, we would potentially catch any red flags that indicated that they might have challenges in a diverse environment.
This practice turned out to be very valuable.
The Interviews
As the interview training required shadowing, almost every interview would have two people from the interview panel. One person worked with the candidate, and one observed the discussion. This pairing meant that the hiring manager got two interpretations of what happened in the meeting and how the candidate responded to different questions. Multiple perspectives were beneficial in reducing the effect of any interviewers’ biases.
We offered to let candidates bring their tools if they chose so that they could be comfortable rather than presenting the candidates with an abstract problem and having them solve it on a whiteboard or a company laptop. The interviewer and the candidate solved the technical challenges collaboratively. This approach mirrored the way that many teams at Avvo worked in a pair-programming style. The goal was to recreate, as much as possible, the actual working environment of our teams.
Gaining Credibility as an Inclusive Technology Employer
Improving our interview process alone wouldn’t make a significant difference if Avvo was not visible in the market as a company serious about diversity and inclusion.
The team already had multiple people volunteering at the Ada Developers Academy but had never hired an intern. We hired our first two interns from Ada in their next cohort.
We followed that by joining the new Washington Technology Associate Apprenti program (a registered technical apprentice program focusing on underrepresented groups and veterans). We hired two apprentices from the first cohort of that program as well.
We always hired interns and apprentices in pairs because we wanted to make sure that they would have someone else going through a similar experience that they could use for mutual support in addition to their Avvo mentors.
Working with these programs let us partner with people deeply enmeshed in the community. We wanted to learn and listen. Working with them also introduced us to their volunteers, often experienced developers from other companies who felt strongly about increasing representation in technology.
Along with our partnership with training programs, we made sure we attended the local meetups for underrepresented groups. Either one of our recruiters, engineering managers, developers, or I would attend these meetups to listen and understand the challenges that these groups faced in the industry. We networked as well, but only tentatively at first. We wanted to establish credibility and not just come to a single meeting and disappear.
The sustained efforts to become a part of the community taught us a lot and raised awareness of what we were trying to do at Avvo. Candidates would apply and mention the different people that they had already met at the company. Avvo was already hosting meetups for different technologies. Those meetings eventually started to become more diverse as candidates from underrepresented groups visited to see our offices.
Evolving the Culture
The focus on increasing diversity did not have universal support. When I joined, the technology team culture was not very inclusive, and some were resistant to making any changes.
I continued to educate and discuss, but I also continued to push firmly forward.
Our agile coaches and I taught new, more inclusive facilitation techniques for meetings and discussions. One of the senior managers started a mentoring program for everyone in the organization designed to support everyone, but especially those who might feel impostor’s syndrome.
Eventually, those who were not interested in the new culture decided to find other opportunities. In the end, this was a relatively small percentage of the team. Most were interested in being part of the new culture.
The Results
In under two years, we increased the percentage of women in the technology team from 17% to 27%. We increased the percentage of Black, LatinX, and multi-racial people from 2% to 11%. Our age diversity also improved significantly. We did this while increasing the size of the team by nearly 50%. We also significantly improved our employee net promoter scores during this time.
If one thing stands out to me about what we accomplished during this time, it is a question asked by one of our developers during a town hall right after our acquisition. The town hall was hosted by the acquiring company’s executive team to answer questions from their new employees. The Avvo developer said, “we are very proud of the diversity of our technology team at Avvo. What efforts have you put in place to make sure that your team is diverse?”
Acknowledgments
There are several people mentioned in this article by title. I do want to acknowledge them here as this was always a team effort and would not have been successful without their involvement and leadership. Specifically: LaQuita Hester, a fantastic recruiter dedicated to improving diversity in the technology industry; Hunter Davis, Director of Engineering and the creator and guide for our mentoring program; Justin Weiss, Director of Engineering; and Leslie Zavisca, Engineering Manager.
Many, many others were instrumental in ways large and small. Every developer, tester, data scientist, and manager helped.
I also want to acknowledge my executive team peers who had built an excellent company and supported me as I brought my team up to a level of diversity closer to what they had created. My executive peers were Mark Britton, Eric Dahlberg, Monica Williams, Bhavani Murugiah, Sachin Bhatia, Kelly McGill, and Jason Moss.
Many companies are interested in experimenting with self-selection as a way of organizing their teams. I see questions about the process often in online forums. While there are some excellent books and blog posts on the topic, I thought that I would share a self-selection exercise that we did at my last company, Avvo. It worked reasonably well and with relatively little drama. If you are considering a similar exercise, you might consider this approach.
I joined Avvo as its’ CTO in the summer of 2016. At the beginning of 2017, we moved to a new team structure. The basis of the new team structure was the customer journeys through our product. The new teams were naturally called “Journey Teams.” I describe Journey Teams briefly in my talk Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement in Your Company.
Traditionally at Avvo, the development teams had been organized in a top-down manner. I had heard from the individual developers some frustration at how they were placed into teams and moved without consultation. I decided that this re-organization was an excellent way to demonstrate the more inclusive and autonomous culture that I was building. Allowing people to self-select their new team seemed like an excellent way to break from the past and set expectations for the future.
Preparation
We decided on six Journey Teams. Four were product-focused supporting customer journeys. The other two were internally focused. One Journey Team supported our developers with tooling to help them manage their services. The other internal journey team focused on supplying business analytics to the marketing, finance and sales teams.
If someone is going to choose a team, they need to understand what the team is and why they would want to join it. The Chief Product Officer and I, with our direct reports, set the number and charters of the Journey Teams.
Once we set the number and missions of the Journey Teams, we picked an initial leadership group for each team. That leadership group consisted of one senior member of each functional specialty that would be part of the team. The product teams each had a Product Manager, a Development Lead, a Test Lead, a UX Lead, a Data Engineering Lead, and a Data Analytics Lead.
The new Journey Team leadership groups were each responsible for setting up the initial scaffolding of each of their teams. The scaffolding included: fleshing out their missions, establishing their spheres of responsibilities, putting together some initial strategies they would use, and choosing their core metrics. As they made progress on these, they would review with each other and with the senior product and technology leadership. We needed to make sure that every part of the product and platform had an owner and that the plans and metrics made sense.
As the Journey Team leadership groups made progress building their plans, they were asked to put together staffing estimates on what they would need to execute their strategies. The staffing estimates were valuable as it helped me decide on what staffing I would need in the next years budget. The budget process was happening in parallel with this effort.
As we moved into December of 2016, the leadership of each of the Journey Teams had made enough progress that I felt comfortable setting the self-section exercise to happen right after the New Years break in January. At this point, the board had approved the budget. The CPO and I could figure out what staffing we would allocate to each team based on their mission and their strategy. Each Journey Team then needed to think about how they would structure their efforts based on their allocated staffing.
The Exercise
The self-selection exercise structure was a job fair with a festive atmosphere. The entire product, design, development, test, data engineering, and data analytics teams assembled. We had cupcakes and drinks. One by one, each Journey Team leadership group came up to pitch their team to the rest of the organization. They described their mission, their goals, their initial plans, and the planned size of the team. Some had already designed logos and had slogans. Each team was selling their mission to their peers. Some teams put a lot of effort and salesmanship into their pitches. Other teams had a difficult time articulating why people should join them.
After the last Journey Team had presented, every person in the room got a card. The card contained a space for their name and a list of the Journey Teams with spaces to put their order of preference. We asked everyone to fully rank their preferences just in case that would be needed.
When all the cards were filled out and collected, the meeting adjourned.
Finalizing the selection
After the self-selection meeting, the people managers from the organization met. The responses from the each of the cards were now in a spreadsheet showing each person’s preferences, the number of people currently assigned to each Journey Team and the number of people that were budgeted to be on the team.
The people managers were part of the process because they knew each of their reports interests, challenges, growth plans, and interpersonal issues. They were there to advocate for their reports wishes. They were also there to understand the process. With an understanding of the process, they could explain to someone why they didn’t get their first choice. The people managers were also there to make sure that each team had the best diversity of skills, backgrounds, and experience so that they would have the highest chance of succeeding.
The matching people and teams process was iterative. As the teams started to fill in, we had to go back and re-adjust a few times. The whole process of matching people and teams only took about 90 minutes for a 120 person organization. It went relatively quickly. Along the way, we chose to shift one headcount between teams to accommodate a developer’s professional development interests.
We were able to match 99% of the people to their first or second choice of Journey Team. In the case where someone got their third choice, we had a good explanation for them about the decision.
Once the initial rosters for each Journey Team were set, they had a chance to review and give feedback. For the cases where people didn’t get their first choice, their manager was able to discuss with them in their 1:1s.
While we were open to further iteration to accommodate any concerns that came up, it turned out that it wasn’t necessary. The Journey Teams and individuals were all content with the matching.
A week after the self-selection exercise we sent out the official announcement of the new team rosters. The teams started meeting to flesh out the initial plans and individuals moved to sit with their new teammates. We did make it clear to every person that if they were unhappy with their decision that we would help them switch.
A Retrospective on the exercise a few weeks later found very high satisfaction from the organization on the process and on the teams that it produced.
The Result
The exercise itself was a success. It had tremendous engagement from the organization. People felt empowered in the exercise and committed to their new team because it was their choice. Only one person switched teams in the three months after the exercise and only a handful in the rest of the year.
What I would do differently Next Time
The process of preparing for the exercise from each of the Journey Teams created some tension in the organization. The Journey Team leadership groups spent much time meeting together in the weeks before the exercise. The teams weren’t transparent enough about what they were doing. We as leaders hadn’t set reasonable expectations about communication. We did start to encourage them to send out updates to the organization on their progress, but it came later than it should have. Next time, I would give more guidance to the leadership teams about how they could go about their initial organizing. I would put a tighter time expectation on them, and I would make sure that they were transparent to the rest of the organization.
The presentations themselves were a bit of a challenge for some teams. We did encourage teams to make their presentations fun and to sell their missions. We didn’t help the teams with their presentations though, and we didn’t do a run through with them. The disparity in presentations did mean that some teams attracted an inordinate amount of interest. Next time, I would have a run through where each team could see each other’s presentations, and we could give some advice to help make their presentations better.
Regular Self-Selection Exercises
There were some in the organization who were so happy with the self-selection exercise that they suggested we repeat it every year. I know that there are organizations who do this. From my experience, I can see it working within a small company where most everyone already has a good connection with each other. In a small organization, it would take much less time to go through the forming, storming and norming phases. In a larger organization, regular re-organization would mean a lot of wasted time trying to get teams going.
For Avvo, the self-selection made sense at a juncture where we were doing a complete organizational restructuring. The old teams were utterly gone. It took a while for the new teams to get going, but once they established themselves, they worked well, and it made little sense to change them again. Individuals always had the option to move between teams if they felt like they were ready for new challenges. The organization was growing, and so the teams were always hiring. If we had been in a more constrained environment, we would still have done our best to facilitate smooth movement within the organization.
The core thing with an exercise like self-selecting teams or any other exercise is to be deliberate in your intent. Why are you doing the exercise? What benefits do you expect? What are the downsides? If it is successful, what will you do next? If it is unsuccessful, how will you roll it back or what will you do instead?
Conclusion
Letting the people in your organization self-select into teams can be an active driver of engagement and autonomy. The exercise we did at Avvo was successful for us and is worth looking at as inspiration for your process. If you are considering self-selection, be deliberate about what your goals are, what aspects of self-selection help you achieve them and what you might do if the goals are not met.
A culture of continuous improvement is a culture where you are always open to improving how you build and deliver. You don’t accept the status quo; you choose how to work and feel empowered to change it if it no longer makes sense. It is a people-first culture.
Having had the benefit of a culture like this at the last place I worked, when I started at my current company, I wanted to see if I could create a continuous improvement culture there, too. It took some effort, and we learned some painful lessons along the way, but we did make significant improvements to how our teams operated and how the engineering organization functioned.
As a result of these changes, our teams are able to execute at a much higher level, and the morale of the organization improved significantly. In short, we get a lot more stuff done, and we are happier doing it.
To get there, we had to change some of our frameworks, structures, and processes, or adopt new ones.
Here are some of the frameworks we created that could be helpful for any company:
WIGs and sWIGs: A way to align the company around a common mid-term strategy and shorter-term tactical deliveries in a way that preserves team autonomy and agile delivery. WIG stands for “wildly important goal,†and sWIG means “sub-wildly important goal.†Our WIGs clarify the midterm strategy for the company, and the sWIGs clarify the shorter-term tactics we are using to achieve that strategy
DUHBs: A data-driven decision-making framework that allows individuals in the company to craft a clear, data-based argument for a making a change. DUHB stands for data, understanding, hypotheses, and bets, which describes the linear process of solving a problem
Journey teams: An autonomous team model that gives teams more direct control over how they work, aligned with customer journeys
RFCs: A mechanism that allows anyone in the organization to drive large-scale change inclusively. It is a document and a process that uses the “request for comment†structure from standards groups as a basis
Retrospectives everywhere: A cultural shift in how we think about examining our organizational strengths and weaknesses when it comes to executing projects
Each framework builds upon the others. By making the priorities and goals of the company clear, people have the context to make good decisions. With a common data-driven process for vetting ideas, people have a good, structured way to propose changes. With autonomous teams, we can test new ideas locally and let the best practices emerge organically. With an inclusive mechanism for proposing larger-scale changes, the organization can participate in the process instead of having it pushed down from leadership. Finally, with a practice of retrospectives at all levels, the organization can learn from successes and mistakes made in any of the other components.
These frameworks created an environment that was not only adaptable and nimble, but also one where the members of the organization were empowered to make changes and were given tools to make advocating for change easier.
If there are more companies with continuous improvement cultures, it means a healthier and happier industry for all of us.
Compare the Market was nice enough to invite me to speak at their tech managers’ off-site about distributed teams. This talk reflects my own experience leading distributed teams.
I was presenting to them over video. Their meeting included people in two different offices and also folks dialing in from home. Ironically, in the middle of my talk, I got disconnected from the video conference. Because I was sharing my slides full-screen and had my speaker notes on my second monitor, I didn’t notice. So I spoke to myself for about 15 minutes before I realized what happened and dialed back into the meeting. It was a bit mortifying, but the folks in the UK were extremely nice about it. I can’t think of a better example though of the challenges around working with teams who have to communicate over electronic means constantly, so it was a good illustration of the issues I raised. 🙂
Now that the sale of Avvo has closed and the transition is progressing, I’ll be leaving the company. It has been an absolutely stellar experience. I have loved working with everyone here. After Spotify, it was critical for me to find another company that had values that aligned well with my own, and a senior leadership team and board that I could learn from. Avvo was that place.
I’m extremely proud of the team that we’ve built and the one-of-a-kind engineering culture that now exists at Avvo.
I’m taking a bit of time to consider my next move. I always aspire to be deliberate in my actions, and I need to get a bit of distance to decide what is next. Now that I have a bit more time, I hope to share some of my lessons from Avvo in writing and talks.
This is the e-mail that I sent to my team:
In Simon Wardley’s article “Bits or pieces?: On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners, and Theft“ (http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html), he talks about the need for skilled folks to explore uncharted lands (the pioneers), to take the crazy ideas and turn them into practical products (the settlers), and to industrialize those products (the town planners). I have worked in all three of these roles in my career, but I am happiest as a pioneer and settler. Last year, an interviewer asked me about this article (https://youtu.be/4tqJJ2c6BrU).
As Avvo moves into its new home in Internet Brands, it needs a new leader that will help it thrive and grow in a company that excels at Town Planning. I know that I am not that leader, and so I’ve decided that it is time for me to find my next set of uncharted lands.
I have been privileged to work with every one of you. I am incredibly proud of what we have accomplished together. We have built a mentoring, inclusive, diverse and agile culture with strong teams of people who support each other. While sometimes we focus on how far we are from where we want to be, it is worth realizing how far we’ve come and what rarified air we breathe.
It’s important to understand that the tough changes that have come are not due to the culture that we created. They are the result of two very different companies coming together with different priorities and goals. I will do my best to make sure that every person who is affected gets a new role as soon as possible.
For those that have joined in the last couple of months, I am disappointed that we won’t have more time so that I could get to know you better. I have been thoroughly impressed by what I have seen. For those that I have been able to spend more time with, I’m glad to have been on this journey with you.
I wish each of you the absolute best of luck. While our paths are diverging, there is a bond that we share and a responsibility towards each of you that I will always feel. I’m always available for a coffee, a beer or a phone call if you want someone to hash through something with you.
This week, we kicked off manager training for Avvo technology managers. Before we could build a curriculum, we needed to decide what was important to learn and where we as a group needed the most development.
If I had done this with my organization at Adobe, years ago, I might have made a list of capabilities or requirements for our roles and then assessed each person against those requirements. I’ve since learned that the top-down approach tends to isolate and alienate people. It is something done TO them. They don’t feel investment or ownership of the process. If they disagree with the list or my assessment of them, it is hard to challenge due to the nature of the process.
When I was at Spotify, I worked with Paolo Brolin Echeverria and Mats Oldin to build manager training for my Tribe. They developed an excellent kick-off exercise that I repurposed for my team at Avvo.
The process is straightforward.
We began by individually thinking about the qualities of a good leader in our organization. We each wrote every important quality we could think of onto individual post-its. This effort took about 20 minutes. Then, one by one, we put each of our post-its onto a large board. As we placed each quality, we explained why we believed it was important for a leader at Avvo.
When we finished putting all of our post-its on the board, we affinity-grouped them. Affinity-grouping resulted in 30 groups of similar qualities as well as a few individual post-its that did not fit into any group. The grouping process required a lot more discussion so that we could all agree on the final groupings.
At this point, we had collectively described 30 essential qualities of a leader at Avvo, which is far too many to effectively focus on. To narrow things down, we each received six votes to put towards any group of qualities that we felt were the most critical. Then, we tallied the votes and took the top eight as our core qualities of a manager at Avvo.
The voting process also led to a lot of valuable discussions as we saw where we had voted as a group. Were these right eight? Were they the most important eight? The eight qualities that we picked were: empathy, develops autonomy, builds good teams, is real and trustworthy, is a big picture thinker, supports mastery, gives feedback, and has a bias for action.
Individually, we then assessed ourselves against the eight core qualities on a three-point scale: “I need training on this,†“need training, but it can wait,†and “I can train others on this.†One by one, we went up to a board that had the eight qualities mapped on a spider graph. We put dots on a line for each quality where we rated ourselves. We explained why we chose that assessment. This led to further good discussion about how to assess ourselves against these qualities.
The group as a whole found this exercise to be very valuable. We had excellent discussions on what it means to be a good leader at our company, including the values we agree on, and the ones that we don’t. We were also able to prioritize those collectively in a way that everyone feels ownership and allegiance to them.
And we came to an understanding of where we need to develop the most as a group. This mutual understanding will inform the curriculum for our management training – my original goal.
My keynote talk is here. The introduction is in German, but my talk is in English.
Afterward, Sebastian Meyen and I sat down to talk about pioneers, settlers and town builders, evolving culture and embracing failure as a means of learning in big and small companies.
Slides from an earlier (and longer) version of the talk are below: